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I wove myself of many delicious strands Of violet islands and sugar-balls of thread So faintly green a small white check between Balanced the field’s wide lawn, a plaid Gathering in loose folds shaped around him Those Princeton mornings, slowly stage-lit, when The dawn took the horizon by surprise And from the marsh long, crayoned birds Rose up, ravens, maybe crows, or raw-voiced, Spiteful grackles with their clothespin legs, Black-winged gossips rising out of mud And clattering into sleep. They woke my master While, in the dark, I waited, knowing Sooner or later he’d reach for me And, half asleep, wriggle into my arms. Then it seemed a moonish, oblique light Would gradually illuminate the room, The world turn on its axis at a different slant, The furniture a shipwreck, the floor askew, And, in old slippers, he’d bumble down the stairs. Genius is human and wants its coffee hot— I remember mornings when he’d sit For hours at breakfast, dawdling over notes, Juice and toast at hand, the world awake To spring, the smell of honeysuckle Filling the kitchen. A silent man, Silence became him most. How gently He softened the edges of a guessed-at impact So no one would keel over from the blow— A blow like soft snow falling on a lamb. He’d fly down from the heights to tie his shoes And cross the seas to get a glass of milk, Bismarck with a harp, who’d doff his hat (As if he ever wore one!) and softly land On nimble feet so not to startle. He walked In grandeur much too visible to be seen— And how many versions crawled out of the Press! A small pre-Raphaelite with too much hair; A Frankenstein of test tubes; a “refugee”— A shaman full of secrets who could touch Physics with a wand and body forth The universe’s baby wrapped in stars. From signs Phoenicians scratched into the sand With sticks he drew the contraries of space: Whirlwind Nothing and Volume in its rage Of matter racing to undermine itself, And when the planets sang, why, he sang back The lieder black holes secretly adore. At tea at Mercer Street every afternoon His manners went beyond civility, Kindness not having anything to learn; I was completely charmed. And fooled. What a false view of the universe I had! The horsehair sofa, the sagging chairs, A fire roaring behind the firesecreen— Imagine thinking Princeton was the world! Yet I wore prescience like a second skin: When Greenwich and Palomar saw eye to eye, Time and space having found their rabbi, I felt the dawn’s black augurs gather force, As if I knew in the New Jersey night The downcast sky that was to clamp on Europe, That Asia had its future in my pocket.

“He is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive.” —Donald Rumsfeld You haven’t heard from your father in six months and you can’t bring yourself to call. In Bengal, farmers wore masks on the backs of their heads to ward off tigers, who, one supposes, wouldn’t attack a man who was watching. If I don’t call, you thought, nothing is wrong. Each possibility is a cavern eaten out of limestone by water. Naming everything is a way of naming nothing. His family dropped away like cicada husks swept off tree trunks by rain. One brother, heart attack. His father’s two feet taken by diabetes, then his father by stroke. In a tornado, leave your windows ajar. A doorway for an earthquake. In a lightning storm, do not pick up the phone. Learn to see out the back of your head. His youngest brother, weeks dead before discovery: the couch where he died, face down, shadow of rotted flesh stained into fabric, ghost of a face. Imagination kills the living just as easily as it brings back the dead. In Turkey, they hang the nazar—teardrop of blue glass— on lintels, above beds, from the rearview mirror. To ward off evil, they say.

amy winehouse All song is formal, and you Maybe felt this and decided You’d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.) When a desire to escape becomes formal, It’s dangerous. Then escape requires Nullity, rather than a walk in the park or a movie. Eventually, nullity gets harder and Harder to achieve. After surgery, I had Opiates. I pushed the button as often as I could. Understood by music was how I felt. An escape So complete it became a song. After that, Elegy’s the only necessary form. steve jobs Say you lost all your money, or turned against your ambition. Then you would be at peace, or Else why does the mind punish the body? Vengeance is mind, says the body. Ever after, you’re a mirror, “silver and exact.” Just like the bug in a string of code, the body defies the mind Or looks in the mirror of the mind and shudders. Better instruments are better because they’re Silver ish but intact. troy davis The clock is obdurate, Random, and definite. Obdurate the calendar. You thump on the cot: another signature. Did it didn’t do it would do it again. And if a deferred dream dies? Please sign the petition. Very good. Let’s hunt for a pen. If you thump, there’s another signature and Signatures are given freely by the signer’s hand. lucian freud Lingering over Unlovely bodies, Couldn’t help Intuitively rendering A whole Nother angel. Facts are Relics — an Effect worth Undertaking: yes, Dear daylight? donna summer Discourse that night concerned the warm-blooded love we felt. On the divan and in the ballroom and on the terrace, we felt it. Now virtue meant liking the look of the face we lay next to. Never mind the sting of the winter solstice. All discourse that night concerned the warm-blooded love we felt. Something lifted us higher. Her little finger told her so, Untangling, with careless skill, the flora of the sexual grove. Master physician with a masterly joy in wrapping up Mud-spattered, coke-dusted wounds at midnight, when it’s too Early to stop dancing and go home. Our lily-minds soothed by her Royalty concealed in the synthesizers in the flora of the sexual grove.

