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It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

It’s not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough. Someday I’ll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk. And I’ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days, And I’ll see that I’m rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways. I haven’t lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon. Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed off virtue’s burden. Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser. If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard; If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not suffice, But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life, Well then there’s Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more! But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore, If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate, Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face— Well, anyway, You didn’t come to save the just but that other type that abounds, And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere . . . Lord, I’m still around. And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You, Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You, Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him, And maybe this little that he’s made himself, kept back until then, though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim. It would be something that he’d put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed. Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms And offered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride, A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands, a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.

An Ode Attempted in English Sapphic When the fierce north wind with his airy forces Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury, And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes Rushing amain down, How the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble, While the hoarse thunder, like a bloody trumpet, Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters, Quick to devour them! Such shall the noise be and the wild disorder, (If things eternal may be like these earthly) Such the dire terror, when the great Archangel Shakes the creation, Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven, Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes; See the graves open, and the bones arising, Flames all around ’em! Hark, the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches! Lively bright horror and amazing anguish Stare through their eyelids, while the living worm lies Gnawing within them. Thoughts like old vultures prey upon their heart-strings, And the smart twinges, when the eye beholds the Lofty Judge frowning, and a flood of vengeance Rolling afore him. Hopeless immortals! how they scream and shiver, While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong Down to the center. Stop here, my fancy: (all away ye horrid Doleful ideas); come, arise to Jesus; How He sits God-like! and the saints around him Throned, yet adoring! Oh may I sit there when he comes triumphant Dooming the nations! then ascend to glory While our hosannas all along the passage Shout the Redeemer.

Day of Satan's painful duty! Earth shall vanish, hot and sooty; So says Virtue, so says Beauty. Ah! what terror shall be shaping When the Judge the truth's undraping— Cats from every bag escaping! Now the trumpet's invocation Calls the dead to condemnation; All receive an invitation. Death and Nature now are quaking, And the late lamented, waking, In their breezy shrouds are shaking. Lo! the Ledger's leaves are stirring, And the Clerk, to them referring, Makes it awkward for the erring. When the Judge appears in session, We shall all attend confession, Loudly preaching non-suppression. How shall I then make romances Mitigating circumstances? Even the just must take their chances. King whose majesty amazes, Save thou him who sings thy praises; Fountain, quench my private blazes. Pray remember, sacred Saviour, Mine the playful hand that gave your Death-blow. Pardon such behavior. Seeking me, fatigue assailed thee, Calvary's outlook naught availed thee; Now 'twere cruel if I failed thee. Righteous judge and learnèd brother, Pray thy prejudices smother Ere we meet to try each other. Sighs of guilt my conscience gushes, And my face vermilion flushes; Spare me for my pretty blushes. Thief and harlot, when repenting, Thou forgavest—complimenting Me with sign of like relenting. If too bold is my petition I'll receive with due submission My dismissal—from perdition. When thy sheep thou hast selected From the goats, may I, respected, Stand amongst them undetected. When offenders are indited, And with trial-flames ignited, Elsewhere I'll attend if cited. Ashen-hearted, prone and prayerful, When of death I see the air full, Lest I perish too be careful. On that day of lamentation, When, to enjoy the conflagration, Men come forth, O be not cruel: Spare me, Lord—make them thy fuel.

Still half drunk, after a night at cards, with the grey dawn taking us unaware among our guilty kings and queens, we drove far North in the morning, winners, losers, to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place one of us knew, with some vague view of cutting losses or consolidating gains by the old standard appeal to the wilderness, the desert, the empty places of our exile, bringing only the biblical bread and cheese and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way, expecting to drink only the clear cold water among the stones, and remember, or forget. Though no one said anything about atonement, there was still some purgatorial idea in all those aching heads and ageing hearts as we climbed the giant stair of the stream, reaching the place around noon. It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone, or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light, and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor, blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam of crystal to a calm where the waterlight dappled the ledges as they leaned against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again against the low wind moving over the stream, and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings. This surely was it, was what we had come for, was nature, though it looked like art with its grey fortress walls and laminated benches as in the waiting room of some petrified station. But we believed; and what it was we believed made of the place a paradise for ruined poker players, win or lose, who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks like gasping trout (the water they drank making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back waiting for nature to say the last word —as though the stones were Memnon stones, which, caught in a certain light, would sing. The silence (and even the noise of the waters was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase, grew pregnant; but nothing else did. The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks, unlike the ones you would expect to find on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon, mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em, were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks. Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man thought bitterly about primitive simplicity and decadence, and how he had been ruined by civilization and forced by circumstances to drink and smoke and sit up all night inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and could no longer afford a savagery whether noble or not; some would never batter that battered copy of Walden again. But all the same, the water, the sunlight, and the wind did something; even the dragonflies did something to the minds full of telephone numbers and flushes, to the flesh sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other. And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders which formed the giant stair of the stream, induced (again) some purgatorial ideas concerning humility, concerning patience and enduring what had to be endured, winning and losing and breaking even; ideas of weathering in whatever weather, being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents. But to these ideas did any purgatory respond? Only this one: that in a world where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap one might at any rate wash with the soap. After a time we talked about the War, about what we had done in the War, and how near some of us had been to being drowned, and burned, and shot, and how many people we knew who had been drowned, or burned, or shot; and would it have been better to have died in the War, the peaceful old War, where we were young? But the mineral peace, or paralysis, of those great stones, the moving stillness of the waters, entered our speech; the ribs and blood of the earth, from which all fables grow, established poetry and truth in us, so that at last one said, “I shall play cards until the day I die,” and another said, “in bourbon whisky are all the vitamins and minerals needed to sustain man’s life,” and still another, “I shall live on smoke until my spirit has been cured of flesh.” Climbing downstream again, on the way home to the lives we had left empty for a day, we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges not one had held the stream, which in its floods had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble, smashed practically back to nature, the massive masonry of span after span with its indifferent rage; this was a sight that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet both during the long drive home and after, till it was time to deal the cards.

