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When first, descending from the moorlands, I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide Along a bare and open valley, The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide. When last along its banks I wandered, Through groves that had begun to shed Their golden leaves upon the pathways, My steps the Border-minstrel led. The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer, 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies; And death upon the braes of Yarrow, Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes: Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign, its stedfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt One, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth. Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land! Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber Were earlier raised, remain to hear A timid voice, that asks in whispers, "Who next will drop and disappear?" Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth-looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath. As if but yesterday departed, Thou too art gone before; but why, O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered, Should frail survivors heave a sigh? Mourn rather for that holy Spirit, Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; For Her who, ere her summer faded, Has sunk into a breathless sleep. No more of old romantic sorrows, For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid! With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten, And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead.

Getting drunk, a friend called women He had slept with, men he hated, And then 911, repeating "Emergency" like a schoolboy. "Try 999," I suggested, Giving him the hot-line number That Malaysians, once, imagined Was the extension of the dead, Their calls, instead, directed to The homes for police and firemen And medical help, dispatchers Picking up for thousands who thought, Immediately, they had linked With the calm voices of the dead. Cautions? Disclaimers? Those callers, Regardless, asked about heaven's Lifestyle, what it meant to be dead. They chanted incantations to Ward off whatever might travel Through phone lines from the afterlife. "What's the story with you," my friend Kept on repeating, receiving Sympathy, curses, threats, a fine. And the Malaysians? They, at last, Asked for help with the lottery— Because surely the selfless dead Knew the winning numbers, the sort Of thing you heard in paradise.

I don’t know how fast I was going but, even so, that’s still an intriguing question, officer, and deserves a thoughtful response. With the radio unfurling Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, you might consider anything under 80 sacrilege. Particularly on a parkway as lovely as the one you’re fortunate enough to patrol—and patrol so diligently. A loveliness that, if observed at an appropriate rate of speed, affords the kind of pleasure which is in itself a reminder of how civilization depends on an assurance of order and measure, and the devotion of someone like yourself to help maintain it. Yes, man the measurer! The incorrigible measurer. And admirably precise measurements they are—Not, of course, as an end in themselves but, lest we forget, as a means to propel us into the immeasurable, where it would be anybody’s guess how fast the west wind was blowing when it strummed a rainbow and gave birth to Eros. Never forget that a parkway is a work of art, and the faster one goes the greater the tribute to its power of inspiration, a lyrical propulsion that approaches the spiritual and tempts—demands the more intrepid of us to take it from there. That sense of the illimitable, when we feel we are more the glory than the jest or riddle of the world —that’s what kicked in, albeit briefly, as I approached the Croton Reservoir Bridge. And on a night like this, starlight reignited above a snowfall’s last flurry,  cockeyed headlights scanning the girders overhead, eggshell snowcrust flying off the hood, hatching me on the wing like a song breaking through prose, the kind I usually sing through my nose: So much to love, A bit less to scorn. What have I done? To what end was I born?

O put a hand on her hand On Exterior Street The day was full of day On Exterior Street Moths drank tears from sleeping birds On Exterior Street You could think and look On Exterior Street The balls of the sycamore were swinging On Exterior Street Storing the definitions loading the differences Why did I still want to give it away Why not wait and write about that beautiful green sweater I was a virgin and learnt all about cells from Penelope Even the private road is exterior As one said all breasts are beautiful The Flower this flower is falling over It will never be more exalting It will always be more exalting On Exterior Street

If  you give money to an animal He or she gets cloying and aggressive But when arrested for that behavior Says, “I didn’t know anything, my reps Did it. Well they did. These humans Committed their tiny crimes in the mail,” it says, “Knowing animals are photogenic. You can hold One in your lap or hold a sheaf of  photos In which a feline looks like you yourself  tearing off a leg Of a springbok antelope, which prey looks like you Concentrating on the flee instinct,” it says. I tend to agree with it. It and All of them have expressions on their faces, four limbs, Two eyes, noses, ears, etcetera, how close can you get to you Or me, and then there’s the same insides. If  it is a cheetah Do not put it in your lap. If  it’s A black rhino it weighs 2,250 lbs. And has two! sharp horns about 24 in. ea.! Let’s suppose nothing about that one and not say It has a facial expression. My own opinion Is it will have one in a matter of time. There are ten other scenes in which I look like the animals In them so don’t argue I’m writing yet another check this week And as a matter of fact I’d like to smack something, Bite it, and cook it. You do that, tonight For instance. If one of us eats the other It’s a very big crime Not tiny like the revolutionary revelation in a solicitation That we are like the animals, no,are them, Which is bigger in evolution and spirituality, Sure, and in the final accounting Much more important, but today Don’t put a cheetah in your lap and don’t eat other humans.

That it was shy when alive goes without saying. We know it vanished at the sound of voices Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises, Though it could be approached by someone praying. We have no recordings of it, though of course In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers. But its song is lost. If it was related to A species of Quiet, or of another feather, No researcher can know. Not even whether A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou, Where legend has it some once common bird Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.

Sometimes  ,  when i'm very tired  ,    i think of extremophiles    ,   chemolithoautotrophs & others with     power for changing not-life into lives  ,    of those that eat rock & fire in volcanoes   ,     before the death of the world but after   the death of a human ,    of their taste for ammonia or iron  ,     sulfur & carbon ,   somehow enough of it to go on ...     As workers taste revolt       ,   they grow at the vents of oceans   ,     turning mute vapor into respiration            ,   changing unhinged matter to hinges        ,  near the rims of sea trenches or the caves     ...     Our friend wrote of writers living              in gray hiding, ,     of those who love glass & early freedom   ,    steep sand & late freedom       ,     sex among gentle or bitter grasses     ,   those with a taste for blue or belligerence   ,obscure lives, she called them               ,   the writers of radical mind     … The living prefer life    ,  mostly they do ,   they are ravenous ,    making shapes in groups as the dying grow     one thought until the end ,   wanting more specifics   ,desert or delay until the i        drops away into i am not here,   the mineral other pumps & vast vapors  ,    ridges & shadows beyond the single life it had not thought of—

Tw o young men—you just might call them bo ys— waiting for the Woodward streetcar to get

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth. The hydrangea Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo. Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable. Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon In the green rooms of the Abandonarium. Beautiful cage, asylum in. Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not Have been there. So few wild raspberries, they were countable, Triaged out by hand. Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves Will (perhaps tomorrow) die. High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles, Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home. Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such. Wisteria, extreme. There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

Exuberance sips bootleg gin from a garter flask with a ruby monogram “E.” She wears a red dress one size too small, eyes wide, she flirts with everyone, dares Lincoln Beachey to fly until he runs out of gas, rides a dead engine all the way down. She watches Ormer Locklear climb out of the cockpit two hundred feet up, tap dance on his upper wing as the houses of  honest families with their square-fenced yards slide below his shuffle. An oval pond winks in the sun, like a zero. Exuberance challenges pilots to master the Falling Leaf, perfect the Tailspin, ignore the Graveyard Spiral, the Doom Loop. These aviators predict every American will fly. Exuberance believes Everybody Ought to Be Rich