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A personal lens: glass bending rays That gave one that day’s news Saying each and every day, Just remember you are standing On a planet that’s evolving. How beautiful, she thought, what distance does For water, the view from above or afar. In last night’s dream, they were back again At the beginning. She was a child And he was a child. A plane lit down and left her there. Cold whitening the white sky whiter. Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world To be a sea.

It was like soul-kissing, the way the words filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk. All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15, but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me to read to the all except for me white class. She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder, said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent to the buses, awed by the power of words.

Turning to watch you leave, I see we must always walk toward other loves, river of   heaven between two office buildings. Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling, book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light. I think it is all right. Or do tonight, garden toad a speaking stone, young sound in an old heart. Annul the self? I float it, a day lily in my wine. Oblivion? I love our lives, keeping me from it.

How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find him out we have to seek, as children do for something like the beetle scuttling between grass, hidden in plain sight.

Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book, A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls, Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin. We’re completing our task. The tip I left For the waitress filters down Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat. As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this: You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples From a fruit stand, and what coins Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue, Tickets to a movie in which laughter Is thrown into their faces. If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat. If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom. A tip, a small purchase here and there, And things just keep going. I guess.

I Swing by starwhite bones and Lights tick in the middle. Blue and white steel Black and white People hurrying along the wall. ”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“ Curve behind the sun again Towers full of ice. Rich Glass houses, “Here, Have a little of my blood,” Rich people!” Wheat in towers. Meat on ice. Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls. Baseball between these sudden tracks. Yell past the red street— Have you any water to drink, City? Rich glass buildings, give us milk! Give us coffee! Give us rum! There are huge clouds all over the sky. River smells of gasoline. Cars after cars after cars, and then A little yellow street goes by without a murmur. There came a man (”Those are radios, that were his eyes“) Who offered to sell us his bones. Swing by starwhite buildings and Lights come to life with a sound Of bugs under the dead rib. Miles of it. Still the same city. II Do you know where you are going? Do you know whom you must meet? Fortune, perhaps, or good news Or the doctor, or the ladies In the long bookstore, The angry man in the milkbar The drunkard under the clock. Fortune, perhaps, or wonder Or, perhaps, death. In any case, our tracks Are aimed at a working horizon. The buildings, turning twice about the sun, Settle in their respective positions. Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City Consents to be recognized. III Then people come out into the light of afternoon, Covered all over with black powder, And begin to attack one another with statements Or to ignore one another with horror. Customs have not changed. Young men full of coffee and Old women with medicine under their skin Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour. Everywhere there is optimism without love And pessimism without understanding, They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts Cannot agree to be at peace With their own images, shadowing them in windows From store to store. IV Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds And savage ferns, The brown-eyed daughters of ravens, Sing in the lucky doors While night comes down the street like the millennium Wrapping the houses in dark feathers Soothing the town with a sign Healing the strong wings of sunstroke. Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies Off my Kentucky collarbone. The claws of the treacherous stars Renegade drums of wood Endure the heavenward protest. Their music heaves and hides. Rain and foam and oil Make sabbaths for our wounds. (Come, come, let all come home!) The summer sighs, and runs. My broken bird is under the whole town, My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving And there are real fountains under the floor. V Branches baptize our faces with silver Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills. Winds at last possess our empty country There, there under the moon In parabolas of milk and iron The ghosts of historical men (Figures of sorrow and dust) Weep along the hills like turpentine. And seas of flowering tobacco Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.

Nobody knows exactly when it fell off the map or what the pressures were on its flooding river. The hedge, the tottering mailbox, were gone. That dimple of light from the bicycle that raised itself to creak at noon across a clattering bridge names my father. His blood silent as a surging wish drags this town lost through my body, a place I can get back to only by hunch and a train whistle that was right on time. But time and trains were never right in Green Springs, West Virginia. What color could map the coal’s grime, shacks shored against the river every March, mail left to rot because no one answered to occupant? Farmers low on sugar cursed the heat and left bad cigars boys would puff back to clouds where they dreamed of girls naked as their hands under outfield flies. Scores were low. There were no springs for the sick. Women lined their walls with the Sears catalog, but the only fur they ever had was a warbled rabbit. To get here think of dirt, think of night leaking, the tick of waterbugs, a train held in Pittsburgh.

To those whose city is taken give glass pockets. To those whose quiver gapes give queens and pace their limbs with flutes, ropes, cups of soft juice. To those whose threshold vacillates give that bruise the dust astonished. To falling heroes give raucous sibyls’ polished knees. To those who sip nectar give teeth. And if they still sip nectar—give green chips of wood. To swimmers give clocks or rank their hearts among new satellites as you would Garbo’s skint lip. To scholars, give dovecotes to virgins, targets. Justice has nothing on them. Virgil, sweetheart, even pretty fops need justice. If they think not let creditors flank them and watch their vigour quickly flag. To exiled brides give tiny knives and beads of mercury then rob them of prudence for prudence is defunct. To those who fist clouds, give powder. And if their sullen wallets flap, give nothing at all. Still I have not addressed lambent fops swathed in honey, the stuttering moon Martyrs, Spartans, Sirens, Mumblers, Pawns Ventriloquists—or your sweet ego The Beloved Ego in the plummy light is you. When I see you in that light I desire all that has been kept from me etcetera. For you. Since your rough shirt reminds me of the first grass pressing my hips and seeds heads fringing the sky and the sky swaying lightly to your scraped breath, since I hear panicked, my sister calling since the gold leaves have all been lost, and you are at least several and variegated I toss this slight thread back The beloved ego on cold marble blurs inscription. Hey Virgil I think your clocked ardour is stuck in the blue vein on my wrist. It stops all judgement

If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O. in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter, say not-it! to the sea oats,not-it! to the sky above the disheveled palms,not-it! to the white or green oyster boats and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods that resemble so many giant whiskers, if I repeat this is not it, this is not why I'm waiting here, will I fill the universe with all that is not-it and allow myself to grow very still in the center of this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat sleeping in the windowsill and say not-it! garbage can, not-it! Long's Video Store, until I happen upon what is not not-it? Will I wake up and BEHOLD! the "actual," the "real," the "awe-thentic," the IS? Instead I walk down the Island Quicky, take a pound of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggie, then walk to the beach to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work I'm waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf of his own enlightenment because everything is bait and lust and hard-up for supper. I came out here to pare things down, wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out beneath the rotting dock at five o'clock in the afternoon when the voice that I call I is a one-man boat slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion. Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day, bird who will eventually go blind from slamming headfirst into the water. What do you say fat flounder out there deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells, lying so still you're hardly there, lungs lifting with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.

The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba bas will hear of as a god.”