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He drew these dandelions during one of the days when the only solace was derived from the labor of getting the white stems and blurry seed heads just right. “Nobody there,” the new disease announced, with black-tie gloom, “nobody there,” after he’d succumbed. Sometimes, sleeping soundly is almost unbearable. Please take care of me, he asked, as they put his crayons with his wallet in a box by the stove. In the distance, beyond the tulips, an insect chorus droned: we beat you up; we beat you up.

And trip me up a startled robbed way Dreamt a burnt stump for a tongue Ash-haired girl Cowbell girl

The way calcium grows all by itself into bone, microscopic fraction attaches itself to fraction or clouds crystallize, or blizzards congeal into hard ice on aluminum wings, even the astronauts’ bodysuits can’t cover up the sheer strangeness of it, the extraordinary being-here or anywhere, the skin of the plane could easily peel back like an ear of corn and then what’s to be seen but who, me? the live, disintegrating, terrified Barbie Doll asks, stuffed into her jeans like a stick of butter, her neat, pointed feet dangerously stuck into sky... but still, teetering down the aisle if anyone bumps her she glares,This Is My Territory, this little packet of a hundred and twenty-two pounds more or less says Move it, Babe, one minute the cold kitchen, next minute Miami Beach, digging into the sand beside the violent- ly green sea, droplets of Almighty coconut oil under the crisp tang of salt drizzle and lick all over its bare, lusciously bronzed congregation of too too solid— No! Never in this world, the greedy molecules hiss as the plane turns inland, the woman returns to her seat past all the other anonymous collections of cells, some snoring, some fussing with their kids, one bent over a laptop, another staring straight at her for a second, with X-ray exhausted eyes peering, then swiveling away as if they’d known each other before, fellow crew members from another planet, though the woman thinks of herself only on Main Street—my my what an arrangement of chromosomes collected who knows why—up here among streaked, boiling clouds with the plane speeding through them, how unexpected it is, how far the body travels from its babyhood, locked in its charged circuits she thinks about edges, the leathery sunburned skin flaking off, in filmy shreds, sound barriers breaking away from her but here she still is for this one second fixed, eyes sticking out of the top of her face like the glint of a buried pin or the beak of a mother robin in the nest she made for herself: with earth losing its outer walls twig by twig, what is this naked fork quivering in the middle of Whose consciousness she keeps wondering, whizzing across the face of an electric cloud chamber, here all I am is falling, in the tight ship of the diminished, in hot chips of pure ignorant energy fizzing around some magnet, some lucky iron only imagination can count on, trembling, gritting her teeth on the thread of an end she can’t know, Please, Someone, materialize me in arms I can love always

And now I have another lad! No longer need you tell How all my nights are slow and sad For loving you too well. His ways are not your wicked ways, He's not the like of you. He treads his path of reckoned days, A sober man, and true. They'll never see him in the town, Another on his knee. He'd cut his laden orchards down, If that would pleasure me. He'd give his blood to paint my lips If I should wish them red. He prays to touch my finger-tips Or stroke my prideful head. He never weaves a glinting lie, Or brags the hearts he'll keep. I have forgotten how to sigh— Remembered how to sleep. He's none to kiss away my mind— A slower way is his. Oh, Lord! On reading this, I find A silly lot he is.

I once loved a boy who built batteries for pacemakers, miniature machines that could glint a heart to life. There were no secrets in his fingertips; to make sure, I held them to the light. Even so, he had learned a way to make a pulse. He might have set it down like a wind-up toy: a small bear stomping across the table, escape on its mechanical mind. Now, my own steps stutter when I sneak into the hospital and figure out how to bring you back. With me comes every girl I've ever been, holding hands to let the current shiver through us like spun sunlight: flaxen, fizzy, a memory of miles, of measure, time tangled together, copper wires in my palm. Hello, gorgeous, give me your hand. We've been waiting for you. So rise, girl. Wake up.

I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs. That morning as the wind was mowing little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth: Careers . . . Cookery, Seamstress . . . and Baby Maker. . . all gone up in smoke. But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life, for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods and taught the mechanics of fire, around which they had us dance with pointed sticks lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.” Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving about what people think of a woman—thirty, unsettled, living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics. Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.

