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One day in that room, a small rat. Two days later, a snake. Who, seeing me enter, whipped the long stripe of his body under the bed, then curled like a docile house-pet. I don’t know how either came or left. Later, the flashlight found nothing. For a year I watched as something—terror? happiness? grief?— entered and then left my body. Not knowing how it came in, Not knowing how it went out. It hung where words could not reach it. It slept where light could not go. Its scent was neither snake nor rat, neither sensualist nor ascetic. There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing. Through them the belled herds travel at will, long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

I've come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to a place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish's grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet's song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh's lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, "I am a man," & now I know why I'd rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

I’ve come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet’s song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,” & now I know why I’d rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

This rose-tree is not made to bear The violet blue, nor lily fair, Nor the sweet mignionet: And if this tree were discontent, Or wished to change its natural bent, It all in vain would fret. And should it fret, you would suppose It ne’er had seen its own red rose, Nor after gentle shower Had ever smelled its rose’s scent, Or it could ne’er be discontent With its own pretty flower. Like such a blind and senseless tree As I’ve imagined this to be, All envious persons are: With care and culture all may find Some pretty flower in their own mind, Some talent that is rare.

composed at clevedon, somersetshire My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o’ergrown With white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leaved Myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such would Wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatched from yon bean-field! and the world so hushed! The stilly murmur of the distant Sea Tells us of silence. And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caressed, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land, Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing! O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere— Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst through my half-closed eyelids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquility: Full many a thought uncalled and undetained, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain, As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject Lute! And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved Woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. Meek Daughter in the family of Christ! Well hast thou said and holily dispraised These shapings of the unregenerate mind; Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring. For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; Who with his saving mercies healèd me, A sinful and most miserable man, Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid!

The snake, alphabet of one glide, swims with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then we lose it in the pond grass, lashed among the bottom-feeders. Pocketing goggles, my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted), a month of sun days. In Fairbanks, all-night baseball and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style. Someone’s driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift that here will linger long enough for us to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung, to get the hang of happiness and get going. Get the picture? I do, but just for the moment, which is why I want it monumental, equestrian, astride, however I can get it. What’s passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards from the lower forty-eight. The frog I trod sprang back intact, all its receptors set on July.

On a slab of Jurassic shale, an ovate body, legs fine as eyelashes, the mayfly's precise signature, consummate, immortal. Now its descendents, in a tumult of mating, roil the air on Koerner's sluggish creek below the hill where the Ebenezer Baptist church, its doors agape, declines daily into dust and rubble. Beyond the church, the graveyard encroached by nightshade and nettle, its stones listing or broken or gone, a few bearing words now scarcely visible: Eliza, Beloved Wife . . . In Perpetual . . . . A million years from now the stricken stones will be scoured clean and ephemerids will rise each spring to dance above the clouded waters.

It’s you I’d like to see Greece again with You I’d like to take to bed of cyclamen You know I nurse a certain myth about myself              that I descend de tribus d’origine asiatique and am part Thracian or Macedonian cleaving to a Hellenic mystique after centuries’ migration inland a full moon rising over the Acropolis I can repeat the scene        this time à deux as then I had no one to kiss slicing halloumi amid the hullabaloo of a rooftop taverna in   July The doors that opened to lovers pulled like tree roots from darkness        I close upon us now like book covers The alcove in which we embrace is cool with brilliant tile and weirded by a dove’s note       chase of ouzo with Uzi          junta-style History makes its noise      we duck till it passes      Love we think is our due Not we think like the epoch the unchosen thing we’re wedded to

For Rachel Right shoulder aching with day-long butchery, Left shoulder numb with dints clanged on the shield, The hero is fouled with blood, his own and others’, First slick, then sticky, then caked, starting to mat His beard—the armor deadweight all around him; His teeth grit and rattle with every jolt Of bronze-rimmed wheels behind the shit-flecked horses. But when he glimpses the mountains, the distant snow, A blankness swoons upon him, and he hears Nothing but the white vowels of the wind Brushing through stands of spears like conifers While a banner slips its staff and hangs in the blue Like a kestrel or a contrail. The hero’s death, The prize, elusive quarry of his life, Stands stock-still in her cloven tracks in snow And turns, one ear tuned to the creek’s far bank, One dished towards him. Her unstartled gaze Beads on him like a sniper’s sights, until At the clean report of a cracking poplar branch, She leaps away like luck, over rapid water, And snowfall scrims the scene like a mist of tears, Like a migraine, like sweat or blood streaming into your eyes.

My father was A blossom, And I was his fragile Epiphyte on his Days off. The purple Dogs of years Gone by Watch him smile At the horizon. His feretory Catches the Rain from the Smoldering sky. These fields are Fallow and dried Gullies where gin Sparkled In the morning. My father’s remains Are smooth like the Starlight that Makes my life Slightly yellow.