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My eyes are polished smooth by sight, they clot like crystals in storm glass, like my sister brewing beakers of toxin. If we had seen what had been done, what the helicopter pilot did in our name, what the special ops team did in our name, what they did with their hands in our name. What if it were my sister, what if it were her, what? If we had seen with our own smooth eyes. Mark the diacritical, my lovely: we’re all wearing our knee-high boots, every last one of us, we live in a booted nation. A nation girded and gunning. This moment, this is precisely all, watching takes work, sight takes hours, takes my eyeglasses, every last one of them, as if they were yours. You can see there’s a sigh in our sight. What if it were my sister? What if it were, what. What we saw ground into our eyes with the photos, with the newspaper reports. What would I say, what can I say if, what would I say if it were my sister, my own? With my own beakers of toxin, my own boots, my own hands in my own name?

Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly. This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep. But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room. You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.

I GLOOM! An October like November; August a hundred thousand hours, And all September, A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . . And doom! That then was Antwerp. . . In the name of God, How could they do it? Those souls that usually dived Into the dirty caverns of mines; Who usually hived In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars; Who dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud, Lumbering to work over the greasy sods. . . Those men there, with the appearance of clods Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God Ever shrived. . . And it is not for us to make them an anthem. If we found words there would come no wind that would fan them To a tune that the trumpets might blow it, Shrill through the heaven that's ours or yet Allah's, Or the wide halls of any Valhallas. We can make no such anthem. So that all that is ours For inditing in sonnets, pantoums, elegiacs, or lays Is this: “In the name of God, how could they do it?” II For there is no new thing under the sun, Only this uncomely man with a smoking gun In the gloom. . . What the devil will he gain by it? Digging a hole in the mud and standing all day in the rain by it Waiting his doom; The sharp blow, the swift outpouring of the blood, Till the trench of gray mud Is turned to a brown purple drain by it. Well, there have been scars Won in many wars . . . Punic, Lacedæmonian, wars of Napoleon, wars for faith, wars for honour, for love, for possession, But this Belgian man in his ugly tunic, His ugly round cap, shooting on, in a sort of obsession, Overspreading his miserable land, Standing with his wet gun in his hand . . . Doom! He finds that in a sudden scrimmage, And lies, an unsightly lump on the sodden grass . . . An image that shall take long to pass! III For the white-limbed heroes of Hellas ride by upon their horses Forever through our brains. The heroes of Cressy ride by upon their stallions; And battalions and battalions and battalions— The Old Guard, the Young Guard, the men of Minden and of Waterloo, Pass, for ever staunch, Stand, for ever true; And the small man with the large paunch, And the gray coat, and the large hat, and the hands behind the back, Watches them pass In our minds for ever . . . But that clutter of sodden corses On the sodden Belgian grass— That is a strange new beauty. IV With no especial legends of marchings or triumphs or duty, Assuredly that is the way of it, The way of beauty . . . And that is the highest word you can find to say of it. For you cannot praise it with words Compounded of lyres and swords, But the thought of the gloom and the rain And the ugly coated figure, standing beside a drain, Shall eat itself into your brain: And you will say of all heroes, “They fought like the Belgians!” And you will say: “He wrought like a Belgian his fate out of gloom.” And you will say: “He bought like a Belgian h is doom.” And that shall be an honourable name; “Belgian” shall be an honourable word; As honourable as the fame of the sword, As honourable as the mention of the many-chorded lyre, And his old coat shall seem as beautiful as the fabrics woven in Tyre. V And what in the world did they bear it for? I don't know. And what in the world did they dare it for? Perhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand. They could very well have watched a hundred legions go Over their fields and between their cities Down into more southerly regions. They could very well have let the legions pass through their woods, And have kept their lives and their wives and their children and cattle and goods. I don't understand. Was it just love of their land? Oh, poor dears! Can any man so love his land? Give them a thousand thousand pities And rivers and rivers of tears To wash off the blood from the cities of Flanders. VI This is Charing Cross; It is midnight; There is a great crowd And no light. A great crowd, all black that hardly whispers aloud. Surely, that is a dead woman—a dead mother! She has a dead face; She is dressed all in black; She wanders to the bookstall and back, At the back of the crowd; And back again and again back, She sways and wanders. This is Charing Cross; It is one o'clock. There is still a great cloud, and very little light; Immense shafts of shadows over the black crowd That hardly whispers aloud. . . And now! .  . That is another dead mother, And there is another and another and another. . . And little children, all in black, All with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places, Wandering from the doors of the waiting-room In the dim gloom. These are the women of Flanders. They await the lost. They await the lost that shall never leave the dock; They await the lost that shall never again come by the train To the embraces of all these women with dead faces; They await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and foss, In the dark of the night. This is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock; There is very little light. There is so much pain. L’Envoi And it was for this that they endured this gloom; This October like November, That August like a hundred thousand hours, And that September, A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years. . . Oh, poor dears!

