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Let it no longer be a forlorn hope To wash an Ethiope; He’s wash’d, his gloomy skin a peaceful shade, For his white soul is made; And now, I doubt not, the Eternal Dove A black-fac’d house will love.

See here an easy feast that knows no wound, That under hunger’s teeth will needs be sound; A subtle harvest of unbounded bread, What would ye more? Here food itself is fed.

Could not once blinding me, cruel, suffice? When first I look’d on thee, I lost mine eyes.

Thou water turn’st to wine, fair friend of life, Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of thy reign, Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife, And so turns wine to water back again.

Cruelty has a Human Heart And Jealousy a Human Face Terror the Human Form Divine And Secrecy, the Human Dress The Human Dress, is forged Iron The Human Form, a fiery Forge. The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress. Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew; Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.

Sprawling like some small group of picnickers, They're propped among the shadows of the trees, Though one seems drunk, spread-eagled. Nothing stirs Except the flies that clog their cavities. A red cleft rules the parting of that head. You stretch a little and slide out of bed. Acres of debris are in sodden flood About the ruined village, which concedes In blackened matchwood to the tide of mud Its smoking households. Rising from the weeds, Arms reach up stiffly, as for an embrace. Out of the mirror you observe your face While sunlight offers all that you desire. The Aztecs, to appease your counterparts, Would hook still-living bodies from the fire, Hack out and hold aloft the pulsing hearts, Drenching the steps with blood, so they might give Those idle brutes each day a day to live. You have today. Stark-eyed and hollow-faced, Her rigid ribcage almost bursting through The skin, a girl sits in a land laid waste And stares out blankly. So then, it is you— The thought had not occurred to you before— It's you, Huitzilopochtli, God of War.

Sometimes you watch them going out to sea On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers, Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them, In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing, Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet Enormous flippers. The bow, with such a load on board, Hammers through the whitecaps, while they talk; Junonian girls, Praxitelean boys, pelted on By bursting clouds, by spray, eventually heave The tanks upon their backs, the boat drifts at anchor, And down they go to the sea floor, by the foggy headland. At least, you can presume they kick the flippers And plunge to where the water is more calm. The cool Instructors must keep eyes and ears Open. Accidents out there, they happen. You might imagine scraps Of cultural débris, a broken pot, a ring, a cogwheel Come up, clutched in a palm, and interesting, A wave pattern in it, the blade of a sword, When a lucky diver breaks again the surface. Time, Time and again frigate and schooner cracked Blown against the rocks, holed below the water line. Even an inscription Might now be coming up from those green deeps. Yet the divers do their silent thing. On the sea floor Expect only the sea, a multitude of sand without an hourglass. Round somebody’s ankle idly it swarms. A diver Hangs by a thread of breath in solitude there. Some go down In all simplicity curious; to have tales to tell; And who knows, what they learn Just might, long after this, be usable.

Zigging, mid- block, he’s off: on a torn-up, trafficked slab of Second Avenue— his cane sweeping over broken asphalt, like a sapper or an open skiff on back-splashing seas. For a few seconds it’s unclear if he gets the risk, as yellow cabs swoop down and flock at the light. Then, safe home on the other side. And I for one cannot take my eyes off him as he pivots, compassing north. We’re never truly clear. Now he jams himself at pace between a giant planter and cross-braced scaffold newly set up at Finnegans. And wham. The guy is smack on his ass, un-staring up to heaven, stunned. Damn, I think, what in hell was that? It’s not like the pain of loving someone who doesn’t want you back (though that once ate up years of my life and left me blown like an artery after too many bypasses), nor does it compare to frittering away in a job that I’m ill-suited to and which I’ll probably lose. It’s more as if a hammer dropped from a sill and laid him out cold. That scaffold just appeared there overnight. And for all my hard-won bile I’m not worse off than he is, except in this: I’ve come to think I am.

Haunted, they say, believing the soft, shifty dunes are made up of false promises. Many believe whatever happens is the other half of a conversation. Many whisper white lies to the dead. "The boys are doing really well." Some think nothing is so until it has been witnessed. They believe the bits are iffy; the forces that bind them, absolute.