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So, so breake off this last lamenting kisse, Which sucks two soules, and vapours Both away, Turne thou ghost that way, and let mee turne this, And let our selves benight our happiest day, We ask’d none leave to love; nor will we owe Any, so cheape a death, as saying, Goe; Goe; and if that word have not quite kil’d thee, Ease mee with death, by bidding mee goe too. Oh, if it have, let my word worke on mee, And a just office on a murderer doe. Except it be too late, to kill me so, Being double dead, going, and bidding, goe.

Look heah! ’Splain to me de reason Why you said to Squire Lee, Der wuz twelve ole chicken thieves In dis heah town, includin’ me. Ef he tole you dat, my brudder, He said sump’n dat warn’t true; W’at I said wuz dis, dat der wuz Twelve,widout includin’ you. Oh! . . . !—

Imagine a child from Virginia or New Hampshire Alone on the prairie eighty years ago Or more, one afternoon—the shaggy pelt Of grasses, for the first time in that child’s life, Flowing for miles. Imagine the moving shadow Of a cloud far off across that shadeless ocean, The obliterating strangeness like a tide That pulls or empties the bubble of the child’s Imaginary heart. No hills, no trees. The child’s heart lightens, tending like a bubble Towards the currents of the grass and sky, The pure potential of the clear blank spaces. Or, imagine the child in a draw that holds a garden Cupped from the limitless motion of the prairie, Head resting against a pumpkin, in evening sun. Ground-cherry bushes grow along the furrows, The fruit red under its papery, moth-shaped sheath. Grasshoppers tumble among the vines, as large As dragons in the crumbs of pale dry earth. The ground is warm to the child’s cheek, and the wind Is a humming sound in the grass above the draw, Rippling the shadows of the red-green blades. The bubble of the child’s heart melts a little, Because the quiet of that air and earth Is like the shadow of a peaceful death— Limitless and potential; a kind of space Where one dissolves to become a part of something Entire ... whether of sun and air, or goodness And knowledge, it does not matter to the child. Dissolved among the particles of the garden Or into the motion of the grass and air, Imagine the child happy to be a thing. Imagine, then, that on that same wide prairie Some people are threshing in the terrible heat With horses and machines, cutting bands And shoveling amid the clatter of the threshers, The chaff in prickly clouds and the naked sun Burning as if it could set the chaff on fire. Imagine that the people are Swedes or Germans, Some of them resting pressed against the strawstacks, Trying to get the meager shade. A man, A tramp, comes laboring across the stubble Like a mirage against that blank horizon, Laboring in his torn shoes toward the tall Mirage-like images of the tilted threshers Clattering in the heat. Because the Swedes Or Germans have no beer, or else because They cannot speak his language properly, Or for some reason one cannot imagine, The man climbs up on a thresher and cuts bands A minute or two, then waves to one of the people, A young girl or a child, and jumps head-first Into the sucking mouth of the machine, Where he is wedged and beat and cut to pieces— While the people shout and run in the clouds of chaff, Like lost mirages on the pelt of prairie. The obliterating strangeness and the spaces Are as hard to imagine as the love of death ... Which is the love of an entire strangeness, The contagious blankness of a quiet plain. Imagine that a man, who had seen a prairie, Should write a poem about a Dark or Shadow That seemed to be both his, and the prairie’s—as if The shadow proved that he was not a man, But something that lived in quiet, like the grass. Imagine that the man who writes that poem, Stunned by the loneliness of that wide pelt, Should prove to himself that he was like a shadow Or like an animal living in the dark. In the dark proof he finds in his poem, the man Might come to think of himself as the very prairie, The sod itself, not lonely, and immune to death. None of this happens precisely as I try To imagine that it does, in the empty plains, And yet it happens in the imagination Of part of the country: not in any place More than another, on the map, but rather Like a place, where you and I have never been And need to try to imagine—place like a prairie Where immigrants, in the obliterating strangeness, Thirst for the wide contagion of the shadow Or prairie—where you and I, with our other ways, More like the cities or the hills or trees, Less like the clear blank spaces with their potential, Are like strangers in a place we must imagine.

To Adam Z You asked me last summer: “What is a doily?” Sometimes, at lunch, I walk on the beach. Today I was coatless. A storm cloud threatened, Dark as a spaceship. Should it pour, A sister ship down in the water Would throw up grappling nets to the surface, Rain rise to soak me. Behind a sandbank, Waves touched the shore, no more than a shimmer. Less rare than its cousin, the antimacassar, A doily’s placed between sweet thing and china. Both survive where vicars arrive For tea, are given thin cup and saucer Instead of a mug. If your cake’s so rich That it’s leaking syrup, you’ll need a doily. Held up, its paper’s the filigree Of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear. The shower holds off. My shoe’s a doily. Without it, where would I be on these shells That crunch underfoot, like contact lenses, As I gingerly walk, on my mermaid way Back to my husband in his human dwelling? Someone is pulling a blue toy trawler Along the horizon to port, so smoothly It looks realistic. Sea’s partly doily. Surfers ride its lace to their downfall, After all, we’re nothing but froth. Like a carpet salesman, the indolent tide Flops a wave over, showing samples: “Madam, This one is durable, has a fringe.” Under Its breath the sea sighs, “Has it come To this? Must everything always end in ... doily?” It must. Broad afternoon. The rain-cloud barges Have passed and here’s a cumulonimbus parade Of imperial busts, the Roman rulers In historical order which, I think, would please you. Their vapor curls and noble foreheads Are lit up in lilac because they’re invading The west. Next come the philosophers and, last of all, The poets. Pulleys draw them delicately on. Here comes Lucretius, then Ovid, then Horace In lines, saying relentlessly, “Doily,” “Doily,” Till stars take over and do the same.

