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Hear me, O God! A broken heart Is my best part. Use still thy rod, That I may prove Therein thy Love. If thou hadst not Been stern to me, But left me free, I had forgot Myself and thee. For sin's so sweet, As minds ill-bent Rarely repent, Until they meet Their punishment. Who more can crave Than thou hast done? That gav'st a Son, To free a slave, First made of nought; With all since bought. Sin, Death, and Hell His glorious name Quite overcame, Yet I rebel And slight the same. But I'll come in Before my loss Me farther toss, As sure to win Under His cross.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope? No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given: Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour: Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance and mutability. Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. Thou messenger of sympathies, That wax and wane in lovers' eyes; Thou, that to human thought art nourishment, Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not—lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality. While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; I was not heard; I saw them not; When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of birds and blossoming, Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy! I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow? With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatch'd with me the envious night: They know that never joy illum'd my brow Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou, O awful LOVELINESS, Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express. The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind.

The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.” Out of the death breeding Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats Have cropped to barrenness. The corms come by mail, are planted. Then do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard Hard as it seems it must be for green spears to pierce the all but Frozen mold and insist that they too, like mouse-eared chickweed, Will live. The spears lengthen, the bud appears and spreads, its Seed capsule fattens and falls, the green turns yellowish and withers Stretched upon the ground. In Washington, magnolias were in bud. In Charlottesville early bulbs were up, brightening the muck. Tomorrow Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant. Spring comes And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web and no One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore. One of us Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia—a strangulated Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill Free sleep. Oh, it’s not all that bad. The sun shines on my hand And the myriad lines that criss-cross tell the story of nearly fifty Years. Sorry, it’s too long to relate. Once, when I was young, I Awoke at first light and sitting in a rocking chair watched the sun Come up beyond the houses across the street. Another time I stood At the cables of a liner and watched the wake turning and Turning upon itself. Another time I woke up and in a bottle On a chest of drawers the thoughtful doctor had left my tonsils. I Didn’t keep them. The turning of the globe is not so real to us As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray —The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. “I Need you,” tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget: Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen Years or days or hours ago. And that same blue jay returns, or perhaps It is another. All jays are one to me. But not the sun which seems at Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth, As flowers seem to. The roses this June will be different roses Even though you cut an armful and come in saying, “Here are the roses,” As though the same blooms had come back, white freaked with red And heavily scented. Or a cut branch of pear blooms before its time, “Forced.” Time brings us into bloom and we wait, busy, but wait For the unforced flow of words and intercourse and sleep and dreams In which the past seems to portend a future which is just more Daily life. The cat has a ripped ear. He fights, he fights all The tom cats all the time. There are blood gouts on a velvet seat. Easily sponged off: but these red drops on a book of Stifter’s, will I remember and say at some future time, “Oh, yes, that was the day Hodge had a torn ear and bled on the card table?” Poor Hodge, battered like an old car. Silence flows into my mind. It Is spring. It is also still really winter. Not a day when you say, “What a beautiful spring day.” A day like twilight or evening when You think, “I meant to watch the sun set.” And then comes on To rain. “You’ve got to take,” says the man at the store, “the rough With the smooth.” A window to the south is rough with raindrops That, caught in the screen, spell out untranslatable glyphs. A story Not told: so much not understood, a sight, an insight, and you pass on, Another day for each day is subjective and there is a totality of days As there are as many to live it. The day lives us and in exchange We it: after snowball time, a month, March, of fits and starts, winds, Rain, spring hints and wintry arrears. The weather pays its check, Like quarreling in a D.C. hotel, “I won’t quarrel about it, but I made No local calls.” Strange city, broad and desolating, monuments Rearing up and offices like monuments and crowds lined up to see The White House inside. “We went to see the White House.   It was lovely.” Not so strange though as the cemetery with guttering flame and Admirals and generals with bigger gravestones than the lesser fry Below Lee’s house, false marble pillars and inside all so Everyday, in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed Created no illusion of lived-in-ness. But the periwinkles do, in beds That flatten and are starred blue-violet, a retiring flower loved, It would seem, of the dead, so often found where they congregate. A Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were? An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.” The wind shakes the screen And all the raindrops on it streak and run in stems. It’s colder. The crocuses close up. The snowdrops are brushed with mud. The sky Colors itself rosily behind gray-black and the rain falls through The basketball hoop on a garage, streaking its backboard with further Trails of rust, a lovely color to set with periwinkle violet-blue. And the trees shiver and shudder in the light rain blasts from off The ocean. The street wet reflects the breakup of the clouds On its face, driving over sky with a hissing sound. The car Slides slightly and in the west appear streaks of different green: A lid lifted briefly on the spring. Then the moon burns through Racing clouds, its aureole that of rings of oil on water in a harbor Bubbling up from an exhaust. Clear the sky. Beside a rim of moon. Three stars and only three and one planet. So under lilacs unleaved Lie a clump of snowdrops and one purple crocus. Purple. A polka-dotted Color little girls are fond of: “See my new dess!” and she twirls On one foot. Then, crossed, bursts into tears. Smiles and rain, like These passing days in which buds swell, unseen as yet, waiting For the elms to color their further out most twigs, only the willow Gleams yellow. Life is hard. Some are strong, some weak, most Untested. These useless truths blow about the yard the day after Rain the soft sunlight making softer shadows on the faded lawn. The world looks so old in the spring, laid out under the sky. One Gull coasts by, unexpected as a kiss on the nape of the neck. These Days need birds and so they come, a flock of ducks, and a bunch of Small fluffy unnamed balls that hide in hedges and make a racket. “The gift of life,” as though, existing in expectancy and then Someone came up and said, “Here,” or, “Happy Birthday.” It is more Mysterious than that, pierced by blue or running in the rain Or simply lying down to read. Writing a postponed letter which may Bring no pleasure: arduous truths to tell. And if you thought March was bad Consider April, early April, wet snow falling into blue squills That underneath a beech make an illusory lake, a haze of blue With depth to it. That is like pain, ordinary household pain, Like piles, or bumping against a hernia. All the signs are set for A OK A day to visit the National Gallery—Velázquez, Degas—but, and What a but, with water on the knee “You’ll need a wheelchair, Mummy.” Coasting among the masterpieces, of what use are they?Angel with a Hurdy-Gurdy