& what if hope crashes through the door what if that lasts a somersault? hope for serendipity even if a series of meals were all between us even if the aeons lined up out of order what are years if not measured by trees

If there is any dwelling place for the spirits of the just; as the wise believe, noble souls do not perish with the body, rest thou in peace ... —Tacitus Who keeps the owl’s breath? Whose eyes desire? Why do the stars rhyme? Where does The flush cargo sail? Why does the daybook close? So sleep and do not sleep. The opaque stroke lost across the mirror, The clamp turned. The polished nails begin the curl into your palms. The opal hammock of rain falls out of its cloud. I name you,Gloat-of- The-stalks, drowse-my-embers, old-lily-bum. No matter how well a man sucks praise in the end He sucks earth. Go ahead, step Out into that promised, rasp gratitude of night. Seeds and nerves.Seeds And nerves. I’ll be waiting for you, in some Obscure and clarifying light; I will say, Look, there is a ghost ice on the land. If the page of marble bleeds in the yellow grass, If the moon-charts glow useless and cold, If the grains of the lamp outlast you, as they must— As the tide of black gloss, the marls, and nectar rise I will understand. Here are my gifts:smudges of bud, A blame of lime. Everything you remember crowds Away. Stubble memory, The wallpaper peeling its leaves. Fog. Fog In the attic; this pod of black milk. Anymore, Only a road like August approaches. Sometimes the drawers of the earth close; Sometimes our stories keep on and on. So listen— Leave no address. Fold your clothes into a little Island. Kiss the hinges goodbye. Sand the fire. Bitch About time. Hymn away this reliquary fever. How the sun stands crossing itself in the cut glass. How the jonquils and bare orchards fill each morning In mist. The branches in the distance stiffen, Again. The city of stars pales. In my fires the cinders rise like black angels; The trunks of the olives twist once towards the world. Once. I will walk out into the day.

—for Troy Davis 1. There was a light rain on the night of your execution. Wet little pricks exploding on the skin. The gears on my bike jammed so I pedaled crazy-legged, pumping three times harder, making time. I glide past a charter bus emptying in front of the Supreme Court, I double over at the mostly white choir: I am Troy Davis / We are Troy Davis. 2. I am Troy Davis / We Are Troy Davis. My mother calls hours later, crying until her eyes swell into beets. Why are our mothers always crying? Why am I not crying? It’s become so familiar. In my boyhood . . . Rodney King; Billy Clubs; Loose Nooses; L.A. Riots; Abner Louima and his attackers: the police officers shoving a plunger up his rectum; Amadou Diallo: 41 gun shot wounds; Echoes of Emmitt Till: Black mothers unable to recognize their creations. Men strung on trees left for the crows to suck. The way Billie Holiday’s voice wrinkles from horror. The gallant South, the snickering wind. 3. The gallant South, the snickering wind. You were lethally injected: poison entered your veins, stopped your heart, then your breathing. I wake up in a cold sweat hearing you tell the family it wasn’t you. You, Black Socrates. Galileo, Prisoner to this skin. I imagine your transition to the other side with the ancestors. Afro Blue. I imagine this life different— not opposed to life, black life. Not hateful. I imagine this poem—a proper elegy. Can you hear that? America singing. Its trees mock us. Its wind curses us. No praying. God’s ears are filled with cotton. 4. God’s ears are filled with cotton. Death is my pulse. I pray daily that I will live to be old, healthy, but sometimes I despair. I think about my mother almost being thrown on a subway track carrying me in her belly. Hearing the metal train car moving in. Feeling my heart beat. Wanting to save this black boy from an early death. Just one, Lord, spare me one. I want to teach my daughter that black doesn’t equal death; and to love her people, all of them, even the white great-grandmother who got sick from giving birth to half-white, all black babies. And yet, I get quiet each time we walk by Union Station that increasingly resembles Monticello. The homeless: who missed Emancipation those Negro hymns no longer move me. Everything is a countdown to Swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home to be a black mass, riding this skin, a bomb ticking, soon to expire. 5. A bomb ticking, soon to expire. What if we didn’t have to die? What would it mean to live? What would it mean to give milk to our own babies? What would it mean to swim to the bottom of the ocean, recovering our bones? What would it mean to visit the African burial that is Wall Street? What does it mean to tell your daughter We were the first blue chip stock? That we do not own our children, their lives. That any motherfucker can point and say kill that nigger. And it happens. Like that. Like that. What does it mean to be free when we’ve been property longer than we’ve been free in this great nation? What does it mean to say Troy Davis, my dear brother, I’m Sorry. A part of me died tonight. I prayed for the mother ship to come take me somewhere else. Do aliens kill each other? Dear black Socrates, Galileo: the planets are spinning.