His head rose like a torch in a tomb. Banquet-style, as at a second Symposium, The others lounged on couches or lay knocked out. A net of shadows dangled from wire-meshed windows. Buffeted there, there, some swam against currents Or were swept off into underwater canyons. Visitors, confusion streaming over them, speech Foaming into eddies, words lolling like jetsam On the lightless bottom, listened to the news Of minds crammed in bodies: Here, all was stoic Or hectic or unspeaking disconnection. Moving shadows on the TV screen implied A world out there, though a world more couth, More uncouth? in four o’clock’s slushy freezing dark: Plato’s cave loomed in semblance of the walls, Only wasn’t it the cave as All, no outside Not inside, nothing more real to go out into? He peered far down to where dark swam up From the depthless screen and hovered poised Above dark-in-light: Sergeant Schultz kept repeating, “I know nothing, nothing,” his funny-Nazi German accent As he recoils from his ever sauve tormentor, the American POW Colonel Hogan who threatens Schultz With good-humored ruthlessness as bad as a mother In a supermarket aisle cajoling her greedy-eyed child, “Ah ah ah—remember the Russian front!” —Poor Schultz’s accent making him more human in his terror, Though only an actor acting his lines through The canned laughter’s bacchic furor sweeping down The corridor to die in murmurs of slippers shushing. Cast yourself in it, imagine having to say those lines, Not just now, but always, eternity a chaos Of laugh-track frenzy more demonic than funny, Reruns of Hogan haunted by the actor Who acts Hogan’s lines, his real-life orgies Before a secret camera ending in his Glogotha, His infamy to be bludgeoned and found wrapped Naked in a shower curtain that hangs In the mind like the cave’s walls turning outside Inside outside inside no end or difference inside out —The almost see-through membrane of a world gone flat: He hunches forward to change the channel. Muttering something to Schultz’s “I know nothing, nothing,” A grim joke maybe, “Ain’t that the truth...” though really, Who could know what words he was or wasn’t Answering, who can hear above the roar of Earth moving under him, trying to throw him off As he clings to the sofa hurtling through space! And as he clings, the screen slowly opens and fans out wide Around the National Broadcasting Corporation peacock Waving its plumes, flaming blues, greens, radiant vermilions, Brilliance of the seasons, late-morning pastels Easy and restful for the brain and eye, Sempiternal hues Atlantis rose up and sank back into. And these feather off into grays, solid wintry Grays that give off nothing and reflect nothing back.

the day shifts, we talk to each other the way we talk to each other, the luster fades, our bodies fill with sap, there is a shift, joy reappears before another personal narrative burns to a heap of citations, continuing in complicated machinery, becoming blood knots in space, both the living and dead surround the present has been. I open my eyes in the full force of fear and hesitation, frozen in passing passageways with endless permutations, subjected to violence, stupidity, and love.

It hangs on its stem like a plum at the edge of a darkening thicket. It’s swelling and blushing and ripe and I reach out a hand to pick it but flesh moves slow through time and evening comes on fast and just when I think my fingers might seize that sweetness at last the gentlest of breezes rises and the plum lets go of   the stem. And now it’s my fingers ripening and evening that’s reaching for them.

We walked at the edge of the sea, the dog, still young then, running ahead of us. Few people.  Gulls.  A flock of pelicans circled beyond the swells, then closed their wings and dropped head-long into the dazzle of light and sea.  You clapped your hands; the day grew brilliant. Later we sat at a small table with wine and food that tasted of the sea. A perfect day, we said to one another, so that even when the day ended and the lights of houses among the hills came on like a scattering of embers, we watched it leave without regret. That night, easing myself toward sleep, I thought how blindly we stumble ahead with such hope, a light flares briefly—Ah, Happiness! then we turn and go on our way again. But happiness, too, goes on its way, and years from where we were, I lie awake in the dark and suddenly it returns— that day by the sea, that happiness, though it is not the same happiness, not the same darkness.

His daughter pulls on her father’s frayed dishdasha to go check the bees. Today she doesn’t carry the smoke canister with her to the field. She opens a tray while talking down their high whine, breaks off honeycomb and rubs it over her face and hair, over white cloth, down to her feet. Each of her hands holds the crumbling comb like a sponge while she waits for them. When the first one comes she feels wings against her toes, a tongue unscrolling. She wills herself not to laugh as the next alights on her neck, tickling her hairs as it walks. Then they descend to shoulders, forearms, chest, thighs, eyes she shuts—she feels the thousand tongues on the cloth. Feather-like wings churn in her ears, rustle and hum with agitated talk. Never been so loved. Her father’s alive, she’s a torch of burning bees, tears course across cheeks. When her mother sees the apparition of bees walking towards their door she falls on her knees. It is the end of the world. But when the angel speaks with her daughter’s voice she’s not amazed. Mama, how do I end this? Her mother brushes bees away from her eyes, pulls them from her hair and undresses her child, hanging the winged dishdasha on the clothes line. Carries her naked girl into the house to bathe. The bee-like angels take all day to strip honey from the robe, return it to their tiered home.