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Here they are. The soft eyes open. If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever. Having no souls, they have come, Anyway, beyond their knowing. Their instincts wholly bloom And they rise. The soft eyes open. To match them, the landscape flowers, Outdoing, desperately Outdoing what is required: The richest wood, The deepest field. For some of these, It could not be the place It is, without blood. These hunt, as they have done, But with claws and teeth grown perfect, More deadly than they can believe. They stalk more silently, And crouch on the limbs of trees, And their descent Upon the bright backs of their prey May take years In a sovereign floating of joy. And those that are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward: to walk Under such trees in full knowledge Of what is in glory above them, And to feel no fear, But acceptance, compliance. Fulfilling themselves without pain At the cycle’s center, They tremble, they walk Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again.

In her nineties and afraid of weather and of falling if she wandered far outside her door, my mother took to strolling in the house. Around and round she’d go, stalking into corners, backtrack, then turn and speed down hallway, stop almost at doorways, skirt a table, march up to the kitchen sink and wheel to left, then swing into the bathroom, almost stumble on a carpet there. She must have walked a hundred miles or more among her furniture and family pics, mementos of her late husband. Exercising heart and limb, outwalking stroke, attack, she strode, not restless like a lion in zoo, but with a purpose and a gait, and kept her eyes on heaven’s gate.

I sigh for the heavenly country, Where the heavenly people pass, And the sea is as quiet as a mirror Of beautiful beautiful glass. I walk in the heavenly field, With lilies and poppies bright, I am dressed in a heavenly coat Of polished white. When I walk in the heavenly parkland My feet on the pasture are bare, Tall waves the grass, but no harmful Creature is there. At night I fly over the housetops, And stand on the bright moony beams; Gold are all heaven’s rivers, And silver her streams.

Simone Weil, 1909-1943 Only the stones at first Seem to have a part in this, And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch By gripping the shallow soil With all the shocking might Of hunger and of thirst, As if the soil itself Were all that's left on earth. I think the grass alone Can hold within its grasp What matters to it most, And still it looks bereft, And famished as the stones. I watch a stream of moths Proceeding on their ways, They carve out tortuous paths As if they were intent On entering unseen And ever-smaller doors. So four years into the war, And cut off from the ones Whose circumstance you felt And suffering as yours, You carved yourself a path Through ever-narrowing doors Of hunger and of thirst, And entered them day by day, Refusing all at first But that ration of food Your people could obtain Behind the lines in France, And then refusing that, From summer into fall You cut your ration back To send your part to them, Your part diminishing To rations cut in half And cut in half again, And then nothing at all But water at the last Sipped for the nurse's sake, You finally lacked the strength Even to lift your hands: Father, I cannot stand To think of them and eat. Send it to them, it is theirs. Send this food for them, For my people still in France. And turned your face away, As famished as the grass. Only the stones at first Seem to have a part in this, And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch. But hidden in the grass As if the grass itself Were giving out a cry, I overhear the finch Begin her native rhyme And toil to paraphrase Her version of your words. It seems she tries and tries Until the words come clear, It is theirs, she seems to say, Or that is what I hear, And again: It is theirs, it is theirs. And the plover joins in praise With her fluttering, murmured prayers: Send it to them, it is theirs. And the blackbirds breaking wide Take it up in their dialects To sing you in their way, I swear I can hear the words, Send it to them, they say, Send it to them, it is theirs, Then all the birds of the air Give thanks above your grave, As if they were your cause And those you meant to save, As if the birds were there In attendance at the end, And, seeing the sacrifice Had borne your body up, So wasted as it was, To your chair in Paradise, And saw, before they fled, Your first breathtaking act Before the heavenly feast, The bread set at your place: To refuse to eat till none On earth has less than you, Though God in pity take Your hands and lift them toward His table for your sake. Father, they have no food, Send it to them, it is theirs. And the birds returning here Give tongue to what they've heard, They tell the grass and stones And the stream of moths who carve Their tortuous paths in the air. But how in giving thanks Can we calculate the worth Of one who chose to starve? You held within your grasp Our hunger and our thirst. And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch Seems to have a part in this. It grips with a shocking might What matters to the last, As if the soil itself Were all that's left on earth, And all the earth were held Within its famished grasp.