There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left or giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet high when rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout- legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The last of the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room in which I’m writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit’s surface and was lost. There might be other things to think of strobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of it like the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloud forests north of Monteverde, only none of them were living anywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the week Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100. Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in here the long way come to think of it. A study claims it wasn’t climate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemic provoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like that had a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There were no Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinct subspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastal barrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they’re often thought to have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inaugural Thanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to be traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first, then backwards into costumes of the past: tee shirt and shorts, gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breeches tucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbons streaming into Delaware till I’m buckled like a Puritan, musket in hand, not half-famished, and there’s plenty of heath hens everywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeets and no Smith Island cottontails, a long contested subspecies of the Eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier island off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale, deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt works back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’s only official dessert — a venerable confection whose pencil- thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long autumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nesting sites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as rest stations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound, Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed Thimble Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry, cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War, the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding places for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than three Smith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands include Rabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligator down here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dry up on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunny but it won’t be. The blue pike cavorted through the waters of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco. Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnative species did both fish in as early as 1960 and ’70, respectively. There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff’s pocket gophers, and no Ainsworth’s salamanders, a species known to us only through two specimens found on Ainsworth family property in Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling of another kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my hands then pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness of softened logs. There’s a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collects under the rug I’m sitting on. I think the rough weave of it acts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens. There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no less than Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and therefore no Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideous arachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratory passages of the Monachus tropicalis. When it occurs to me I sweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skies in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to feather the air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peak population hovering above five billion, or 40% of the total roll of  birds in North America, but there were no remaining passenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shut in Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha. Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon was Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct species and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspecies of the common. There might be as few as 250 of the former hidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghost crabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in ’64 when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing village built on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother so perilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would have acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead, dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat content would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew,yireh shalem, means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make her into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest, was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else threaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquito population in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more like a question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastated the dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen died on June 17, 1987, when the ballad “Always” by Atlantic Starr dominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nasty Olduvai water hole around which two clans of hominids battle at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is after the first monolith shows up. The film’s monoliths are artifacts of alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designed to provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawns on the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears to to bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls it into the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumbling weaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a long white nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillant anthracite of space. Pan right to the Earth, a quarter of it silvery blue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a pale idea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years later by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972,annus finalis for the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possibly the Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroos to have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochre of Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an ice cap’s wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequently with the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sight as