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This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else. And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair. The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild as horses in their oat sacks. The women wear spurs. In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air. My room is the same as last year. They always give me end of the corridor, left, the top floor. Privacy. Why not. I’ve been through here before. I’m the town’s best customer. A minor attraction. I buy from their stores. Remember this bureau— battered wood, the fake drawer and split mirror? And even the glass marks, ring within ring of spilled drinks. When I sit here the widest warped links have a center. Strung out they’re a year’s worth of slack, a tether that swings around the spine’s dark pole and swings back. Each time I return something’s different, although there’s a few I can always expect. The cracks in the mirror: always more, never less. The stains in the bedspread have spread. And the rip in the window shade lets through more light, strange light, since I come here to be in the dark. Should be taped. A few things can be saved anyhow. But I don’t want to get into that. I set up my pictures. Mother and Father, stiffer, more blurred every year. I turn them to the walls when there’s customers, that is the least I can do. What mending there is occurs in small acts, and after the fact of the damage, when nothing is ever enough. There is always the scar to remind me that things were once perfect, at least they were new. I first came here when I was a girl. It surprised me, the things that two people could do left alone in a room. Not long and I learned. I learned what the selves are a man can disown till he lets them to life in a room. It’s the region’s hard winters, snowed in with the snow half the year. I’d expect them to think up a few. But nothing surprises me, not anymore. The plumbing can only get worse with the cold. It’s true, even summers the water is foul and flows slowly, a thin brown trickle by noon. Heat pours in the west, freak waves of dry lightning soak the whole town in a feverish light. Beneath me, the tables of water have dropped to unheard-of levels. It’s been a long drought. I bend my whole arm to the handle, the valve yawns open but nothing comes out. What else should I expect. Wrung cloth. The body washing in dust.

Each day the job gets up And rubs its eyes We are going to live on in dry amazement Workers push the granite bed under the avenue Bed of the married The re-          the pre-married Making a form as forms become infinite The scrapings       scraping Graywhacke    chert People wait for their bumpy little pizzas Theories of theories in gravity voices Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid Angel food in whole foods Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood Made everything a horizon Those walking upside down don’t know what to think The finch engineering itself to deep spring Or you        life       tired of being cured How many layers Of giving up are there One of it Two of everything in the arc you save

Frères humains qui après nous vivez, Soon they’ll have the speed freak twisting On a scaffold, soon the birds Will come to peck out his eyes, & when He’s too weak & exhausted to turn His head away, they’ll do it, too, They’ll peck his eyes right out. You’ll want to watch it happen, you’ll want To witness it. You’ll want to see Paolo And Francesca almost touch before They’re swept away again, him in one line Waiting for rations, her in another one, Both of  them naked, standing there, Cock & nipples shriveled in the cold. Frères humains qui après nous vivez, N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis.

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures The birds that were singing this morning have shut up I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no It’s a strange bird. He should know. & I think now “Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.” Ron put me in that picture. In another picture, a good- looking poet is thinking it over, nevertheless, he will never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank, listening, completely interested in whatever there may be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends, nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy. What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how that makes me feel. You are dead. And you’ll never write again about the country, that’s true. But the people in the sky really love to have dinner & to take a walk with you.

The dim boy claps because the others clap. The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A. Union Station, ’46, sweating through last night. The dim boy claps because the others clap. Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat. Isn’t it wrong to be or not be spastic? Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. I’m laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream by a savage father and I’m ashamed to look. The dim boy claps because the others clap. The score is always close, the rally always short. I’ve left more wreckage than a quake. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back. The afflicted never cheer in unison. Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked. The dim boy claps because the others clap.

I don’t like doing homework, I know that it will bore me. But now I am much happier ’Cause Freddie does it for me! He greets me at the door each day When I come home from school. He just can’t wait to read my books— I think that’s pretty cool! I give him all my homework, Like history and math. And when he’s done I give him A nice warm bubble bath! My grades are so much better now, Which makes my parents glad. Freddie is the smartest dog That I have ever had!

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians: this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric, not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Before Gilgamesh invented the kaleidoscope and Galileo the Rubik’s cube, before the scimitar-horned oryx went missing, before the tamarind trees went bare, before the stars’ eyelids were wrapped in tinfoil, before the leaves could gnaw on water, before electrons made donations, before the owl wore a mask, before the wind had a sound, before the moon had a name and the smoke a spine, before the tulips crossed their legs, before the tongue was armored, before the ghosts rode centaurs to riots, before cyberspace was culled and belly buttons sown to wombs, before the taste had an after, before intellect became property and thunder premeditated, before the New, New World, before a stone wished to be more than a stone, before we had a change of clothes, before the grass was color-blind, before the rivers lost their fingers, and the rain stopped teething, before the kings were all beheaded, the gravedigger neither young nor old, before a lion was still a lion, before the girls were all killed, before the trapeze gave way.        We hung           suspended in time by the arches of our curved feet and this tickled the gods, tickled them to death.        & I think our silence cut us loose, let us go falling from the doubt, secretly thrilled at the hems and ever so eager to break.

Last night I awoke knew That I should say goodbye now To these verses. That's how it always goes After a few years. They have to get out Into the world. It's not possible to keep them Forever! here under the roof. Poor things. They must set out for town. A few will be allowed to return later. But most of them are still hanging around out there. Who knows what will become of them. Before they Find their peace.

They caught them. They were sitting at a table in the kitchen. It was early. They had on bathrobes. They were drinking coffee and smiling. She had one of his cigarillos in her fingers. She had her legs tucked up under her in the chair. They saw them through the window. She thought of them stepping out of a bath And him wrapping cloth around her. He thought of her waking up in a small white building, He thought of stones settling into the ground. Then they were gone. Then they came in through the back. Her cat ran out. The house was near the road. She didn’t like the cat going out. They stayed at the table. The others were out of breath. The man and the woman reached across the table. They were afraid, they smiled. The others poured themselves the last of the coffee Burning their tongues. The man and the woman looked at them. They didn’t say anything. The man and the woman moved closer to each other, The round table between them. The stove was still on and burned the empty pot. She started to get up. One of them shot her. She leaned over the table like a schoolgirl doing her lessons. She thought about being beside him, being asleep. They took her long grey socks Put them over the barrel of a rifle And shot him. He went back in his chair, holding himself. She told him hers didn’t hurt much, Like in the fall when everything you touch Makes a spark. He thought about her getting up in the dark Wrapping a quilt around herself And standing in the doorway. She asked the men if they shot them again Not to hurt their faces. One of them lit him one of his cigarettes. He thought what it would be like Being children together. He was dead before he finished it. She asked them could she take it out of his mouth. So it wouldn’t burn his lips. She reached over and touched his hair. She thought about him walking through the dark singing. She died on the table like that, Smoke coming out of his mouth.