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From here into the north, the ways are dry. Yellow grass, thirst in the roots. In the hearts. It's all simple, but false. When I try to think history, the enormous vertebrae of the dinosaur behind the purple beeches in Invalidenstrasse, Bismarck in marble, and Benn, a nameplate on Bozener, lifeless. In the depths of the bunkers on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin are the shoes of Hitler's favorite horse. Profile of power: armor and helmet. In our pants pockets, we crumple the banners. Full of satisfaction we hear the flags splinter in the fabric's darkness. Don't forget the poets' loaded dice. When iron rules again, we will have to console ourselves, adorn stones with smaller stones, the heart with water. * * * Von hier in den Norden sind die Wege trocken. Gelbes Gras, Durst in den Wurzeln. Im Herzen. Alles ist einfach, aber falsch. Wenn ich versuche, Geschichte zu denken, die riesigen Wirbelknochen des Sauriers hinter den Blutbuchen in der Invalidenstraße, Bismarck in Marmor, und Benn, ein Klingelschild in der Bozener, leblos. In den Tiefen der Bunker des Potsdamer Platzes in Berlin liegen die Hufeisen von Hitlers Lieblingspferd. Profile der Macht: Harnisch und Helm. In der Hosentasche zerknicken wir die Standarten. Voll Genugtuung hören wir die Fahnen splittern im Dunkel des Stoffs. Vergeßt nicht die gefälschten Würfel der Dichter. Wenn die Eisernen wieder herrschen, werden wir uns trösten müssen, Steine schmücken mit kleinen Steinen, mit Wasser das Herz.

We suffer from the repression of the sublime. —Roberto Assagioli This artist’s sculptured, open box of mahogany (ivory white inside) is strung with vertical and horizontal layers of mus- ical wires that sing when struck, and bits of bright garnet rock tremble where they intersect. These gems flash in the candle light, and before me all my beloved childhood looms up in the humming levels, each one deeper than the other. I tip this sculpted box and my child laughs and moves there in his own time. You’ll hear me moan: Oh, you will hear me moan with all the old, sure pleasure of what I’d thought I’d lost come back again. Why, we have never left our home! On the leather lace fixed about my neck, blue, yellow, red and black African trading beads begin to glow: their colors all weave and newly flow together like translucent and angelic worms. And beneath these my neck is as alive with gentle, white bees as is a woman’s breast. Beside and in the light river figures come on stage exactly as they are needed. I tell you, I conduct my own act! A boy poses so youthfully, so beautifully, his slim arms a graceful arrow over his small, brown head, and he dives! Limbs and body push supple as a whole school of fish. And then his vacant place is taken by another— a man dressed in denim and in boots of red rubber. He is wrenched from the shore and pulled through the fresh, bright stream by a kid who tugs on one of his hands and holds a fishing rod. And, too, this man is dragged in the opposite direction by a red dog on a leash shaking his wet great coat into the stippled light. That man just sashayed: he zigzagged this way and that. The man is me! A bluejay does a dance for us! He hops beside a tree that rises inside of me. He half-glides, his iridescent, blue back striking like a brush of Gauguin on the bare canvas of the air and then: he flies! leaving behind him a small, perfect feather, which I find shades from blue to brown— my brother’s color into mine. Now in the space the diver and the booted fellow left, my brother and I are there fishing together, our poles glinting in the water. My mouth moves. My eyes are alive! I cry to my brother with joy. For that bluejay was a messenger of what I want! Gregory my friend and guide on this voyage seems benign. He brushes my chest and my stretched, naked arms open to the sun with a branch of the fragrant pine. “Be healed,” he chants with each glancing stroke. “Be healed.” The needles prick my skin back into life, and I go down to bathe my feet in the stream. The veins form a light, mottled web along my white ankle. I feel my kinship with the pine, the jay, the luminescent stream and with him—or is it with her, the Mother? Gregory, my oracle, my teacher. He leans there in the door of our tent by the river, his face glowing, hair long and shining as a woman’s, his belly fat with life—pregnant with the two of us: my brother and I, unborn twins who lie entangled in each other’s developing limbs. Soon we will be born! He and I will taste of milk for the very first time! And taste of strawberry pop and of bright bananas. And we will eat, my brother and I, a great, shining, autumn-red apple fallen from our father’s tree as if from the long sky, and you too will taste this apple with us, for we all have the same mother, and her name is Grace.

