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We liked to stick it in a bb gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah, the poor man’s tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other’s underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there and nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we knew we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we’d go under, and there would be nothing of return.

An hour inland from Bangor, Maine, over rolling hills, in an oval pasture surrounded by giant conifers, the forest floor bejeweled with ruby-studded mushrooms, I watch the sheep sing, if bleating could be called a song. Maybe someone in a grove long ago saw a man attached to a beast of burden and so the concept of the satyr was born. Memory is the past reversed. I once went out with a sailor, a Spaniard, from Andalucía. We met at sea where I worked the roulette wheel in the ship’s casino. His legs were slightly bowed, his voice gruff and torn, and when he came the sound seemed to climb up not from his throat but from his feet smelling of earth and sea and grief— a deep song Lorca called duende. It wasn’t pretty. His blue and red and purple briefs soaking in a bucket by the cabin door. He told me once when he was a boy his grandmother had caught him trying to fuck a chicken.The poor chicken, he laughed, his saddle-worn Andalucían laugh, feathers flying everywhere, his grandmother screaming. And what to call those half-human, half-chicken kinds of days: scratching and clawing at the earth, bathed in dust, trying not to think about the simmering anise, peppercorn, and broth. When I visited him, he met me at the airport. Then the long train ride south through field after field of sunflowers.Por la tarde families paraded,por la noche, only men and boys and extranjeras—foreign women— out past sunset. In an empty disco six or seven guys danced, throwing themselves around madly, slamming into each other to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Franco had died a few years back. From my window that night, a full moon, shadows of the town square, the boarded-up cathedral, a cat in heat, the smell of blood oranges. In the morning his grandmother, all in black, asleep stooped in a chair outside my door. Nearby the ruins of an ancient Roman temple, goats on hind legs eating the pale green leaves from olive trees.

1. The earth is dry and they live wanting. Each with a small reservoir Of furious music heavy in the throat. They drag it out and with nails in their feet Coax the night into being. Brief believing. A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies. And in this night that is not night, Each word is a wish, each phrase A shape their bodies ache to fill— I’m going to braid my hair Braid many colors into my hair I’ll put a long braid in my hair And write your name there They defy gravity to feel tugged back. The clatter, the mad slap of landing. 2. And not just them. Not just The ramshackle family, the tíos, Primitos, not just the bailaor Whose heels have notched And hammered time So the hours flow in place Like a tin river, marking Only what once was. Not just the voices of scraping Against the river, nor the hands Nudging them farther, fingers Like blind birds, palms empty, Echoing. Not just the women With sober faces and flowers In their hair, the ones who dance As though they’re burying Memory—one last time— Beneath them. And I hate to do it here. To set myself heavily beside them. Not now that they’ve proven The body a myth, a parable For what not even language Moves quickly enough to name. If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments. If I lean into the desire it starts from— If I lean unbuttoned into the blow Of loss after loss, love tossed Into the ecstatic void— It carries me with it farther, To chords that stretch and bend Like light through colored glass. But it races on, toward shadows Where the world I know And the world I fear Threaten to meet. 3. There is always a road, The sea, dark hair,dolor. Always a question Bigger than itself— They say you’re leaving Monday Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?

Art was long. Paul was short. Art sang the song. Paul was the sort who made one up as if from air. Paul had more gift. Art had more hair— which isn’t to take away from Arts. Many sing well if someone starts, and it robs no Simon to get paid like Paul. Along was Art’s way to be singing at all. If Paul robbed some, it’s harder revealing. What stuck in his mind, he stuck to concealing so koo-koo-ka-choo would stick in our heads. It wasn’t Garfunkel, someone said Simon said when they parted acts. Debts one forgets. Acoustic is fraught with strings over frets, taken together, taken apart. Paul lifting from life. Life lifting from Art.