When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore, put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your planes and you’ll understand. Here.

Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The order arrived three minutes of. I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I did it. Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right. No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in early childhood: I did it, I shaved him. Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town; then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country; then one of "the great powers"; then another (another, an- other)—In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing of any kind whatever. Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I). . . Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the way it was when you started. Well. . . it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks, I didn't want any job that bad.

Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water. Suddenly the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you.The lion and the lamb cuddling up.

1 Created purely from glass the saint stands, Exposing his gifted quite empty hands Like a conjurer about to begin, A righteous man begging of righteous men. 2 In the sun lily-and-gold-coloured, Filtering the cruder light, he has endured, A feature for our regard; and will keep; Of worldly purity the stained archetype. 3 The scummed pond twitches. The great holly-tree, Emptied and shut, blows clear of wasting snow, The common, puddled substance: beneath, Like a revealed mineral, a new earth.

Something almost Flemish about that water, a golden brown but clear into its depths, the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray beside it, and a boat moored at the end; something, it seems to me in looking back, about a murky bullhead on a stringer, one of those rope ones you can hardly see, so that the fish appeared to scull in place; something (the details start to widen now) about white wooden clapboards on the side of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped, a neon beer sign staring out through glass— late in the afternoon, I drinking deep of everything I saw, now mine to keep.

For the second time this week I've watched snow fall at sunrise, dawn arrive on a breeze (the way I think it always does). I don't know which, time or the weather, woke me, charmed me out of a dream where a few of us floated around, gravity's jokers, face-up in the quiet water and the jetsam of a slow life. I had one line that I'd saved and let it go as though it were mine, calling for “Darker days and brighter gods!” Then I only had my waking instant, but it opened with that same shadowless light, a sense of change, of something both near and remote, first and last, blowing with the wind and snow through my reflection in the window. And then I lost it. So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee, an unfinished ode to idleness, cobwebs in high places, a spider that rappels down the bookshelves, and a commotion recollected in tranquility; sunlight pouring through, and another bright page with a peculiar darkness flowing over it — shadows of heatwaves from the radiator, or my thoughts going up in smoke. The glass, when misted over, reminds me of store windows, how they're swathed with soap, shrouded in secrecy before a grand opening or after an ignominious closing. Either way, not very interesting except, perhaps, when the grafitti, the anonymous messages appear scrawled across them by some child of the air, words you can see through or a clear smear. And at twilight I'm still here, the same place, the same light. Nothing to do but move with the view: snow, wind over soft ruins, unfinished buildings that loom like monuments to a spent curiosity. I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes roosting on soggy flunkgirders. Want a cigarette? Nope. Got a match? Nope. See any alternative to solipsism? Nope. Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope. Did you know that Maryland has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope. The creatures of idleness are pure speculation. They follow the weather, shadow the wind, fill in the blanks. Some are big and clumsy and sly and like to lick my watch; others, like gerunds, have already drunk themselves into a state of being. Another, with time on his hands and the sense of how windows are both inside and outside a place, stands there watching his silhouette change to a reflection as the light shifts and he moves forward or back, plays like a god stepping in and out of himself, and hears the wind as the breath of change when the last flurry whirls away in the light. The last flake grows larger

At last I can be with you! The grinding hours since I left your side! The labor of being fully human, working my opposable thumb, talking, and walking upright. Now I have unclasped unzipped, stepped out of. Husked, soft, a be-er only, I do nothing, but point my bare feet into your clean smoothness feel your quiet strength the whole length of my body. I close my eyes, hear myself moan, so grateful to be held this way.