opposed to scent. Then the Earth is at the left as the satellite approaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss’s Blue Danube, first performed on February 15, 1867, in the now defunct Diana Ballroom. In my own Diana Ballroom, named not for the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastity directly, but by way of the two-kilometer lunar crater christened in her honor in 1979, declivity in whose embrace my ballroom trembles comfortably, I boost my chi by remembering to breathe deep, to eat oatmeal, ginger, and figs, and to commit myself to a custody of wildflowers, up to and including the maroon perfume of the chocolate cosmos, a non-self-pollinating species whose every plant now in bloom is a clone of the selfsame specimen uprooted from a cubic foot of Mexico back in 1902. Likewise the last known Rocky Mountain locust ever to appear appeared alone that year on a prairie up in Canada, whereas decades before a glistering storm of them blanketed an area vast as California, matter-of-factly devouring buckwheat, barley, strawberries, apple trees, fence posts, and even the laundry wildly flapping away on the line, the sound of “millions of jaws biting and chewing” setting a nation’s nerves on edge, or at least Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, if we’re to believe her On the Banks of Plum Creek

Vicisti, Galilæe. I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep; For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep. Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove; But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love. Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold? I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain. For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath, We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death. O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say. New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods; They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods. But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof, Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love. I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace, Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease. Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake; Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath; And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death; All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre, Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire. More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things? Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may? For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day. And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears: Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years? Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May. Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end; For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend. Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides; But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides. O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods! O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods! Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend, I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end. All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past: Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates, Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits: Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings, And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things, White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled, Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world. The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away; In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey; In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears; With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years: With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour; And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour: And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be; And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea: And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air: And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare. Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods? Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods? All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past; Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last. In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things, Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings. Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod, Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God, Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head, Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead. Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around; Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned. Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these. Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam, And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome. For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours, Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea. And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways, And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays. Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wise that ye should not fall. Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all. But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art, Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart, Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white, And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night, And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star, In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun, Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone. Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath; Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death. Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span; A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep. For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

How the thickest of them erupt just above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff no wind can move them.   Let us praise them in all of their varieties, some skinny as the bands of headphones, some rising from a part that extends halfway around the head, others four or five strings stretched so taut the scalp resembles a musical instrument.   Let us praise the sprays that hold them, and the combs that coax such abundance to the front of the head in the mirror, the combers entirely forget the back.   And let us celebrate the combers, who address the old sorrow of time’s passing day after day, bringing out of the barrenness of mid-life this ridiculous and wonderful harvest, no wishful flag of hope, but, thick, or thin, the flag itself, unfurled for us all in subways, offices, and malls across America.

Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main The pealing thunder shook the heav'nly plain; Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr's wing, Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes, And through the air their mingled music floats. Through all the heav'ns what beauteous dies are spread! But the west glories in the deepest red: So may our breasts with ev'ry virtue glow, The living temples of our God below! Fill'd with the praise of him who gives the light, And draws the sable curtains of the night, Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind, At morn to wake more heav'nly, more refin'd; So shall the labours of the day begin More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin. Night's leaden sceptre seals my drowsy eyes, Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.