From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs, Happy to linger in shallows while others jackknifed from cliffs, wrong To exact perfection from a sad piece or add notes to a proven tune; But ever the classicist: in swimming lessons, slowest to learn; In fights, tentative, preferring the hammerlock to the jab and hook; cautious In the earliest romances, choking in the clutch, fumbling the caress; or shy Among the crew-cut Cupids bristling at the armory’s weekend dances; But shifty in every game, keeping it close. Always holding still And adjuring others to go slow until we leapt forward that night out of control And pinned to the seats of Tyler Wilson’s outlandishly unstock Ford While, from the opposite side of the valley, scalding in each curve, came the black din And brunt of Sonny Walker’s highjacker Chevrolet, everyone screaming And bearing down to be first across the bridge at Hurricane Creek. Many trophies show us frozen: a leg poised for the hurdle, an arm cocked for the unanswerable spike. What I remember through the windshield’s splintering lens is time, a mailbox Rushing by, the letters TURRENTINE, then darkness rolling inside; Though memory, at best, retrieves maybe six percent in studio light, So even now I think we might have turned: smart with his hands, There is a kind of savior who blusters through the South, good with animals and machines, Who surely somehow would have found a gap, through an open gate Into a marshy cornfield or up a logging road into a hillside wood. At any rate, there is just a little while, shy of any bridge, just as judgment Balances its two blind alternatives and a third accelerates head-on. I’ve made a careful study: things that can only be accomplished in deep space, In another language, in far history, at an almost incalculable speed. Courage is not included, or much foolishness. They spin the purest glass, they split the atom, they speak with God. They make a sort of Teflon hip and attach it with metal screws, Only the threads upbone keep stripping so they have to operate Again and again, and what she’s accomplished is more of a gait, really, Than a walk, so when she moves toward me, across any room, I think too much of my own will implicated in that dragging brace. Each step is obviously trained, and the whole earned motion full Of muscle, plastic, and bone is coordinated by nerves even the Strictest dance does not require. She has said there is no fault, But even in such talk, grace occurs as an accident someone caused. If what I require is a thing too certain, braided from probabilities, There is another thing articulated in the scars that saved her face— And no right now in that night we were shaken and rolled like dice, no right to Say this guilt to be alive is love, or the opposite of lucky is wrong.

On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps Were scary, it's true, but probably normal; A house accepting new patterns of weight With protest, the way no conviction goes gently. We laughed a little, and called it "our spirit." Later that night, when the power conked out And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name, "Daniel," and a history of whispered exploits, All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes, Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves To explain why this or that has led to suffering. Pretty soon, we were using him for everything. When the Christmas tree fell, it was "Daniel"; When my wife lost her ring, it was "Daniel"; When the kids forgot to feed the goldfish And it turned up dead, its eyes silvered over Like water shadowed under sheets of ice, Well, that became Daniel too, which was curious; And pauses me now as I make the long walk Down the hall to the bathroom in darkness, And hear, in soft concert, the sound of my footfalls Answered at once by my children's voices Still calling to Daniel behind their door.

from Sonnets, First Series VI Dank fens of cedar; hemlock-branches gray With trees and trail of mosses, wringing-wet; Beds of the black pitchpine in dead leaves set Whose wasted red has wasted to white away; Remnants of rain and droppings of decay, — Why hold ye so my heart, nor dimly let Through your deep leaves the light of yesterday, The faded glimmer of a sunshine set? Is it that in your darkness, shut from strife, The bread of tears becomes the bread of life? Far from the roar of day, beneath your boughs Fresh griefs beat tranquilly, and loves and vows Grow green in your gray shadows, dearer far Even than all lovely lights and roses are?

‘What are the bugles blowin’ for?' said Files-on-Parade. ‘To turn you out, to turn you out,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play, The Regiment’s in ’ollow square—they’re hangin’ him to-day; They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut his stripes away, An’ they're hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’. ‘What makes the rear-rank breathe so ’ard?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s bitter cold, it's bitter cold,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What makes that front-rank man fall down?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘A touch o’ sun, a touch o’ sun,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. They are hangin’ Danny Deever, they are marchin’ of ’im round, They ’ave ’alted Danny Deever by ’is coffin on the ground; An’ ’e’ll swing in ’arf a minute for a sneakin’ shootin’ hound— O they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin!’ ‘’Is cot was right-’and cot to mine,’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘’E’s sleepin’ out an’ far to-night,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘I’ve drunk ’is beer a score o’ times,’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘’E’s drinkin’ bitter beer alone,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. They are hangin’ Danny Deever, you must mark ’im to ’is place, For ’e shot a comrade sleepin’—you must look ’im in the face; Nine ’undred of ’is county an’ the Regiment’s disgrace, While they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’. ‘What’s that so black agin the sun?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s Danny fightin’ ’ard for life,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What’s that that whimpers over’ead?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. For they’re done with Danny Deever, you can ’ear the quickstep play, The Regiment’s in column, an’ they’re marchin’ us away; Ho! the young recruits are shakin’, an’ they’ll want their beer to-day, After hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’!