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my mother put down her knife and fork, pulled her wedding ring from its groove, placing it contemplatively on her middle finger. So natural was the move, so tender, I almost didn’t notice. Five years, she said, five years, once a week, I wrote a letter to your father. And waited until time was like ash on my tongue. Not one letter back, not a single note. She sighed, smiling, the weight gone. This prime rib is really tender, isn’t it? she asked.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other With half faces and full eyes like an ancient Egyptian picture And for a short while. I stroked your hair In the opposite direction to your journey, We called to each other, Like calling out the names of towns Where nobody stops Along the route. Lovely is the world rising early to evil, Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity, In the mingling of ourselves, you and I, Lovely is the world. The earth drinks men and their loves Like wine, To forget. It can't. And like the contours of the Judean hills, We shall never find peace. In the middle of this century we turned to each other, I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me, The leather straps for a long journey Already tightening across my chest. I spoke in praise of your mortal hips, You spoke in praise of my passing face, I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey, I touched your flesh, prophet of your end, I touched your hand which has never slept, I touched your mouth which may yet sing. Dust from the desert covered the table At which we did not eat But with my finger I wrote on it The letters of your name.

Disguised in my mouth as a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning all over my door like a rooster in the morning  in the morning  in the morning And studded in my kidneys like perforated hiccups inflamed in my ribs like three hoops of thunder through a screw a star-bent-bolt of quivering colons you breathe into veiled rays and scented ice holes you fire the space like a flare of embalmed pigeons and palpitate with the worms and venom and wailing flanks and somewhere inside this fever inside this patinaed pubic and camouflaged slit stooped forward on fangs in rear of your face you shake to me in the full crown of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning Masquerading in my horn like a river eclipsed to infantries of dentures  of diving spears you enter broken mirrors through fragmented pipe spit you pull into a shadow ring of magic jelly you wear the sacrificial blood of nightfall you lift the ceiling with my tropical slush dance you slide and tremble with the reputation of an earthquake and when i kick through walls to shine like silver when i shine like brass through crust in a compound when i shine  shine  shine you wail to me in the drum call of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning gonna kill me a rooster in the morning early in the morning way down in the morning before the sun passes by in the morning  in the morning  in the morning In the morning when the deep sea goes through a dog's bite and you spit on the tip of your long knife In the morning in the morning when peroxide falls on a bed of broken glass and the sun rises like a polyester ball of menses in the morning gonna firedance in the petro in the morning turn loose the blues in the funky jungle in the morning I said when you see the morning coming like a two-headed twister let it blow  let it blow in the morning  in the morning all swollen up like an ocean in the morning early in the morning before the cream dries in the bushes in the morning when you hear the rooster cry cry rooster cry in the morning  in the morning I said disguised in my mouth like a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind stripped for the shrine room you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster In the morning  in the morning  in the morning

In the energy crisis my city has turned to burning angel skins. I read by their light, a book of elegies. A fruit fly lands on Amichai, I slap him flat Against the page. Now it is an elegy for him, as well, And his tomb. And I am a terrible, toothless god, Stringing blades of grass between the tongues of sheep. Ash of angel fire drifts over my head, falls in my coffee. O Holy, Holy, Holy indigestion. I bribe the coming day with open windows And freshly washed underwear Hung out on the clothesline, Slipping hastily over the hips of winds. The winds know, all you have to do is Open your mouth, the flies will come.

a sentimental curator has placed two fragments of bronze Grecian heads together boy and girl so that the faces black- ened by the three thousand years of desert sand & sun seem to be whispering something that the Gurgan lion & the wing- ed dog of Azerbaijan must not hear but I have heard them as I hear you now half way around the world so simply & so quietly more like a child than like a woman making love say to me in that soft lost near and distant voice I’m happy now I’m happy oh don’t move don’t go away.

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee; What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. Ezra Pound You’ll find labels describing what is gone: an empress’s bones, a stolen painting of a man in a feathered helmet holding a flag-draped spear. A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal; this glass cabinet could have kept the first salts carried back from the Levant. To help us comprehend the magnitude of absence, huge rooms lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus, Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold all the scrolls of Alexandria. My love, I’ve petitioned the curator who has acquired an empty chest representing all the poems you will now never write. It will be kept with others in the poet’s gallery. Next door, a vacant room echoes with the spill of jewels buried by a pirate who died before disclosing their whereabouts. I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept a few of your pieces for my private collection. I think you know the ones I mean.

Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower, mist in the pines so thick the crows delight (or seem to), winging in obscurity. The ineffectual panic of a squirrel who chattered at my passing gave me pause to watch his Ponderosa come and go— long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited but knew it only by the wildflower meadow, the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian, scattered among the locoweed and sage. Today my grief abated like water soaking underground, its scar a little path of twigs and needles winding ahead of me downhill to the next bend. Today I let the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.

In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall, Carpenters hammered under the shaded window, Wind troubled the window curtains all night long, A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram Slid slowly forth. Hearing the milkman’s chop, His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience. The winter sky’s pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls, Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer. A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair From underseas, kindled the looking-glass, Distinguished the dresser and the white wall. The bird called tentatively, whistled, called, Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven.

What did we suffer for? why did we flee our houses as if we had been hostages at our own tables? Even free, we were not free, we kept breaking down in thrift stores, our eyes tearing in bins of glasses taken from the faces of the dead; disoriented and dizzy as crows swarming the corpses of our own hearts, in the aisles of the department stores filled with the glitter of plenty, we kept spilling coffee on ourselves. Why are we forever afraid of bathtubs, of water hitting us in the face like the invisible stoning of an anonymous crowd, why does buying makeup make us feel guilty, why do we eat our food like thieves? Why do we sneak our friends in the back door and make our love climb up a tree? Why do our lies nest within one another like diminishing dolls? Why do we jump when the smallest child pushes open a door? Why are we afraid of the whistling of teapots? Who’s coming in to read over our shoulders our most secret thoughts, who’s clinging to our roofs like a demon? Why is his cheerfulness even more frightening than his anger? Why does my hope burn like the scar of a burn on my breast? Why are you an eye floating in a pool of dead water, blue; and unable to breathe? Why do we keep asking why? How do we know how to stop it if we don’t know why it began? How can we unravel so much violence followed by so much lie? How will we know when it’s ever over? or believe it will ever stop?

A blast off the Atlantic snaps a flag in the Firth of Clyde, while thirty leagues away, the same synoptic wind surges across this hillside honeycombed with mineshafts, sounding the unstopped slots of a "G" harmonica left to dry on the kitchen sill. Snow charges a sky in which the sun swims and glimmers like a groat, a turbulent space where owls hunt by day but nothing stands for long—bereft of circumstance—beyond the standing stones of Long Meg and Her Daughters. Through the night, like a stoker on a fast express—the Hyperion on its Edinburgh run— you hoy buckets of coal on the grate, only to see its flames drawn up the chimney, getting more heat from hoying the fuel than from its burning. As a barnacle goose swims against the dark, uttering its terse honk, you pull your favorite word,duvet, close about your head. Tomorrow, bailiffs may take everything not hammered down.