From a distance, at night, they seem to be industries—all lit up but not on the map; or, in this scientific age, they could be installations for launching rocket ships— so solid, and with such security, are they. . . Ah, but up close, by the light of day, we see, not “pads” but actual paddies— for these are simply silos in ricefields, structures to hold the harvested grain. Still, they're the tallest things around, and, by night or day, you'd have to say they're ample for what they do: storage. And, if you amble around from your car, you can lean up against one in the sun, feeling warmth on your cheek as you spread out your arms, holding on to the whole world around you, to the shores of other lands where the laborers launched their lives to arrive and plant and harvest this grain of history—as you hold and look, look up, up, up, and whisper: “Grandfather!”

Dreams brimming over, childhood stretched out in legs, this is the moment replayed on winter days when frost covers the field, when age steals away wishes. Glorious sleep that seeps back there to the glory of our baseball days.

In 1915 my grandfather’s neighbors surrounded his house near the dayline he ran on the Hudson in Catskill, NY and thought they’d burn his family out in a movie they’d just seen and be rid of his kind: the death of a lone black family is the Birth of a Nation, or so they thought. His 5’4” waiter gait quenched the white jacket smile he’d brought back from watered polish of my father on the turning seats, and he asked his neighbors up on his thatched porch for the first blossom of fire that would bring him down. They went away, his nation, spittooning their torched necks in the shadows of the riverboat they’d seen, posse decomposing; and I see him on Sutter with white bag from your restaurant, challenged by his first grandson to a foot-race he will win in white clothes. I see him as he buys galoshes for his railed yard near Mineo’s metal shop, where roses jump as the el circles his house toward Brooklyn, where his rain fell; and I see cigar smoke in his eyes, chocolate Madison Square Garden chews he breaks on his set teeth, stitched up after cancer, the great white nation immovable as his weight wilts and he is on a porch that won’t hold my arms, or the legs of the race run forwards, or the film played backwards on his grandson’s eyes.

I grow in places others can’t, where wind is high and water scant. I drink the rain, I eat the sun; before the prairie winds I run. I see, I sprout, I grow, I creep, and in the ice and snow, I sleep. On steppe or veld or pampas dry, beneath the grand, enormous sky, I make my humble, bladed bed. And where there’s level ground, I spread.

Both of us had been close to Joel, and at Joel’s death my friend had gone to the wake and the memorial service and more recently he had visited Joel’s grave, there at the back of the grassy cemetery among the trees, “a quiet, gentle place,” he said, “befitting Joel.” And I said, “What’s the point of going to look at graves?” I went into one of my celebrated tirades. “People go to look at the grave of Keats or Hart Crane, they go traveling just to do it, what a waste of time. What do they find there? Hell, I wouldn’t go look at the grave of Shakespeare if it was just down the street. I wouldn’t look at—” And I stopped. I was about to say the grave of God until I realized I’m looking at it all the time....

She wants to set the house on fire, gas in both hands, gas on the wall. It’d be like the sea torched from its floor. She’d run like light from basement windows. or maybe suck all arms to room ablaze, so housed in gut piping. the copper hollowed, reaching to a heated black rot at bottom. Like ants; maybe she crawl in the dark. low on the belly maybe she thug out late, lay low and ink eight walls. lay low like cold, she might strip bare, black glass. sometimes strut, sometimes hide late. she runs from house to ember, a sum of sink. She breathes through flame a room of spoons. one bar brick, one black-eyed room splatter, one torch spent for each arm, from coal to alley, she heaves hue of concrete into each limb. A house of blue-ring flames to mimic; someone better run.

I spoke in a hurry, in a nervous hush, Because the time was short— The lightning was shuddering, Slowing down, running. Or was that my blood, The quiet diminishing of daily life? It’s time for me to go forth Into Your tiny mustard seed. In the house of my Father, everything is fading, In the house of the Father, all the angels are crying, Because the anguish of a jaded, exhausted horse Sometimes finds its way even unto them. One gray day, I was alive on this earth, And amid the mist of day—in triumph— The Spirit may approach and look So that you will see Him, without seeing. And, so, celebrate the meager light, Curse not the twilight. If Christ is to visit us It will be on such pitiful days as these.

I drive past him each day in the swamp where he stands on one leg, hunched as if dreaming of his own form the surface reflects. Often I nearly forget to turn left, buy fish and wine, be home in time to cook and chill. Today the bird stays with me, as if I am moving through the heron’s dream to share his sky or water—places he will rise into on slow flapping wings or where his long bill darts to catch unwary frogs. I’ve seen his slate blue feathers lift him as dangling legs fold back, I’ve seen him fly through the dying sun and out again, entering night, entering my own sleep. I only know this bird by a name we’ve wrapped him in, and when I stand on my porch, fish in the broiler, wine glass sweating against my palm, glint of sailboats tacking home on dusky water, I try to imagine him slowly descending to his nest, wise as he was or ever will be, filling each moment with that moment’s act or silence, and the evening folds itself around me.