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Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado. But he grew old— This knight so bold— And o’er his heart a shadow— Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow— ‘Shadow,’ said he, ‘Where can it be— This land of Eldorado?’ ‘Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,’ The shade replied,— ‘If you seek for Eldorado!’

Her handlers, dressed in vests and flannel pants, Step forward in the weak winter light Leading a behemoth among elephants, Topsy, to another exhibition site; Caparisoned with leather bridle, Six impassive tons of carnival delight Shambles on among spectators who sidle Nervously off, for the brute has killed At least three men, most recently an idle Hanger-on at shows, who, given to distilled Diversions, fed her a live cigar. Since become a beast of burden, Topsy thrilled The crowds in her palmy days, and soon will star Once more, in an electrocution, Which incident, though it someday seem bizarre, Is now a new idea in execution. Topsy has been fed an unaccustomed treat, A few carrots laced with cyanide, And copper plates have been fastened to her feet, Wired to cables running off on either side; She stamps two times in irritation, Then waits, for elephants, having a thick hide, Know how to be patient. The situation Seems dreamlike, till someone throws a switch, And the huge body shakes for the duration Of five or six unending seconds, in which Smoke rises and Topsy’s trunk contracts And twelve thousand mammoth pounds finally pitch To earth, as the current breaks and all relax. It is a scene shot with shades of grey— The smoke, the animal, the reported facts— On a seasonably grey and gloomy day. Would you care to see any of that again? See it as many times as you please, For an electrician, Thomas Edison, Has had a bright idea we call the movies, And called on for monitory spark, Has preserved it all in framed transparencies That are clear as day, for all the day is dark. You might be amused on second glance To note the background—it’s an amusement park!— A site on Coney Island where elephants Are being used in the construction, And where Topsy, through a keeper’s negligence, Got loose, causing some property destruction, And so is shown to posterity, A study in images and conduction, Sunday, January 4th, 1903.

All that is uncared for. Left alone in the stillness in that pure silence married to the stillness of nature. A door off its hinges, shade and shadows in an empty room. Leaks for light. Raw where the tin roof rusted through. The rustle of weeds in their different kinds of air in the mornings, year after year. A pecan tree, and the house made out of mud bricks. Accurate and unexpected beauty, rattling and singing. If not to the sun, then to nothing and to no one.

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile! Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee: I saw thee every day; and all the while Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! So like, so very like, was day to day! Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there; It trembled, but it never passed away. How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep; No mood, which season takes away, or brings: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle things. Ah!then, if mine had been the Painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet's dream; I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;— Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine The very sweetest had to thee been given. A Picture had it been of lasting ease, Elysian quiet, without toil or strife; No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, Such Picture would I at that time have made: And seen the soul of truth in every part, A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed. So once it would have been,—'tis so no more; I have submitted to a new control: A power is gone, which nothing can restore; A deep distress hath humanised my Soul. Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea, and be what I have been: The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old; This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend, If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore, This work of thine I blame not, but commend; This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. O 'tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well, Well chosen is the spirit that is here; That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves. Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind. But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne! Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.— Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