“the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, dishevelling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, That heavy bear who sleeps with me, Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp, Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath. —The strutting show-off is terrified, Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants, Trembles to think that his quivering meat Must finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown, Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear, Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, Amid the hundred million of his kind, The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

When Heavy tells a story the millwright shanty under the electric furnaces chokes with quiet, amid the roar, as Heavy pauses, adjusts his mountainous weight over a creaky grease-stained metal chair and looks up at the whirling ceiling fan next to fluorescent lights hanging by wires. His fingers lace like so many sausages across the canvas of blue workshirt on his chest. Heavy tells his story and the voice of reason quickens the demise of foulness from red-faced millwrights just back from a repair job and sitting around for the five air whistles that again call them to combat on the furnace floor. All laughter stops, all nonsense sayings and cuts of wisdom cease their echo when Heavy tells a story. Heavy talks about the Mexican melter who once had an affair with the Pit Boss’s wife. The heart of the problem–and the fact from which the story’s plot revolves– was that the melter lived across the street from the Pit Boss. One night just before the graveyard shift, the melter left his home, kissed his wife’s round face and proceeded to walk to the bus stop. But a bullet pierced through his hardhat and he fell, like an overturned stack of fire bricks, onto the pavement. The moral of this story: Never have an affair with someone whose old man lives within shooting distance. Heavy tells a story about a furnace foreman who always yelled at the laborers for failing to clean the bag house of the built-up filth from hours of cooking scrap iron and ore. The men told him it was too dangerous to walk on the tin-roofed panels; their weight could cause them to fall some 30 feet into the gaping mouth of a flaming furnace below. “Nonsense,” the foreman yelled, “you’re all just lazy Polacks.” (he called everyone Polacks). The foreman then proceeded to walk across the roof as the men stood nearby, with mouths open, near the safety of side beams. “You see,” he said standing in the middle as hydraulics moved shutters up and down to capture the sulphur dust. Then the foreman moved forward and before anyone could shout, he crashed through the roof, screaming into a reddened pot of molten metal; the oxygen in his body making popping sounds as it entered. The furnace operates continued to pour ladles of scrap iron and to melt the steel. They skimmed the slag off the top and when it was ready, they poured the molten mass into ingot molds. There was nothing they could do for the foreman, they said. Production had to keep going. Heavy looks into the eyes of his listeners and says: Somewhere there’s a skyscraper in downtown LA with steel beams made from the ingot with the foreman’s body in it. Somewhere there’s a bridge or underground pipe with the man’s remains chemically bound within the molecular structure. Heavy tells a story. . . and the men lay down their tools, and coffee is poured into heavy ceramic cups, the shanty stills beneath the rumbling, and even foremen stop by to pay a listen when Heavy tells a story.

At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage we made a right at the curved iron fence, one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry — the way it gets — and though I knew him well I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke in my town by the Delaware and it was used for code the way one of the Amerindian languages was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were. I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well — boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid, all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers ran the country. It was Larry, I’m sure now, and what we talked about was cardboard and we were amazed that in the open spaces beside the hotel on 47th Street there were four or five small cardboard “houses,” both of us remembered, the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags, the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase with little or no stuffing and a cardboard bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats, cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon for costume dances, balls is what we called them as if we were art students in Paris about to swim in the nearest fountain. Though what I want to say is the bees were too busy to do us any harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased me through the yard and over a fence hating any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions, who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops, who ran like hell that day (Larry, too) for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.

Crows see us as another invention. Like summer and beauty, They shimmer at sunrise in their new cars, Change their names and color when they see us. When they fly, they’re the bite marks on the sun, And nail-scratches of black against the sky. We matter little to them as we are. They prefer hamburger, youth, Oxygen and mineral water. And, of course, we sell our souls to a passing crow, Because we’re shiny things they take to heaven. Crows are always polite to humans. They have lots of money And live at a party that never ends. We’re the junk genes they left behind, That play Aztec football with our heads, When we dream and lose. Crows have relatives everywhere. Human warfare moves across the sky Making more room for them to fly. We’re just a meal in the next world. We’re the hole in the sky. Crows are legends and instructors of grace. They are the dots in the fog, And the flight of the uterus. Crows are the printed warnings Of a wasted life. They will never leave or abandon us. When we take our last breath, Navigating through our mistakes and lies, The crows will take our last word. We are the last citizens of a pale race of crows, Rearranging the furniture in the mind of God. Crows turn the planet on its axis when we die, And do nothing to the body we’ll remember. Our souls are their meal of the day. And the blue marble in its beak, As it flies away, Is the world leaving you.

The snail moves like a Hovercraft, held up by a Rubber cushion of itself, Sharing its secret With the hedgehog. The hedgehog Shares its secret with no one. We say, Hedgehog, come out Of yourself and we will love you. We mean no harm. We want Only to listen to what You have to say. We want Your answers to our questions. The hedgehog gives nothing Away, keeping itself to itself. We wonder what a hedgehog Has to hide, why it so distrusts. We forget the god Under this crown of thorns. We forget that never again Will a god trust in the world.

The Hedgehog sleeps beneath the hedge— As you may sometimes see— And I prefer it sleeping there To sleeping here with me!