Love, thou are absolute sole lord Of life and death. To prove the word, We’ll now appeal to none of all Those thy old soldiers, great and tall, Ripe men of martyrdom, that could reach down With strong arms their triumphant crown; Such as could with lusty breath Speak loud into the face of death Their great Lord’s glorious name; to none Of those whose spacious bosoms spread a throne For love at large to fill; spare blood and sweat, And see him take a private seat, Making his mansion in the mild And milky soul of a soft child. Scarce has she learn’d to lisp the name Of martyr, yet she thinks it shame Life should so long play with that breath Which spent can buy so brave a death. She never undertook to know What death with love should have to do; Nor has she e’er yet understood Why to show love she should shed blood; Yet though she cannot tell you why, She can love, and she can die. Scarce has she blood enough to make A guilty sword blush for her sake; Yet has she’a heart dares hope to prove How much less strong is death than love. Be love but there, let poor six years Be pos’d with the maturest fears Man trembles at, you straight shall find Love knows no nonage, nor the mind. ’Tis love, not years or limbs that can Make the martyr, or the man. Love touch’d her heart, and lo it beats High, and burns with such brave heats, Such thirsts to die, as dares drink up A thousand cold deaths in one cup. Good reason, for she breathes all fire; Her weak breast heaves with strong desire Of what she may with fruitless wishes Seek for amongst her mother’s kisses. Since ’tis not to be had at home, She’ll travel to a martyrdom. No home for hers confesses she But where she may a martyr be. She’ll to the Moors, and trade with them For this unvalued diadem. She’ll offer them her dearest breath, With Christ’s name in ’t, in change for death. She’ll bargain with them, and will give Them God; teach them how to live In him; or, if they this deny, For him she’ll teach them how to die. So shall she leave amongst them sown Her Lord’s blood, or at least her own. Farewell then, all the world, adieu! Teresa is no more for you. Farewell, all pleasures, sports, and joys, (Never till now esteemed toys) Farewell, whatever dear may be, Mother’s arms or father’s knee, Farewell house and farewell home, She’s for the Moors, and martyrdom! Sweet, not so fast! lo, thy fair spouse, Whom thou seek’st with so swift vows, Calls thee back, and bids thee come T’ embrace a milder martyrdom. Blest powers forbid thy tender life Should bleed upon a barbarous knife; Or some base hand have power to rase Thy breast’s chaste cabinet, and uncase A soul kept there so sweet; oh no, Wise Heav’n will never have it so; Thou art Love’s victim, and must die A death more mystical and high; Into Love’s arms thou shalt let fall A still-surviving funeral. He is the dart must make the death Whose stroke shall taste thy hallow’d breath; A dart thrice dipp’d in that rich flame Which writes thy spouse’s radiant name Upon the roof of heav’n, where aye It shines, and with a sovereign ray Beats bright upon the burning faces Of souls, which in that name’s sweet graces Find everlasting smiles. So rare, So spiritual, pure, and fair Must be th’ immortal instrument Upon whose choice point shall be sent A life so lov’d; and that there be Fit executioners for thee, The fair’st and first-born sons of fire, Blest Seraphim, shall leave their quire And turn Love’s soldiers, upon thee To exercise their archery. Oh, how oft shalt thou complain Of a sweet and subtle pain, Of intolerable joys, Of a death in which who dies Loves his death, and dies again, And would forever so be slain, And lives and dies, and knows not why To live, but that he thus may never leave to die. How kindly will thy gentle heart Kiss the sweetly-killing dart! And close in his embraces keep Those delicious wounds, that weep Balsam to heal themselves with. Thus When these thy deaths, so numerous, Shall all at last die into one, And melt thy soul’s sweet mansion Like a soft lump of incense, hasted By too hot a fire, and wasted Into perfuming clouds, so fast Shalt thou exhale to Heav’n at last In a resolving sigh; and then, O what? Ask not the tongues of men; Angels cannot tell; suffice, Thyself shall feel thine own full joys And hold them fast forever. There So soon as thou shalt first appear, The moon of maiden stars, thy white Mistress, attended by such bright Souls as thy