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What will I miss when I'm gone? The squeak of the wheelbarrow's wheel, Grace note that strikes with every slow Revolution, and then the hushed, rusty Answer in triplets from the invisible Bird in the lackluster maples. Branches, weeds, last autumn's leavings Raked from the moss-eaten pads, beds, Borders, still untrimmed hedges. Also the silent pale blue bells Of my half dozen borage, ringed, Self-seeded from the woods. Daylilies my mother liked to set Roadside in June. Pale Greek anemones She never traveled far enough To find wild, as I did once or twice, but Maybe I'll bring her some, if over there Windflowers blow beside a cloudy sea.

The ribbed black of the umbrella is an argument for the existence of God, that little shelter we carry with us and may forget beside a chair in a committee meeting we did not especially want to attend. What a beautiful word, umbrella. A shade to be opened. Like a bat’s wing, scalloped. It shivers. A drum head beaten by the silver sticks of rain and I do not have mine and so the rain showers me.

Is the ocean really inside seashells or is it all in your mind? — PICHON DE LA ONCE Behold and soak like a sponge. I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the ears of Saru-Saru, a poet reputed to have lived in Atlantis. On the day that the water kissed and embraced and filled all the holes of that giant missing link, this bard’s curiosity was the greatest for he kept swimming and listening for causes. He picked up rocks before they sank and blew wind viciously into them. Finally he blew so hard into a rock that he busted his ear drums; angry, he recited poems as he tried turning into a bird to fly to green Brazil. His left ear opened up like a canal and a rock lodged in it. Rock attracts rock and many rocks attached to this rock. It got like a rocket. His ear stayed with it in a horizontal position. Finally after so many generations he got to hear what he most wanted: the sounds made by flowers as they stretched into the light. Behold, I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the ears of Saru-Saru.

Here is the Beehive But where are all the bees? Hiding away where nobody sees. Here they come creeping Out of their hive, One and two and three, four, five.

Now and again I am here now And now is when I’m here again

my sister Josephine born july in '29 and dead these 15 years who carried a book on every stroll. when daddy was dying she left the streets and moved back home to tend him. her pimp came too her Diamond Dick and they would take turns reading a bible aloud through the house. when you poem this and you will she would say remember the Book of Job. happy birthday and hope to you Josephine one of the easts most wanted. may heaven be filled with literate men may they bed you with respect.

Unfortunately happiness Depends a little more than less On undependable, and hence Absurdly charming elements.

Soul and race are private dominions, memories and modal songs, a tenor blossoming, which would paint suffering a clear color but is not in this Victorian house without oil in zero degree weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind; it is all a well-knit family: a love supreme. Oak leaves pile up on walkway and steps, catholic as apples in a special mist of clear white children who love my children. I play “Alabama” on a warped record player skipping the scratches on your faces over the fibrous conical hairs of plastic under the wooden floors. Dreaming on a train from New York to Philly, you hand out six notes which become an anthem to our memories of you: oak, birch, maple, apple, cocoa, rubber. For this reason Martin is dead; for this reason Malcolm is dead; for this reason Coltrane is dead; in the eyes of my first son are the browns of these men and their music.

When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands. As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines. During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito's vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks. I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks. Patting my thigh, she said, "That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother." She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.

A heritage of a sort. A heritage of comradeship and suffocation. The bawling pit-hooter and the god’s explosive foray, vengeance, before retreating to his throne of sulphur. Now this black-robed god of fossils and funerals, petrifier of underground forests and flowers, emerges with his grim retinue past a pony’s skeleton, past human skulls, into his half-propped up, empty, carbon colony. Above, on the brutalised, unstitched side of a Welsh mountain, it has to be someone from somewhere else who will sing solo not of the marasmus of the Valleys, the pit-wheels that do not turn, the pump-house abandoned; nor of how, after a half-mile fall regiments of miners’ lamps no longer, midge-like, rise and slip and bob. Only someone uncommitted, someone from somewhere else, panorama-high on a coal-tip, may jubilantly laud the re-entry of the exiled god into his shadowless kingdom. He, drunk with methane, raising a man’s femur like a sceptre; she, his ravished queen, admiring the blood-stained black roses that could not thrive on the plains of Enna.