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Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to Obtain the license, get the picture. Spook finders must find spooks to put the face, Name and space coordinates together. What is kept in the mind perimeter Retains a wild autonomy through fate. I will retreat to the precorporate. Let fate have what is fate’s and allow This spirit to slip through time’s difficult Nets with the devious fingers of A wild wind, while I run along behind.

1 It was nearly daylight when she gave birth to the child, lying on a quilt he had doubled up for her. He put the child on his left arm and took it out of the room, and she could hear the splashing water. When he came back she asked him where the child was. He replied: “Out there—in the water.” He punched up the fire and returned with an armload of wood and the child, and put the dead child into the fire. She said: “O John, don't!” He did not reply but turned to her and smiled. 2 Late at night, their sow rooted open the door of their cabin, and husband and wife quarreled over driving her out. His wife knocked him down with an iron shovel. He started for his breeches and said, “If I had my knife, I'd cut your throat,” and she ran out the door. He shut the door after her and propped it closed with a stick of wood. When she was found, she was lying on her face, frozen to death. The weather extremely cold and where she lay the snow was about eighteen inches deep. When she left the cabin, she was barefoot and had very little clothing. The way she took led through briers and there were drops of blood on the snow— where the briers had torn her legs from the knees down— and bits of clothing that had been torn off; at one place she had struck her ankle against the end of a log and it bled freely. 3 Mrs. Farborough went into her brother's house, leaving her husband a short distance from it— he was the best man of the neighborhood for strength— and, without speaking to anyone, seized a tin cup. Her sister-in-law said it seemed as if she took a good deal of authority there. Mrs. Farborough replied she took enough to get her things, and would also take her teakettle. Mrs. Eller told her to take them and get out of the house and stay out. Mrs. Farborough did go out but soon returned with a stone— as large as her fist— which she held under her apron, and sat down, remarking that she intended to stay a while just for aggravation. Farborough then approached the house with a stone in each hand and, when near it, sat on a log. After a moment or two, he sprang into the house, the stones still in his hands. At this, his wife threw the stone she held under her apron at her sister-in-law: missed and struck the side of the house near her head. The women clinched and fell to the floor, Mrs. Farborough on top, hitting Mrs. Eller in the face with her fist. Eller went up to Farborough and said: “Brother Martin, take your wife out of here, and I will take care of mine. Let us have no fuss!” And he started forward to part the women, still fighting. Farnborough pushed him back: “God damn you, stand back, or I will kill the last Goddamn one of you!” and lifted his right hand, holding the stone. He turned to look at the women, and Eller shot him in the back with a pistol, just where his suspenders crossed. 4 He and his wife were members of a society known as Knights and Ladies of Honor. The life of each member was insured for two thousand dollars— to go to widow or widower. He had to borrow money to pay his dues and had just been defeated for town marshal; and now his wife was sick. The Knight of Honor was seen in a saloon with a Negro who used to work for him; then the two were seen going into an alley. Here he gave the Negro a quarter and asked him to go to the drugstore and buy a small bottle of strychnine. If the druggist asked the Negro why he wanted it, he was to say to kill wolves on a farm. The Negro asked him what he really wanted it for and he said to poison the dogs belonging to a neighbor where a girl was working whom he wanted to visit at night. The Negro bought him the bottle, and he told the Negro that if questioned about it he must say that he put it in the pocket of his overcoat and left the coat hanging in a saloon, and that the bottle was taken from his pocket by someone. When his wife asked for the quinine she used as a medicine, he went to the mantelpiece where he had placed a package of quinine bought the day before and poured some of the strychnine into a spoonful of cold coffee. She thought the powder had a peculiar look, and tried to dissolve it by stirring it with her finger. He assured her it was quinine bought where he had always bought it; and she drank it.

Maybe you’ve heard about this. Maybe not. A man came home and chucked his girlfriend’s cat In the wood chipper. This really happened. Dinner wasn’t ready on time. A lot Of other little things went wrong. He spat On her father, who came out when he learned About it. He also broke her pinky, Stole her checks, and got her sister pregnant. But she stood by him, stood strong, through it all, Because she loved him. She loved him, you see. She actually said that, and then she went And married him. She felt some unique call. Don’t try to understand what another Person means by love. Don’t even bother.

1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. And there was a couple who quarreled into the night, Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely right in the lives of those who love each other. 2. In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too. We stood there wondering how the salt horizons and the Dublin hills, the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes we thought we knew had been made to shiver into our ancient twelve by fifteen television which gave them back as gray and grayer tears and killings, killings, killings, then moonlight-colored funerals: nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other. 3. And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done? 4. We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one. Children were born and raised here and are gone, including ours. As for that couple did we ever find out who they were and did we want to? I think we know. I think we always knew.

How many times I have provided For your death; the apple turned one way Then the other, an arrangement made, The softer ground. To hold your head As if this mattered, to say what I think Essential into your ear, To watch the eye look everywhere to find What it does not know it looks for. To fasten you down in the one place Where no one can say anything more, Being nothing else but breath leaving, While the man with the needle stands by Until the signal of how it is time. To believe I know what will happen next; to leave the hill As the body stiffens; to pass each blossom Of blood in the snow as if I understood All I was capable of.