I.M. Ché Frye i Kubla Ché, dreaming of ancient Egypt, ate his hyacinths and was marvelous. Wherever you are is what I’m meant to say. Before you beauty come, Dis crouching among the black basalt, kneading master’s soured linen, watching (bewatched) the great beaten gold litter borne by, deltoids sun-dewed stone, temples bronze & strong &     in train     in thrall perpetual — I am of a mind, daddy. Like, inside the blind-white cloth-of-gold, the scented, sweating box she sat in (think box, lock box) — Phoenician forest, seeder of  known world’s every known green: malachite, sea-green jasper, chrysocolla, olivine — & outside, too, other-handed, other- landed, in rainless, treeless Thebes, my dark knees tendered by two lands, rubbed bare by work & love — Move the tombs to the cliffs of Beni Hasan. Send salt from the four lakes. She is Nefertiti, she shares the crown, she brings the single sun. You do not watch the sun. But in the Deeds of  Suppiluliuma she says she is fearful     but there is no fear past true heresy, her beauty is clear of the next line & the next and that kind of  beauty is     if not redemption the possibility of a separate resurrection. (Am I not beautiful too?) The miners are instructed: Find a vein, gouge it to the very end. ii Princeling Ché, wolfling Ché, fish- eyed prodigy, anabole, brother mine, all-beautiful boy, who’ll turn your pages now? The lines unfurled before you in your sleep, who sets them to song? I cannot. (All men have crowns and every crown can be broken.) Were your senses mixed (blood shaking your heart — orange, with violet veins) or did hearing alone stay and go last, were your nostrils, at last, unblocked, your ears, at last, symmetrized, did you unravel first silence    did you dream? Maimonides says of Abraham it is not God he disobeys but Elohim; that in the bureaucracy of divine instruction the envoy fore the eyes supersedes the voice in the ear     did they close your eyes, daddy?     they must have closed your eyes (enucleate the globe, ligate the four recti, fix in formalin) for under the sole edict of sound the son is killed. iii Of  your father we dare & do not speak. iv Wherever you are, you are not your death. You are not your cold body, your subclavian blood, your spine upon the body block that proffers up your organs, your humors pooled with gravity — you are abed in natron, my friend, you are forty days not in a metal slot but roused into the mirror world, the eastern fields of light, the father sun rayed gentle on the rushes & not the prosector but the jackal keeps your stomach & the falcon your intestines and your heart remains your heart is yours for you there are no more tests of   heart. v My friend, magnificent, across your empty desk they go on trading base metals & precious gems. They found flint in feldspar caves, below the first cataract, where single stones, actioned by wind, can mother a dune. They trade tin south to children of  the stars, mix alum with deep-red alizarin to dye, to delight them who are yet to learn the violence of  such charm heart hanging in its bloodslick chamber     heart gleaming in its rubied darkness My husband, my god, my gold-mad son lorn issue, dim & darling eyes flooding with natal sand, every night flooding my free past. What’s a queen know of this     my babies in their sunless cease     what’s a queen’s knees know but milk & crystalled honey     her throat but subtle Mareotic wine     sun smelted to gold, disced & sledding behind her the whole world’s whole life given her to give — vi Look, the dreamer comes! Was this what you sleep- conceived, this equal dialogue     this black silt talk rife in death & germ all-mixing, estuarizing, high-banked along the flood’s go-down? (it lowers down its voices, the flood     it helps me to think, blessed ram, of death as flood     for in it all things high & low, fair & dun, flax & inlaid faience, free & liened & husbanded are leveled, meet, and proven in the engorged     the enchafèd delta.) I see it now. (The trick of death is that it keeps returning.) Lady of all women, they call me, they are all my children now. (Labors of my dim life.) I will prepare each part for them. (From the front, no back     from behind, no face     am I purged at last of the various envies?) I will build a city for you. (I will build a city for you.) vii Twenty years ago we were nineteen and already elegiac, we were future tensed & annealed, we were quenched in the dark peace of violent histories — Karnak, Babylon, Persepolis, Byzantium — the names alone     (quarry our bones, convey us to Karnak)our names we preserved, bent to stave & strophe, accomplishing our envy, gathering our violence, we were altogether desire, (only ever) all we would be     full of  imminence     (light first, sun later)     stayed, asituate, unforgiving. viii Now you are time’s but I say to you, Ché, in full mouth: We will be perfect. There will be a recognition. The skill has left your fingers, the dream your brainpan but time, too, is prospected by work     (the lumen of the vein)     (the schist afire through the rock) and humans, too, may burn like candles, their spines wicks, their feverdreams the sputting flames — Work in the shadows. We will work in the shadows, the rest being the madness. Naughty naughty boy. Ward residuum. Hold to murmur, hold to method. You see? Time breaks along its faults, lays bare its jeweled fragments for those who love and work. It gives it all for free. It asks only reversion at the end. (And like, that end whereof we could not think     thereof  (no questions asked) you spake & said, My father     and you answered, Here am I, my son)     O tell me — go, you go first (you went first) — what reason makes this right, what insupposable value, what excuse but ultimacy which all know to be the breath of evil? I will build a city for you. ix About beauty they really got it, those masters: great wonders call for great suffering. The father straps down his son, carves along the throat’s chalked crease (signaling purpose), the slavers slough off infants into sand holes (streamlining, focusing the workforce), the queen conceives eternal city, she deracinates a people to upraise it with their bowed backs, mortar it with their warm, oxygenated blood     sunk generations & contingency & opportunity cost     gambling our own lives’ great gamble: that wrong, actioned by time, can be made soluble in art. So, Volchénochëk, you may be absolved — I tried & trying. x Listen, I want to say something to you. You arrived just in time. You told me they’re not better than us, you honored our sin, repaired my will, you were havoc in the trees, the dense infolding fire & its fuel at once (white fusion, wild usufruct)     always your mind was the Emergency, always severaled, chording the upper & lower, equal & bonded in appetency, bonded always to mine. This is a moment of children. Who cares who sees? (Who sees?) We scoff at faultless entropy, we strip the pith from the inner stalk, we count to three. Talk me into it, daddy (the first rolls were blank)     oxidize this carbon black significance — heart of water — this red hematite & blue frit, these yellow ochres that every child knows enflesh the unreal sun — xi Put it another way: the ink gleams for three more words before it (and meaning) sets. In those three beats I must be thousand-faced, entelechied, liable, I must be totally told on — in the middle of my life a myth, a tidal mouth, I am planted in bitter celery, in the phytolithic matrix     all-possible clay     I sense your slow impulsion all around me. Heart’s lake, calendula on my fingers, laughter in the morning- golded reeds (shaking the papyrus), the scale in the wind that shakes the reeds,deus absconditus, the only gossip of the living, I miss you so much. xii Either we are eternal, with neither end nor beginning, or we are sprung from a single thing and proliferative — in either case death is not death (though time cannot but give form to suffering). Believe (if you must) as I must: In all things moment. In each thing everything.

