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from my mother's sadness, which was, to me, unbearable, until, it felt to me not like what I thought it felt like to her, and so felt inside myself—like death, like dying, which I would almost have rather done, though adding to her sadness would rather die than do— but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was— a form of gratitude which when last it came drifted like a meadow lit by torches of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms, when a hummingbird hovered nearby, I slipped into my mouth thereby coaxing the bird to scrawl on my tongue its heart's frenzy, its fleet nectar-questing song, with whom, with you, dear mother, I now sing along.

. . . It was the summer I fucked up    the summer    fucked up   me fucked up   a fuck-up in the summer   & I spent time laying under stars too much   time I wasted  the stars  you lied to me under the stars & the summer was endless   the summer endless   it was an endless summer . . . . . . endless   & I said things like   “If I ever see you again” but   I’ll never see you again   I never saw you again   I made sure of that & I circled   the lake   I went in circles    the lake was endless   it was summer   I fucked up   too much time & I never saw   you again   & I . . . . . . circled & it was   endless & the stars    lied to me   the summer light   moving so slowly   I saw the summer light move   endless & when I see you   the trees will cluster   green rage green   trees raging with love   endless love & I’ll never see you   again   I made sure of that . . . . . . wasted under the stars   the slow summer   light   the endless fuck-up & you never again   you lovely   you summer you   everything that is now never again   whatever that may be   the rage I loved   me under the stars then & now   endless   wasting away me   haze wandering around endless . . . . . . haze  it was endless  too much time & you   lied to me & I    said things like I can’t describe the air on my skin can you   can you please   I know it was important & the light from stars   moved   so slowly   & you   moved off forever   how can you save everything   everything   important   endless . . . . . . summer light   the fuck-up   the lake a circle   circling   the lake how can you save everything   how can I   answer you the light of summer stars I’m sorry  for my light   the endlessness of my endless & my   fuck-up the me that is   now   looking back & thinking   & this summer circling . . .

A Poetic Romance (excerpt) BOOK I A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; All lovely tales that we have heard or read: An endless fountain of immortal drink, Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. Nor do we merely feel these essences For one short hour; no, even as the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast; They always must be with us, or we die. Therefore, 'tis with full happiness that I Will trace the story of Endymion. The very music of the name has gone Into my being, and each pleasant scene Is growing fresh before me as the green Of our own valleys: so I will begin Now while I cannot hear the city's din; Now while the early budders are just new, And run in mazes of the youngest hue About old forests; while the willow trails Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails Bring home increase of milk. And, as the year Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer My little boat, for many quiet hours, With streams that deepen freshly into bowers. Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story. O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end. And now, at once adventuresome, I send My herald thought into a wilderness: There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress My uncertain path with green, that I may speed Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.

If you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think. If you care what they think, how will you not hate them, and so become a monster of the opposite kind? From where then is love to come—love for your enemy that is the way of liberty? From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go free of you, and you of them; they are to you as sunlight on a green branch. You must not think of them again, except as monsters like yourself, pitiable because unforgiving.

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field; An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed— Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning, & someone ran knocking on our door one night. The house became birds in the eaves too low for a boy's ears. I heard a girl talking, but they weren't words. I knew one good thing: a girl was somewhere in our house, speaking slow as a sailor's parrot. I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland. Her voice smelled like an orange, though I'd never peeled an orange. I knocked on the walls, in a circle. The voice was almost America. My ears plucked a word out of the air. She said, Friend. I eased open the door hidden behind overcoats in a closet. The young woman was smiling at me. She was teaching herself a language to take her far, far away, & she taught me a word each day to keep secret. But one night I woke to other voices in the house. A commotion downstairs & a pleading. There are promises made at night that turn into stones at daybreak. From my window, I saw the stars burning in the river brighter than a big celebration. I waited for her return, with my hands over my mouth. I can't say her name, because it was dangerous in our house so close to the water. Was she a boy's make-believe friend or a beehive breathing inside the walls? Years later my aunts said two German soldiers shot the girl one night beside the Vistula. This is how I learned your language. It was long ago. It was springtime.

They landed and could see nothing but meadows and tall trees— cypress, nearly three fathoms about at the roots, rising straight for sixty or eighty feet without a branch. In the woods were cedars, oaks, and walnut trees; some beech, some elm, black walnut, ash, and sassafras; mul- berry trees in groves; honey-suckle and other vines hanging in clusters on many trees. They stepped on violets and other sweet flowers, many kinds in many colors; straw- berries and rasp- berries were on the ground. Blackbirds with red shoulders were flying about and many small birds, some red, some blue; the woods were full of deer; and running everywhere fresh water— brooks, rundles, springs and creeks. In the twilight, through the thickets and tall grass, creeping upon all fours—the savages, their bows in their mouths.

To push and push with raw pink claws like hands of shin. To tunnel my love through wet earth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath like me. I give you permission to grip me. To patrol the worm-drench of my thinking. To bite a worm’s head and cure the rest as cache. Your flesh, my flesh, your dead as dead, buried like a feeling. To push through that wet, a scrum of worms whittling my skin like a premonition. To have pushed mountains into hills, ragged sooth from the slid wall of healing. “Nothing,” said the suicide, “is as sad as recovery.” To work myself forward like a noun or an entry.

London returns in damp, fragmented flurries when I should be doing something else. A scrap of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries and pub food, long, wet walks without a map, bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu, my halfhearted studies, and brooding thoughts and scanning faces in every bar for you. Those months come down to moments or small plots, like the bum on the Tube, enraged that no one spoke, who raved and spat, the whole car thick with dread, only to ask, won’t someone tell a joke? and this mouse of a woman offered,What’s big and red and sits in the corner? A naughty bus.

Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse between one rough dream and another, I seemed, still awake, to be stranded on a stony path, and there the familiar enigma presented itself in the shape of a little trembling lamb. It was lying like a pearl in the trough between one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying. I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother. Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs? Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where? What would I do if it were dying? The hand of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear. It wasn't so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd in that faded, framed Sunday School picture filtering now through the dream's daguerreotype. With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full, small, white doubles of the creature at my feet flared like candles in the creases of the night until it looked to be alive with newborn lambs. Where could they all have come from? A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds— kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face, fixing on me their dark accusing eyes. There was a kind of imperative not to touch them, yet to be of them, whatever they were— now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light— fireflies signaling how many lost New England summers? One form, now another; one configuration, now another. Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain, outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.