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To the gentlemen from the south to the tourists from the north who write poems about the south to the dumb-ass students I’d like to ask one lousy question have you ever seen a regatta of flies sail around a pile of shit and then come back and picnic on the shit just once in your life have you heard flies on shit because I cut my eye teeth on flies floating in shit

After all, there’s no need to say anything at first. An orange, peeled and quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgewood plate Anything can happen. Outside the sun has rolled up her rugs and night strewn salt across the sky. My heart is humming a tune I haven’t heard in years! Quiet’s cool flesh— let’s sniff and eat it. There are ways to make of the moment a topiary so the pleasure’s in walking through.

Here, she said,put this on your head. She handed me a hat. You ’bout as white as your dad, and you gone stay like that.

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s edge, unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form—chicory and daisies tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone but color and the movement—or the shape perhaps—of restlessness, whereas the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plantlike stem

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, Though thou be black as night And she made all of light, Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow. Follow her whose light thy light depriveth, Though here thou liv’st disgraced, And she in heaven is placed, Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth. Follow those pure beams whose beauty burneth, That so have scorched thee, As thou still black must be, Till Her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth. Follow her while yet her glory shineth, There comes a luckless night, That will dim all her light, And this the black unhappy shade divineth. Follow still since so thy fates ordained, The Sun must have his shade, Till both at once do fade, The Sun still proved, the shadow still disdained. Poetry Out Loud Note : In the print anthology, this poem is titled "Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow." The student may give either title during the recitation.

I wonder if anyone ever thought to tell time with them     know where their shadow tipped on 3 o'clock    which floor   which parking spot from a window desk    or if they ever stood completely over their own shade's dot that moment they had no metered footprint; a peek-a-boo we now find ticketed as a before and an after    an either side of a space the zero pulls into, its long reserve wheel of nothing there. Yet here a gnomon of absence bears its shadow placement on some dial of brevity and cold about life       about the footprint we may leave empty of light    empty of even point to it. Here it's flat and densely packed with people unlike the empty open of the plain; here our expanse    the grown over dumpsite of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore is corps of engineered   the bulldozer-beetle's ball of dung shines in it       and somewhere the body hidden in our shit to fake us innocent... one of our jokes sometimes      things rise and float. We in the morning catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff, sight of white herons and the cormorants. When they’re there in the evening, we safely assume the world hasn’t gone anywhere; a take of bearings       the same the next morning when we’d see the lit towers on the island we were headed for      we see now the hour. From the Jersey side we take a bearing, as on mountains from the vantage of the plain, on the towers from the vantage of the dirt-stiffened, unyielding, tarmac of marsh grass     gray like steel grayed a vegetable steel from blur and the exhausts of the turnpike. Position with regard to surrounding objects here is unlike in the mountains which give a bearing even from deep within them, let you see them from inside their formation. Climbing to the high plateau of the street from the subway, we check the peaks downtown or midtown    skyscrapers for direction. Walk a few doors up the block    they parallax eclipsed by the postcard we no more see. * There was a deep well lit its entire depth at noon on the solstice       light without shadow: so with an in-line position with regard to the sun       any cast line of shadow would indicate a curve; the distance between one and not,   an arc of circumference. That phrase of the psalm says death’s shadow is as deep as that valley which is our grave; its length is the same cast everywhere       as deep; no one’s is further from death than another’s; death surrounds us       is our uncurbed circumference. We map our way with only the bearing of surrounding life      itself borderless uncontrolled by the surface of our self. The bridge towers of the Verrazano are so far apart they tilt away from each other on the curve of the earth   factored in. I wonder if from the distance apart of the The Towers you could figure that reach ‘round of the world with this method of shadow? The shadow of flesh casts how deep and far a landscape of perspective?       how round a circumference enough to fit the living world   does a single life turning to its labor spin? Take each story of a building as the radius of expansion      we make of the earth, concentric spheres       on Turtle Island, the hundred ten circumferences go nova So high a reach of vision set on so short a perspective       the world on the turtle's back: at top, the wake of star formation    at base, the animal god.     the jealous Need,    a stomach of feet       trying to stand through this. What can we say of our own that stand in Newark say       so far adrift from a chance to wash      that the dirt on her feet cracks into sores the skin of her soles    and steps her in one more shit infection she has to kick, one more occupation of her body by her monkey rulers she will have to throw off into space       off her back       burned out but clear of starring habit.       Of her destroyed sun    say it endows the landfill       on which to build a new development       “We are the stuff of stars,” Sagan says.

Okay, but now imagine someone, one of fifty, say, in the queue, fiftieth first and advancing little, somewhere within the seventy-two-hour window of efficacy for post-exposure prophylaxis, and, later, in the screening room watching The Clock with the few dozen others in rows behind and ahead who had waited too. He knows he has to but he hasn’t yet. We pick it up there. It is two thousand eleven a few more days. The movie tells what time it is. In poetry too we all face forward.

