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We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone, Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought, And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone,— A higher charm than modern culture won With all the wealth of metaphysic lore, Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore. A many-colored light flows from one sun; Art, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun; The prism modifies the perfect day; But thou hast known such mediums to shun, And cast once more on life a pure, white ray. Absorbed in the creations of thy mind, Forgetting daily self, my truest self I find.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do. Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, nay more than married are. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met, And cloistered in these living walls of jet. Though use make you apt to kill me, Let not to that, self-murder added be, And sacrilege, three sins in killing three. Cruel and sudden, hast thou since Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence? Wherein could this flea guilty be, Except in that drop which it sucked from thee? Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now; ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be: Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me, Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

At a certain point I stopped and asked what poems I could write, which were different from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they were impossible. What I could do was different from what I wanted. To see this was the beginning of work that could be work, not simply pursuit after pursuit that was bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got nothing so solid or continuous. The authority I wanted dissolved always into restlessness, into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate seemed like things that had come to settle inside a glove compartment. I had no faith in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith in the particular. There was the actual stone wall, its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading. The black speck of it, then the outsize sting. The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches. The flea that looks, through the magnifier, like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie, that can live for years in good conditions, and lives by drinking the blood of animals and birds, in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.

the pope has his cardinals batman has his robins shakespeare has a lark in just one of his sonnets

We knew the rules and punishments: three lashes for lack of diligence, eight for disobeying mother or telling lies....No blood, he’d say, and no remission. Came a day he started keeping my account, as at a store. And came another he called me to the tannery: a Sunday, day of settlement. I’d paid one-third the owed amount when he, to my astonishment, handed the blue-beech switch to me. Always, the greatest of my fears were not his whippings, but his tears, and he was tearful now. I dared not disobey, nor strike him hard. “I will consider a weak blow no blow at all, rather a show of cowardice,” he said.No blood and no remission

Doomed beauties, my companions, my familiars, your long arms braceleted with snakes of danger, a questions twines in all the undergrowth. How can we tell the living from the dead? Puvis de Chavanne’s tall pearly figures dressed as sturdy Spartans at the chase turn out to be pale paper dolls in space. And how can we be sure that we’re alive? Our bodies, aging, changing, slow and stiffen. On flesh if not yet quite inert increasingly opaque, bite or bruise or blemish pose the questions Where have you been? What have you been doing? My sister’s leg, scaled by a manic cat nearly three years ago, still is scored and punctured. Last September I picked blackberries bare-armed; here are the scratches ten weeks later. We are passing through the world. This is some of what it does to us.