24. In the last photograph of my sister, she is sprawling in the shade, or what shade’s left, on the converted toolshed’s whitewashed steps. It appears that she has finished for the day, an oil color of some tall sea pines, backlit by twilight off the water behind, her lifelong childlike forest-fear subdued for the moment by a filtered-through, delaminating blue loosening the fretwork of branch and crown. The oversized sweater she always wore is stippled with paint, and her face has the slightly moonstruck look (backlit, as well, by a thin gilt wash too finely filtered for the camera’s lens) of someone who’s stayed up reading late a novel whose story could be her own. Moments before, she’d lifted the painting toward the sun, squinting as she did, imagining—what? we’ll never know— the fading context into which she stared. Then, unpinning her hair, and leaning back against the shed, she yawns once and closes her eyes as if nothing weighed on her thoughts that day, her shoes kicked off, and an unlit cigarette cupped in her hand. And at just the instant the shutter clicks, the shadow of a dog (or a child?) appears at the far right edge of the picture. To think: how once she might’ve been amused by this, this perspective from which we’d frame her life (the perspective from which our own deaths hide) with who she’d been, was, and was tempted to be. 25. And so it continues, day after day, this endless succession of moments culled haphazard from the staticky dark as though each were an event unto itself, as though each inscribed some legible scratch on the frail wax cylinder that kept alive a voice from the ever-receding past .... My sister at thirty or thirty-one: stripping off table varnish while her daughters nap on a folded towel beside her. In the archangel section of the plaster cast gallery, she holds her breath until the security guard stops looking her way. Standing beside the photomat, staring at a strip of pictures, her look of puzzlement slowly gives way to a look of recognition. In the middle of the night—I was eight or nine at the time—I wake to find her patting my head, because she has just had a bad dream. Visiting hours over, she returns down the hall to her hospital room: head down, shoulders stooped, her hands clasped behind her neck. (That same morning, when she started to cry, she somehow managed to distract herself by repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs.) Overjoyed to be finally going home, then, mid-sentence, falling silent at the thought of it, as though her mouth had been covered by a hand. A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window. Beneath the sill: a girl’s hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers. One morning, she leaves the house before dawn. She doesn’t take the car. By noon she finds herself in the business district of the city— a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now, after all these years, she’s about to take the great journey of her life.

That night we drank warm whiskey in our parked car beyond woods now lost to the suburbs, I fell in love with you. What waited was the war like a bloody curtain, and a righteous moment when the lovely boy’s spine was snapped, then the long falling into hell. But lately, you’ve been calling me back through the years of bitter silence to tell me of another river of blood and of the highland’s howl at dusk of human voices blasted into ecstasy. That night in sweet Lorain we drank so long and hard we raised ourselves above the broken places, mill fires burning red against the sky. Why is there no end to this unraveling.

“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton. He carried a rose inside his coat each day to give a beautiful stranger—“Better to die of love than love without regret.” And those who loved him soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act is running through the street with a revolver firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed démodé. There is always a skeleton on the buffet.

Woman was made to serve and obey man, Man must obey God. Wife: man can command. A natural order, God's ordained plan; A woman must bow down to her husband. England needs an heir so I must marry But yet I prevaricate and tarry.