Don't ask me who I'm speaking for who I'm talking to why I'm doing what I do in the light of my existence You rise you spit you brush you drink you pee you shit you walk you run you work you eat you belch you sleep you dream & that's the way it is In the morning tap water tasted fishy coffee sits in its decaffeinated cup caca & incense have a floating romance & a stale washcloth will make you smell doubly stale so don't get kissed on the cheek don't get licked on the neck at 8 a.m. the trains & buses are packed with folks farting their bread & butter farts the gymnasium is dominated by the stench of hot tennis shoes & one in the locker room a few silly-talking intellectual-looking coke-drinking cloth-dropping paper-littering spinach-pooting smug arrogant women wait to be waited on & in another locker room there are odors of crotches & jock straps bengay, tiger balm & burning balls sweat socks & sweat suits of body-building door-slamming iron-pumping phlegm-hawking men all sour & steamy & wrapped up together in a swamp of butt-popping towels but don't let it get you down don't let it psych you up Outside the ledges are loaded with pigeons clouds are seeded with homeless people & lyricism of the afternoon in a sub-proletarian madman squatting & vomiting from his bowels a brown liquid of death in front of your house & it's not happening because of you those socks don't stink because of me a bureaucrat is not a jerk because of us I'm not this way because of them you're not that way because of me don't ask about influences You rise you spit you brush you drink you pee you shit you walk you run you work you eat you belch you sleep you dream & that's the way it is

You look sleazy tonight ma said. Cheap, I said. I’m doin cheap. You got any idea how much it costs to do cheap these days? To do gold City of Paris three-inch platform sandals and this I. Magnin snake dress? I’m doin cheap. You look like a bird, she said a Halloween bird with red waxed lips. —In high school you could either do cheap or Shakespeare, college prep or a pointy bra, ratting a bubble haircut with a toilet brush. I was not allowed to do high school cheap; I did blazers and wool skirts from the Junior League thrift shop. In high school it was don’t walk in the middle of Richie, Leelee, and the baby, you might come between them. You look like a skag wearin that black-eyed makeup, people are gunna think you’re cheap. While I poured red food dye on my hair to match my filly’s tail for the rodeo, ma beat her head against the wall, she said tryin to make me nice. I tried real hard, but the loggers, the Navy guys, they always hit on me. Cause you’re an easy mark, ma said. And I played guilty, I played guilty every time. But now, I said now I’m doin cheap.

Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presiden tial election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas. / You don't remember because you don't care. Sometimes my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen:You don't know because you don't care. / Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own:You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you? / I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer. The war is on and the Department of Homeland Security has decided we have an elevated national-threat level, a code-orange alert. I could say something, but my packages are getting heavier by the minute and besides, what is there to say since rhetorically it's not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Saddam is “that man who tried to kill my father” and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British, but not the French, and Germany won't and Turkey won't join us but the coalition is inside Baghdad where the future is the threat the Americans feel they can escape though there is no escaping the Americans because war, this war, is about peace: “The war in Iraq is really about peace. Trying to make the world more peaceful. This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful.”

Christmas 1982 If anybody made a movie out of my life I wouldn't like it, but I'd watch it twice If they halfway tried to do it right There'd be forty screen writers workin' day and nite. They'd need a research team from Uncle Sam And go from David Allen Coe to Billy Graham It would run ten days in the final cut And that would mean leaving out the gossip smut. And I do request for my children's sake Don't ever let 'em do a new re-make The thing I'm sayin' is, don't you see, Don't make a movie 'bout me Even for T.V. Don't make a movie 'bout me. Don't let 'em drag old Hickory Lake For my telephones and bottles and roller skates Down forty feet in the Cumberland mud There's a rusty old gun that once shed blood Out a hundred yards from my lakeside house Weighted down with a rock is a skirt and blouse A dozen pair of boots that made a dozen corns Trombones, trumpets, harmonicas and horns And the tapes that I threw from the lakeside door Silverstein, and Kristofferson from years before Everything has a story that should be let be So don’t make a movie ‘bout me. If they're hot on a book called Man in Black Tell 'em I've got the rights and won't give back If you don't know my tune you can't get it right I don't talk about me in . . . Man in White. Truth, said the Master, cannot be hid But he didn't say slap it in the face of my kids. A stone is a stone and forever a stone But I'm part good and bad and then I'm gone. There is no sin cleaner than the dirtiest So there's a lot about me that I don't want missed If it's days or years or whatever will be Don't make a movie 'bout me. Aw, I might as well face it cause they will some day So while I can I've got a thing to say I don't know anybody that I said I don't know And there ain't anybody anywhere I owe The I.R.S. gets the lion's share And what is left goes to my own named heirs. Don't let 'em make it in Hollywood If they must, tell 'em Arkansas is where they should. Here’s a hex on whoever makes it be, So don’t make a movie 'bout me. For Love or Monee Don't make a movie 'bout me.