He was hit back of the head for a haul of $15, a Diner’s Club Card and picture of his daughter in a helmet on a horse tethered to a pole that centered its revolving universe. Pacing the halls, he’d ask for a blow job he didn’t want. The ward’s new visitors didn’t know this request was all the injury had left him to say, and would be shamed or pissed, a few hitting him as he stood with his mouth slightly open and large frame leaning in. His wife divorced him for good and blameless reasons. He would not be coming home to share his thoughts on film and weather, or remembering her any longer than it took to leave a room. He liked ham. Kept newspapers in drawers and under his bed, each unread page hand-pressed flat. And when it snowed he leaned into one of the sealed, unbreakable windows, a cheek to the cool glass as he held his fingers over his mouth and moaned low and constant like the sound of a boat on the far side of a lake. When he died they cut him open to see how his habits had been rewired and so tightly looped. Having known him they were afraid of what can happen when you cross the lot to the office or pull up to a light and thump the wheel as you might any hour. If you stare at the dyed and beautiful cross sections of a brain, it’s natural to wonder how we extract the taste of coffee or sense of a note accurately found and held on an oboe from this bramble. On Duke’s slides they circled the regions of blight which explain why almost all behavior we recognize as human was lost, but not why a man who’d curl into a ball like a caterpillar when barely touched, could only ask for sex, for intimacy, for the very thing he could least accept and lived twelve years without, no embrace or caress, no kiss on the lips before sleep, until he died in the lounge looking out on winter sky that seemed eager to snow all day but didn’t.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I— Ah, how poets sing and die!

1 When in his twenties a poetry's full strength Burst into voice as an unstopping flood, He let the divine prompting (come at length) Rushingly bear him any way it would And went on writing while the Ferry turned From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too, And back again, and back again. He learned You add to, you don't cancel what you do. Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled, His own lines carrying him in a new mode To ports in which past purposes unravelled. So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode, Whatever his first plans that night had been, The energy that rose from their confusion Became the changing passage lived within While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion. 2 Forty years later, and both kidneys gone; Every eight hours, home dialysis; The habit of his restlessness stayed on Exhausting him with his responsiveness. After the circulations of one day In which he taught a three-hour seminar Then gave a reading clear across the Bay, And while returning from it to the car With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell —Fell he said later, as if I stood ready, "Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn." Well well, The image comic, as I might have known, And generous, but it turned things round to myth: He fell across the white steps there alone, Though it was me indeed that he was with. I hadn't caught him, hadn't seen in time, And picked him up where he had softly dropped, A pillow full of feathers. Was it a rime He later sought, in which he might adopt The role of H.D., broken-hipped and old, Who, as she moved off from the reading-stand, Had stumbled on the platform but was held And steadied by another poet's hand? He was now a posthumous poet, I have said (For since his illness he had not composed), In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread Was closure, his life soon to be enclosed Like the sparrow's flight above the feasting friends, Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light, Beneath the long roof, between open ends, Themselves the margins of unchanging night.

Duncan Gray came here to woo, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! On blythe Yule night when we were fou, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Maggie coost her head fu high, Look'd asklent and unco skeigh, Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh; Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan sigh'd baith out and in, Grat his een baith bleer't and blin', Spak o' lowpin owre a linn; Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Time and chance are but a tide, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Slighted love is sair to bide, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! "Shall I, like a fool," quoth he, "For a haughty hizzie die? She may gae to—France for me!"— Ha, ha, the wooin o't! How it comes let doctors tell, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Meg grew sick as he grew hale, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Something in her bosom wrings, For relief a sigh she brings; And O! her een, they spak sic things Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan was a lad o' grace, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Maggie's was a piteous case, Ha, ha, the wooin o't! Duncan could na be her death, Swelling pity smoor'd his wrath; Now they're crouse and cantie baith; Ha, ha, the wooin o't!

Taking root in windy sand is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay. A ditchbank or wood's-edge has firmer ground. In a loose world though something can be started— a root touch water, a tip break sand— Mounds from that can rise on held mounds, a gesture of building, keeping, a trapping into shape. Firm ground is not available ground.