Salt is pity, brooms are fury, The waterclock stands for primordial harmony. The spruce forest, which is said to be Like a cathedral Indicates proliferation of desire. The real meaning of the beginning Will not become clear until later, if ever. Things no longer being what they were, Artifice poses as process, The voice is tinged with melancholy. The teacup, the brass knuckles, and the pearl-handled razor Resist interpretation As if to say That half the wind is in the mind And half in the mind of the wind. Speaking through the character Who comes to faith on his deathbed, The author makes apology For saying things he didn’t mean. Little girl-cousins with ribbons in their hair Confuse him with their names and are carried away By laughter. Thus, The force of love comes from belief, Hate is from lack of doubt.

I lied when Pops asked, but I’ll admit it now. I did touch the blue egg to see if, somehow, it felt as much like the sky as it looked. The egg: speckled in its twiggy nest, eye level to 8-year-olds, perfect & off-limits like the Baoding balls on Pops’ desk. We tried to find its mom, but the finches scattered when we came near. One twittered the alarm from a maple. Others balanced on wires, flapped wings at us like we were gravity. I can still see how carefully Garrett scooped the egg from the nest, then headed out to find a spot on the March concrete to drop it.I want to see if these things break into pieces or in half like on TV

Things in the dark exist but are not realized. Perhaps with wings they wait for enacting light. I start out as the sky descends to the visible spectrum and begins. Midmorning I find in a lab a blue magnetic fluid: revolving in the stress of gauss, the source of blue resides. November nights, up to the first snow, derive from this seat of blue. I spend a month reflecting at Palomar. My delicate fourteen tons I bring to bear on galaxies: their lonely shine harbors on my dustless, understanding curve. I come to a mountain out of season. The brass benchmark telling the height is under ice. Without witness, without cease a blizzard pummels the summit's face. I reach the pole. Here at the axis the wobble and grind is audible. My compass tries to point straight down. It, too, deceived: Having achieved one absolute, the source of north, to find that south surrounds, is all but it. The Humboldt Current has my boat and its mile of line straight down. Now and then, fishermen haul in the inexplicable along with seabream, haddock, squid. I hook a coelacanth, thought long extinct, and brain it with an oar. Nose to the bottom I shove off from the hundred fathom curve. Slow footage of mud unreeling through my mind, the miles of decline become my age. Hauled up someday by accident, rupturing in the lost pressure, my look will say how knowing feels. Living among the trilobites I learn you cross great lengths of time by stilling the waiting in yourself. From scavengers I see how you can live off your own dead kind. I gum the grit of a tidal flat and have no name. A chance letter brings me home, telling how I was found. Returned I sit like water in a jar, light from a window passing through, a slow rain of precipitate remembering the bottom.

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . . Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . . Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, But nothing happens. Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles. Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles, Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war. What are we doing here? The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . . We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy. Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey, But nothing happens. Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow, With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew, We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance, But nothing happens. Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces— We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed, Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed, Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses. —Is it that we are dying? Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there; For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs; Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,— We turn back to our dying. Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn; Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit. For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid; Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born, For love of God seems dying. Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us, Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp. The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, But nothing happens.

Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet. Malayan yellow. Express train Berlin-Trelleborg and the Baltic resorts. Flesh that went naked. Tanned unto the mouth by the sea. Deeply ripened for Grecian joys. How far along the summer, in sickle-submissiveness! Penultimate day of the ninth month! Parched with stubble and the last corn-shocks. Unfurlings, blood, fatigue, deranged by dahlia-nearness. Man-brown jumps on woman-brown. A woman is something for a night. And if you enjoyed it, then the next one too! O! And then the return to one’s own care. The not-speaking! The urges! A woman is something with a smell. Ineffable! To die for! Mignonette. Shepherd, sea, and South. On every declivity a bliss. Woman-brown drapes itself on man-brown: Hold me! I’m falling! My neck is so weary. Oh, the sweet last fevered scent from the gardens.

A hackneyed burden, to a hackneyed air,— “I love thee only,—thou art wondrous fair!” Alas! the poets have worn the theme threadbare! Can I not find some words less tame and old, To paint thy form and face of perfect mould, Thy dewy lips, thy hair of brown and gold? Can I not sing in somewhat fresher strain The love I lavish and receive again,— The thrilling joy, so like to thrilling pain? Can I not, by some metaphor divine, Describe the life I quaff like nectared wine In being thine, and knowing thou art mine? Ah, no! this halting verse can naught express; No English words can half the truth confess, That have not all been rhymed to weariness! So let me cease my scribbling for to-day, And maiden, turn thy lovely face this way,— Words will not do, but haply kisses may!