Hear me Neglect turned everything to gold Midas touch     I turn the comfortable To the dead     an anti-elegy tho     I’m Learning not to mourn what I make It’s a complex     this gravity I birth unknowing Not my complex     yours     say it I am owned by several things     all of  them Inherited from a horizon claimed before I was languaged     Invoke the historical Somethingsomethingsomething Chains Somethingsomethingsomething Unworthy I’m citizen of a clumsy imperative Belonging     is a concern of a self   I deaded Past participle implies the historical is a mob Try again     I mobbed my own lonely and was legion Play some offense then     Gold the impossible wound Citizen of  betrayal     Citizen of the going going going — Recursion     this fugitive state as native to me as my father’s Eyes     chestnut of a tree felled before we were languaged See   Inheritance is a hell of a drug     We Black and highly valued For our Flex     I said what I said     and became citizen Of  this petty excuse for forever     Flex on ’em then Invocation of the bicep I have and the bicep throttling me I live here now     Mississippi     and everywhere is everywhere That someone may have escaped from     Fugitive A sad motivation for river     It’s a strange thing That belief you are beautiful be a subversion of the water But here I am     winter gasping at the conditions Too weak to even strangle the grass to soil     No instead Trees feathered with their hollowed offspring Here the wind don’t howl just blooms a militia Of castanets     seven people were lynched here I looked it up and nobody will tell me which tree You are not as tired of the image as I am of uncertainty Every day the rain threatens     Every day my same imperious lonely Hear me     the sun ran like a punk     the sun ran like it owed Not even the gold     is trustworthy     why gold? Because it was the color of my love     and by extension The life I buried here     Gold the genesis of one lonely My ancestors were traded mere miles from here     Gold the genesis Of  another     I know they are not the same in anything but geography Still it is an act of   Flex just to stand anywhere     gravity being what it is Attempt the volta toward impossible     Midas the lonely into a radif Dreams of living life like a gilded garrote Flex The crown of scar tissue still the crown Flex Go to therapy if  you scared Flex Shuck the fear out of  the opposition Flex Every day gold for the sake of your attention Flex Your hereness a mountain plumed with trees Branches hemmed like unplayed notes A history can be undone with less than an alphabet Amend the scandal of the time that brought you here Fled to Flex     Ex. My family fled from Mississippi My family Flexed from Mississippi     and you become The muscle driving you forward     See     you were ugly Once     because you believed it     Dire invocation I am some kind of unkillable and don’t know how to act Everything I said I couldn’t live without Gone Lucky me     to be born into a language of mistakes I leave the violent on Seen and watch them wither Turns out I was their gravity     their forgetful sovereign I Flex     they flinch     the sonics of the words     cousins By virtue of a pistol     This is how I was taught to bridle Sadness like an American     Run with a band of  kids With silver caps     so you know we bad     waiting for the bone Eviction     Flex like value native to your mouth     Tooth out A tiny moon     a second grin shimmering in your palm     Flex The loss     the cost is secondary   Hear me     a life I had ended While I was trying to pursue the life I wanted     by pursuing A loss cobwebbed as a bride     All of this true the calcium winnowing Under the gold     I widowed my own comfort     I am in danger My squad an echo     my squad a promise you get dead someday If you touch me     thus I’m untouched     Neglect killed the grass The dead turn to gold before they resurrect     I am framed By a pastoral I might have escaped once     O the history O the lineage     the renowned Flex of survivors     I’m here I’m back     muscled like a creek          or the whisper That threads a storm miles later     Maybe not     Stick to the facts I’m alive despite a growing and planetary grief     I wear a chain Somedays     and a sweatshirt that translates to I Am Coming Back For What Is Mine Gaudy surprise on the faces of children Of owners     They think I am impossible     They think I am a ghost I Medusa like my daddy taught me     their eyes wilt and are Ill-tended grapes consumed by the skull     I’m metaphoring I told you     I don’t know how to act     but I know how to anthem My lyric loose and I got time today     I’m the type of  bad No synonym alive can hold

"I see you," she says— one of the flickering homeless with gray alehouse hair, pale blue eyes, crunchy lips—a methadone- troubled moth by the YMCA—but who does she see?—is it the chubby, right-handed schoolboy sent out by the nuns at St. Joseph's to clap the chalkboard erasers clean? Or the giddy teenage shipping clerk at lunch break smoking pot for the first time behind a curtain factory shed? Perhaps the middle-aged mortgagee? Maybe an ex- proofreader in lawyerland or betraying husband? Maybe the good loser? How about the new father smiling in tears? Why not the complainer's ally, or the devoted wanker, or the inert doubter, or the annoyancer or toddler?— if not the circumspect bald man, crank, or unselfish lecturer— or does she see each of them?— maybe each would like a lantern to carry; tho there are nowhere near enough lamps for all.

This is the day the flies fall awake mid-sentence and lie stunned on the windowsill shaking with speeches only it isn’t speech it is trembling sections of puzzlement which break off suddenly as if the questioner had been shot this is one of those wordy days when they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains and sizzle as they fall feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life blown from the surface of some charred world and somehow their wings which are little more than flakes of dead skin have carried them to this blackened disembodied question what dirt shall we visit today? what dirt shall we re-visit? they lift their faces to the past and walk about a bit trying out their broken thought-machines coming back with their used-up words there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly it’s going to be impossible to think clearly now until next winter what should we what dirt should we

somewhere in america, in a certain state of grace . . . Patti Smith As a child I danced to the heartful, savage rhythm of the Native, the American Indian, in the Turtle Mountains, in the Round Hall, in the greasy light of kerosene lamps. As a child I danced among the long, jangle legs of the men, down beside the whispering moccasin women, in close circles around the Old Ones, who sat at the drum, their heads tossed, backs arched in ancient prayer. As a child I danced away from the fist, I danced toward the rhythms of life, I danced into dreams, into the sound of flies buzzing. A deer advancing but clinging to the forest wall, the old red woman rocking in her tattered shawl, the young women bent, breasts drooping to the mouths of their young, the heat hanging heavy on the tips of our tongues, until the Sun burned the sky black, the moon made us silvery blue and all of the night sounds, all of the night sounds folded together with the buzzing still in our heads, becoming a chant of ghosts, of Crazy Horse and Wovoka and all the Endless Others, snaking through the weaving through the trees like beams of ribbons of light, singing,we shall live again we shall live, until the Sun and the Sun and the Sun and I awaken, still a child, still dancing toward the rhythm of life.