shining self, shall come And in her first ranks make thee room; Where ’mongst her snowy family Immortal welcomes wait for thee. O what delight, when reveal’d Life shall stand And teach thy lips heav’n with his hand, On which thou now mayst to thy wishes Heap up thy consecrated kisses. What joys shall seize thy soul when she, Bending her blessed eyes on thee, (Those second smiles of heav’n) shall dart Her mild rays through thy melting heart! Angels, thy old friends, there shall greet thee, Glad at their own home now to meet thee. All thy good works which went before And waited for thee, at the door, Shall own thee there, and all in one Weave a constellation Of crowns, with which the King, thy spouse, Shall build up thy triumphant brows. All thy old woes shall now smile on thee, And thy pains sit bright upon thee; All thy sorrows here shall shine, All thy suff’rings be divine; Tears shall take comfort and turn gems, And wrongs repent to diadems. Ev’n thy deaths shall live, and new Dress the soul that erst they slew; Thy wounds shall blush to such bright scars As keep account of the Lamb’s wars. Those rare works where thou shalt leave writ Love’s noble history, with wit Taught thee by none but him, while here They feed our souls, shall clothe thine there. Each heav’nly word by whose hid flame Our hard hearts shall strike fire, the same Shall flourish on thy brows, and be Both fire to us and flame to thee, Whose light shall live bright in thy face By glory, in our hearts by grace. Thou shalt look round about and see Thousands of crown’d souls throng to be Themselves thy crown; sons of thy vows, The virgin-births with which thy sovereign spouse Made fruitful thy fair soul, go now And with them all about thee, bow To him. “Put on,” he’ll say, “put on, My rosy love, that thy rich zone Sparkling with the sacred flames Of thousand souls whose happy names Heav’n keeps upon thy score. Thy bright Life brought them first to kiss the light That kindled them to stars.” And so Thou with the Lamb, thy Lord, shalt go, And wheresoe’er he sets his white Steps, walk with him those ways of light Which who in death would live to see Must learn in life to die like thee.

Aspasie, trillistos. I heard the trailing garments of the Night Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls! I felt her presence, by its spell of might, Stoop o'er me from above; The calm, majestic presence of the Night, As of the one I love. I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight, The manifold, soft chimes, That fill the haunted chambers of the Night, Like some old poet's rhymes. From the cool cisterns of the midnight air My spirit drank repose; The fountain of perpetual peace flows there, — From those deep cisterns flows. O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear What man has borne before! Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care, And they complain no more. Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer! Descend with broad-winged flight, The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair, The best-beloved Night!

1 Come on, my partners in distress, My comrades through the wilderness, Who still your bodies feel; Awhile forget your griefs and fears, And look beyond this vale of tears To that celestial hill. 2 Beyond the bounds of time and space Look forward to that heavenly place, The saints’ secure abode; On faith’s strong eagle pinions rise, And force your passage to the skies, And scale the mount of God. 3 Who suffer with our Master here, We shall before his face appear, And by his side sit down; To patient faith the prize is sure, And all that to the end endure The cross, shall wear the crown. 4 Thrice blessed bliss-inspiring hope! It lifts the fainting spirits up, It brings to life the dead; Our conflicts here shall soon be past, And you and I ascend at last Triumphant with our head. 5 The great mysterious Deity We soon with open face shall see; The beatific sight Shall fill heaven’s sounding courts with praise, And wide diffuse the golden blaze Of everlasting light. 6 The Father shining on his throne, The glorious, co-eternal Son, The Spirit, one and seven, Conspire our rapture to complete, And lo! we fall before his feet, And silence heightens heaven. 7 In hope of that ecstatic pause, Jesu, we now sustain the cross, And at thy footstool fall, Till thou our hidden life reveal, Till thou our ravished spirits fill, And God is all in all.