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The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

The loneliest days, damp and indistinct, sea and land a haze. And purple fog horns blossomed over tides— bruises being born in silence, so slow, so out there, around, above and below. In such hurts of sound the known world became neither flat nor round. The steaming tea pot was all we fathomed of is and is not. The hours were hallways with doors at the ends opened into days fading into night and the scattering particles of light. Nothing was done then. Nothing was ever done. Then it was done.

When I was a young man, I loved to write poems And I called a spade a spade And the only only thing that made me sing Was to lift the masks at the masquerade. I took them off my own face, I took them off others too And the only only wrong in all my song Was the view that I knew what was true. Now I am older and tireder too And the tasks with the masks are quite trying. I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew A better way to keep from lying, And not get nervous and blue When I said something quite untrue: I looked all around and all over To find something else to do: I tried to be less romantic I tried to be less starry-eyed too: But I only got mixed up and frantic Forgetting what was false and what was true. But tonight I am going to the masked ball, Because it has occurred to me That the masks are more true than the faces: —Perhaps this too is poetry? I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern And masked balls fascinate me: Now that I know that most falsehoods are true Perhaps I can join the charade? This is, at any rate, my new and true view: Let live and believe, I say. The only only thing is to believe in everything: It’s more fun and safer that way!

Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time. One song described the dark around the military vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars. They got away with it and worked to abolish youth by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was in love because my sentiments were matched by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames. Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.

The folk who live in Backward Town Are inside out and upside down. They wear their hats inside their heads And go to sleep beneath their beds. They only eat the apple peeling And take their walks across the ceiling.

You shouldn’t have a heart attack in your 20s. 47 is the perfect time for a heart attack. Feeding stray shadows only attracts more shadows. Starve a fever, shatter a glass house. People often mistake thirst for hunger so first take a big slurp. A motorboat is wasted on me even though all summer the pool was, I didn’t get in it once. Not in it, not in it twice. A dollhouse certainly isn’t wasted on a mouse both in terms of habitation and rhyme. Always leave yourself time to get lost. 50 cattle are enough for a decent dowry but sometimes a larger gesture is called for like shouting across the Grand Canyon. Get used to nothing answering back. Always remember the great effects of the Tang poets, the meagerness of their wine, meagerness of writing supplies. Go ahead, drown in the moon’s puddle. Contusions are to be expected and a long wait in ICU under the muted TVs advertising miracle knives and spot removers. How wonderful to be made entirely of hammered steel! No one knows why Lee chose to divert his troops to Gettysburg but all agree it was the turning point of the Civil War. Your turining point may be lying crying on the floor. Get up! The perfect age for being buried alive in sand is 8 but jumping up 33, alluding to the resurrection, a powerful motif in Western art but then go look at the soup cans and crumpled fenders in the modern wing: what a relief. Nearly 80% of the denizens of the deep can produce their own light but up here, we make our own darkness.

Game of Thrones Follow where all is. / Follow the transfused. / Follow what is still and what is still-attracting. That light / That beauty / That love / That, that is massy-borne and rising up, like a drifting star. Like stars lift. / Like lifting stars. / Like the lifting of stars, I rose. I rise. Rose. Rose. Like a thing beyond words: satiated. Let lie in the ravage. / Let lie in what is ravaged-wrought. Why fear what hasn’t become? I beckon, like light. / Like a star, I will beckon. / You will oblige. / You will lend the want. You will eclipse my blinding. You will know nothing. Nothing. You will know nothing of what has been dark.

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet. There, wrapp'd in cloud of sorrow, pity move, And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love: But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain, Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again. All that I sung still to her praise did tend, Still she was first; still she my songs did end; Yet she my love and music both doth fly, The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy. Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight: It shall suffice that they were breath'd and died for her delight.

Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English. I answer, and they say your Arabic is good. How long have you been with us? All my life I tell them, but I’m never believed. They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek, and I answer with mountains of gold and silver, ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas. And when they speak to me in Spanish, I say Moriscos and Alhambra. I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats. And when the speak to me in Portuguese, all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa, Indians and poisoned spears. I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing Manuel to free his enslaved sons. And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is surprisingly good. Then they speak to me in Italian, and I tell them how I lay swaddled a month’s walk from here. I tell them camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives and daughters dying, camels frothing disease, the sand stretching an endless pool. And they say so good so good. How long have you been with us? All my life, but I’m never believed. Then they speak to me in French, and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley, baskets of severed hands and feet. I say the horror, battles of Algiers. And they speak to me in English and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo, Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea. I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens, I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee. And Cairo's taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is unbelievably good. Tell the truth now, tell the truth, how long have you been with us? I say my first name is little lion, my last name is broken branch. I sing "Happiness uncontainable" and "field greening in March" until I'm sad and tired of truth, and as usual I'm never believed. Then they lead me through congestion, gritty air, narrow streets crowded with Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo's taxi drivers and I speak all the languages of the world, and we argue and argue about corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances, the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.

When it became my turn to speak all that my tongue produced was dust. I hold my cat to this. I wear finery. in moments of clarity there is no grace