1 The first ten steps from the house to the shed, I break two or three promises the night has strung like spiders’ webs across my path. The morning is sprung with secrets the night’s been spinning all night and now they’re trapping daylight between the oak and the mendicant poplars and snapping 2 Before me on the broken trail to my desk. In the cowshed the spider hangs on the cross of herself above the first stall door, where, these seven days, she’s been dying, and I bank a fire and shoo the children when they follow me in and I sit to work. Winter’s come, and down on the river the kangaroos 3 Know it. I winter here all day, the poplars, wasted saints, laying on their hands, and nine hours on there’s a shoal of cloud in a cold sky and a blue moon loose in it like a man overboard. Why is it so hard to keep a fire burning all day? You turn your back and it’s gone out somewhere, and yet you sit here still, every thought broken, your feet cold in your boots 4 Two nights later the moon rises nicotine-stained and peaceable into the fingers of the silver trees, and the floodplain is a smokefilled basement. Out of the blue sprawling mist the plover’s mad call: why will a river not stay in the ground? Out on the deck, I draw down deep on the evening and turn and walk 5 Its balm inside and search again briefly for the frequency of family life and I find it in the bath, my girl and our three children, sleek as seals, and in that moment a truck passes on the road and snaps the powerline from the eaves. The house shudders and we fall back in time to candles and stories by heart and reading news from memory. 6 The earth, it seems, has caught a fever, and where will she lie to rest? When the men come and plug us back in, I believe I hear her groan. How will she begin to forgive us, or is that what she’s been doing all along? In the night the mist rolls away, and at dawn there’s a frost over everything. 7 You’d call it a blessing if you hadn’t been woken four times by minor deities, pyjamaed like children and frantic in the dark with oracles. Why do our children not know how to sleep? Do they fear we’ve left our waking late? At first light they dawn and have you rise and lead them out into the story 8 The river has told the grass again, a parable the day has forgotten by nine. And by ten, at your desk, you’ve forgotten it, too. A man so easily distracted by himself. But what are you here for and what do they love, if not the way you leave each day to change the world’s mind and return with the night, your fire spent, your face lined with secrets? 9 One night, you arrive home late and tongue-tied and the child wakes choking. For three hours you wait in emergency and the boy sleeps himself well against you, while an old man and then a woman come with broken-down hearts and don’t leave. You drive home at three and you stand with the boy in the cold outside and you look up and show him the perfect celestial circle 10 Ringing the imperfect moon, and you wish you could tell him what it means. This is what silence looks like, you think later, and a possum lands like ordnance on the roof, and down in the paddock a dozen souls are reborn in the bawling cattle and the fox plays the geese like oboes with broken reeds. Night is the world in its other life. 11 One’s own life is an absurd miracle, waning as long as it lasts, in beauty or poverty, it makes no difference in the end. One is nothing anymore. Our works are our children. They carry us on. They tell us, as though we meant something more than our mere being here. Landscape is another way, a practice longer than love and death. 12 For instance, the brown horse alone in the paddock all day, the canting of the black cockatoos, the grass parrots parsing the morning, the grass trembling with afternoon, the paratactic catechism of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the orange trees, the patience of the river. Go the way the place goes; die beautifully to yourself. 13 Adopt the lively practice of the bluewrens in the hedge and the yoga of the hens. Learn the rules, and forget the rules, like Basho in the naked birches on the river, flaring now under blue cloud in the late light of winter. A small death. A second coming. Drink tea and watch the landscape forget itself. Think of your life 14 in place, not time. Another time, you’re walking home beside the same river. Evening is crimson along the horizon. Look, you say to the child, pointing west. It’s over there, too, he says, pointing east. The place has you almost surrounded. And there’s a dragon, he says. (There’s always a dragon.) Wingecarribee Zen. 15 But it’s no good pretending; we are creation’s anchorites. The places don’t sing, GS said to me once;in particular they don’t sing you— George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week, a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it. They don’t sing, GS; they just are. That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach 16 And what you taught me. Time, that bad idea, is passing anyway, like water. If you’ve been sleeping, you once said, you’ve been missing nearly everything. Meaning, the world wakes up at night; but what if it doesn’t wake again? Another time you said,You’re either writing, or you’re not; so why aren’t you writing? Well, I’m writing now. It’s either raining, or it’s not, and it’s raining now 17 Like a life sentence on the roof and the paddocks and horses and the roos, and deep down below the syntax of the river and up a bit my friend wakes from the anaesthetic dark into the clinical noon of an American summer and wonders how the sun got inside her and cast these shadows, and how much afternoon she’ll get to keep. 18 Over east, beyond the ridge I can see from the desk and under the basalt hills and the feet of the Holsteins and the potato fields and brown-barrel gums an aquifer runs where it always ran; but they’re mining it now, and if they draw it all down, it’ll keep the city in water a week. And how much rain and time will it take to make it rise again? 19 But seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory; the future is someone else’s country to care for. Landscape, though, has all the time in the world; it’s we who are running out. Cars careen like idiots through the dusk, and in the roof the possum calls it a day, and the rain keeps on. It won’t be enough, but it’ll do. 20 My friend in Virginia who’s singing her cancer down looks on cows with love, and I think of her and it pleases me to work where cows came and stood each day and let men drain them dry. This is still their concrete floor. This is still their draught, coming off the edge of night and under the barn door. Poems come like that, she told me once, on the wind to where we labour in wait. 21 But, listen: no one reads poems to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall. It isn’t for anything; a poem is country, and it needs you to keep walking it, and I walk out into it now, carrying my friend and smelling the paddocky wind and feeling the rain cold on my face.

Closed Mondays is music    is men off early from work    is waiting for the chance at the chair while the eagle claws holes in your pockets    keeping time    by the turning of rusty fans    steel flowers with cold breezes    is having nothing better to do    than guess at the years of hair    matted beneath the soiled caps of drunks    the pain of running a fisted comb through stubborn knots    is the dark dirty low down blues    the tender heads of sons fresh from cornrows    all wonder at losing    half their height is a mother gathering hair    for good luck    for a soft wig    is the round difficulty of ears    the peach faced boys asking Eddie to cut in parts and arrows wanting to have their names read for just a few days    and among thin jazz    is the quick brush of a done head    the black flood around your feet    grandfathers stopping their games of ivory dominoes    just before they reach the bone yard    is winking widowers announcing cut it clean off    I’m through courting and hair only gets in the way

Supper comes at five o'clock, At six, the evening star, My lover comes at eight o'clock— But eight o'clock is far. How could I bear my pain all day Unless I watched to see The clock-hands laboring to bring Eight o'clock to me.