after Ovid In summer’s heat and mid-time of the day To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay, One window shut, the other open stood, Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood, Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun Or night being past, and yet not day begun. Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown, Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown. Then came Corinna in a long loose gown, Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down: Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed Or Laïs of a thousand wooers sped. I snatched her gown, being thin, the harm was small, Yet strived she to be covered therewithal. And striving thus as one that would be cast, Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last. Stark naked as she stood before mine eye, Not one wen in her body could I spy. What arms and shoulders did I touch and see, How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me? How smooth a belly under her waist saw I? How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh? To leave the rest, all liked me passing well, I clinged her naked body, down she fell, Judge you the rest: being tired she bad me kiss, Jove send me more such afternoons as this.

Yield prompt compliance to the maid’s desires; A prompt compliance fans the lover’s fires: Go pleas’d where’er she goes, tho’ long the way, Tho’ the fierce Dog-star dart his sultry ray; Tho’ painted Iris gird the bluish sky, And sure portends, that rattling storms are nigh: Or, if the fair one pant for sylvan fame, Gay drag the meshes, and provoke the game: Nay, should she choose to risk the driving gale; Or steer, or row, or agile hand the sail: No toil, tho’ weak, tho’ fearful, thou forbear; No toils should tire you, and no dangers scare: Occasion smiles, then snatch an ardent kiss; The coy may struggle, but will grant the bliss: The bliss obtain’d, the fictious struggle past, Unbid, they’ll clasp you in their arms at last.

Whenever my father was left with nothing to do — waiting for someone to 'get ready', or facing the gap between graduate seminars and dull after-suppers in his study grading papers or writing a review — he played the piano. I think of him packing his lifespan carefully, like a good leather briefcase, each irritating chore wrapped in floating passages for the left hand and right hand by Chopin or difficult Schumann; nothing inside it ever rattled loose. Not rationalism, though you could cut your tongue on the blade of his reasonable logic. Only at the piano did he become the bowed, reverent, wholly absorbed Romantic. The theme of his heroic, unfinished piano sonata could have been Brahms. Boredom, or what he disapproved of as 'sitting around with your mouth open' oddly pursued him. He had small stamina. Whenever he succumbed to bouts of winter bronchitis, the house sank a little into its snowed-up garden, missing its musical swim-bladder. None of this suggests how natural he was. For years I thought fathers played the piano just as dogs barked and babies grew. We children ran in and out of the house, taking for granted that the 'Trout' or E flat Major Impromptu would be rippling around us. For him, I think, playing was solo flying, a bliss of removal, of being alone. Not happily always; never an escape, for he was affectionate, and the household hum he pretended to find trivial or ridiculous daily sustained him. When he talked about music, it was never of the lachrimae rerum that trembled from his drawn-out phrasing as raindrops phrase themselves along a wire; no, he defended movable doh or explained the amazing physics of the octave. We'd come in from school and find him cross-legged on the jungle of the floor, guts from one of his Steinways strewn about him. He always got the pieces back in place. I remember the yellow covers of Schirmer's Editions and the bound Peters Editions in the bookcase. When he defected to the cello in later years Grandmother,in excrucio, mildly exclaimed, 'Wasn't it lovely when Steve liked to play the piano.' Now I'm the grandmother listening to Steve at the piano. Lightly, in strains from Brahms-Haydn variations, his audible image returns to my humming ears.

Adieu near those fields that smoke disembowels And that your arm pushes away For a long time until the inevitable stratum of the Adieus until the next Adieu The door in a cliff has closed. I wanted Daylight to enter here only through the arc-lamp of your eyes That the limits of this place be defined only By the carnal walls our bodies erected Opened wider on the recaptured past than the smallest Pocket-watch and its visible trail ever were Your mouth swallowed the hour and my teeth broke on it When I entered you with kisses Under the full-blown palm of multiple hands The rose you know, on the ground now, Perfumed the silence and killed our secrets Marking our garden with fear that was no longer fear Adieu    the songs are ended    the years disemboweled And may your body distance itself For a long time until the ineluctable regret of Adieus until forever

along the street the outcast pauses his earring makes him special a useless worker of the disgraceful he’s stood at the crossroads of  years the traffic light contains three colors but none give him permission to cross I live OK and work at present as word processor (from the root “cess”) and in the process wander or hold court with whacked youngsters you just can’t get used to death you drain your life toiling for some treasure you’ll die like a darling you won’t protest and out of decorum pretend to see the light die just like the rest of us and to your relatives’ delight agonizing confess you know where to find the gold Translated from the Russian