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It’s dark in here, the dark inside of a man in the dark. It’s not night. One hears crows overhead, dawn fowl caws, the shod soles again treading their sunlit plots above. One grows dotish-fond of such things. Long live the things, their ways, their roots pushed goatish & gray through the skull, in this earth that gaily spins though one has crossed its smutted green threshold to reign in a crate. We have done no wrong, my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled, sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jaw. Once I sat on a stool as my grandmother told me of heaven. She cleaned fish for our living. I saw how her rusty black knife unseamed the sunset in each belly—coral, ochre, carmine, raw, lice-infested sunsets in a pail. So many nights. Night in the kitchen shack, night at the crumbling edge of our milk-pond province, a blade, lone cricket raving in the lawn.

1. the flat end of sorrow here two crows fighting over New Year's Party leftovers. From my cell, I see a cold hard world. 2. So this is the abscess that hurts the nation— jails, torture, blood and hunger. One day it will burst; it must burst. 3. When I heard you were taken we speculated, those of us at large where you would be in what nightmare will you star? That night I heard the moans wondering whose child could now be lost in the cellars of oppression. Then you emerged, tall, and bloody-eyed. It was the first time I wept. 4. The long nights I dread most the voices from behind the bars the early glow of dawn before the guard's steps wake me up, the desire to leap and stretch and yawn in anticipation of another dark home-coming day only to find that I cannot. riding the car into town, hemmed in between them their guns poking me in the ribs, I never had known that my people wore such sad faces, so sad they were, on New Year's Eve, so very sad.

Maybe a sin, indecent for sure—dope, The storekeeper called it. Everyone agreed That Manuel Lawrence, who drank Through the side of his mouth, squinting And chortling with pleasure, was hooked; Furthermore, Aunt Brenda, Who was so religious that she made Her daughters bathe with their panties on, Had dubbed it “toy likker, fool thing,” And so might I be, holding the bottle Out to the light, watching it bristle. Watching the slow spume of bubbles Die, I asked myself, could it be alive? When they electrocuted Edwin Dockery, He sat there like a steaming, breathing Bolt, the green muscles in his arms Strained at the chair’s black straps, The little finger of his right hand leapt up, But the charge rose, the four minutes And twenty-five hundred volts of his death, Which in another month will be Thirty-five years old. So the drink fizzed With the promise of mixtures to come. There it was. If the hard-shell Baptists of Alabama are good and content That the monster has died, so am I. I swallowed. Sweet darkness, one thing Led to another, the usual life, waking Sometimes lost, dried blood in the ear, Police gabbling in a strange language. How else would I ever gauge How pleasure might end, walking Past midnight in the vague direction Of music. I am never satisfied.

The bus steps are high, but William clambers up gamely. Doors shut. He peers out a print-marked window. From the street corner, I wave, wistful as a soldier’s bride as his bus pulls away and turns a corner. At noon the yellow bus returns him to the same place where I’m standing again. He thinks I stood there all day, waiting in his absence. When he finds out I left to play tennis, his forehead crumples like paper in a wastebasket. Now he knows I can move on my own without him. Tears drawn from the well of desertion form in his eyes. I’m his first love and his greatest disappointment.

Eastham, Massachusetts One of the spectators is disappointed there isn’t a guide to explain the beaching, the scientists busy cutting into ninety-four pilot whales stranded on the salt grass. No one knows why and, try as the rescue team might, not one whale will go back to water. So they’re injected to speed up the dying, lined up like lumber and sawed into, except when the black skin splits we can’t stop staring, their meat is so red. I don’t want to know why this happens— what parasite or geomagnetic anomaly finished their love of motion. Why should anything have to leave this world when water can cycle from atmosphere down to land, the ocean and back to forgiving sky. I’m on my way to Connecticut where my father has a little vegetation on his heart valve—that’s how the intern describes it, trying to minimize the danger of him slipping into a haze so cold, some nights, bone-cold, his hand can’t get from his plate to his mouth. Rain slicks the highway slowing me down. The same water fattened into snow in the woods of my childhood, the whiteness unbroken except where my father cut trails and taught me to ski, laying down the herringbone behind him as he broke up hills that left me with legs made of slush. He wanted me strong, no patience for pain. No choice but to find the muscle to follow. Even now when he boasts how I zigzagged the breakneck hills in an icestorm, there’s no hint of my knee-chattering fear, slats skittering out of control, each run a victory of luck more than will, each ride up the lift a prayer for my bones. I wonder how it is for him now there in the ward where whiteness can’t hide the cold blank that’s ahead. When the whales beached, spectators came like pilgrims, each new arrival scanning the faces of those heading back to their cars to see how it changed them to survey so much death. Nothing showed. Their eyes followed the asphalt, heads bent in private devotion. There in a room where others have died, my father keeps a record of each test and drug. He watches medicine drip into his arm and circle in the dark of his blood. I believe it will heal him, as I believe in the strength of my blood to protect me from failures of will. Once when my grandmother at ninety-six lay delirious with pneumonia, pitching on her high horsehair bed, she saw three crows perched on the dresser. They smell so awful, she said. Please, open the window. Let them out. It was my father who did what she asked. And the crows flew out, carrying her fever over the treeline, dissolving into sky, and she lived. Whatever she saw, by love, luck or dumb Yankee will, it was true. That’s what I mean by medicine.

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs paddling after their prized sticks. Fall is when the only things you know because I’ve named them begin to end. Soon I’ll have another season to offer you: frost soft on the window and a porthole sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches. The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

Farewell my dearer half, joy of my heart, Heaven only knows how loth I am to part: Whole Months but hours seem, when you are here, When absent, every Minute is a Year: Might I but always see thy charming Face, I’de live on Racks, and wish no easier place. But we must part, your Interest says we must; Fate, me no longer with such Treasure trust. I wou’d not tax you with Inconstancy, Yet Strephon , you are not so kind as I: No Interest, no nor Fate it self has pow’r To tempt me from the Idol I adore: But since you needs will go, may Africk be Kinder to you, than Europe is to me: May all you meet and every thing you view Give you such Transport as I met in you. May no sad thoughts disturb your quiet mind, Except you’l think of her you left behind.

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!

Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses quivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight around the starkness. We could have choked on August. Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth, we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt. Could we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday, we played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves. Our school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion. When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning against a fury that we did not know was change.

December 26, 1974 Title IX of the 1972 Education Act is signed, providing for equal opportunity in athletics for girls as well as boys. The year was 1974 When Little Leaguers learned the score. President Ford took out his pen, And signed a law that said from then On women too would have the chance To wear the stripes and wear the pants. Now what you hear, as flags unfurl, Is "Atta boy!" and "Atta girl!"