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As George Washington hacked at his cherry tree, Joseph said to him This is the tree that fed Mary When she lingered by the way. As George Washington polished his bright blade, Joseph told him This cherry tree Bent down and nourished the mother and her babe. As George Washington felled the cherry tree, Voices of root and stem Cried out to him In heavenly accents, but he heard not what they had to say. Rather, he was making A clearing in the wilderness, A subtle discrimination Of church and state, By which his little hatchet Harvested a continental Bumper crop for Mary Of natural corn.

As phantoms direct life from the shadows, I feel I leaned on something, and it broke. My father on the porch with his crosswords said, this must be what it feels like to be dead; When I returned from the dead there was no one to greet me, but still you are glad— I wander the ruins the way my tongue wanders my missing teeth, the bricks and mortar of Deep Deuce rotted like molars in an ancient mouth; Here Charlie Christian might have walked— The astrologer counseled patience and creative imaging: Step One: Visualize an object that symbolizes the accursed influence. Picture yourself throwing it into a furnace. Step two: Visualize the person who is responsible for the curse. Imagine one end of a rope is tied around your waist and the other around that person. Picture yourself cutting the rope with a chainsaw as you call out, “You have no power over me!” Step three: Repeat twice a day for eleven days . . . You visualize her green boots inside the furnace . . . —No. You are in a crematorium and you see her perfect and corruptible body on a tray sliding into fire; Then you see yourself cutting the rope that ties you together with a saw; And then at last your own imperfect and corruptible body—I mean, me—calls out and I jump in after her.

Deep in our refrigerator, there's a special place for food that's been around awhile . . . we keep it, just in case. “It's probably too old to eat,” my mother likes to say. “But I don't think it's old enough for me to throw away.” It stays there for a month or more to ripen in the cold, and soon we notice fuzzy clumps of multicolored mold. The clumps are larger every day, we notice this as well, but mostly what we notice is a certain special smell. When finally it all becomes a nasty mass of slime, my mother takes it out, and says, “Apparently, it's time.” She dumps it in the garbage can, though not without regret, then fills the space with other food that's not so ancient yet

Baton Rouge, 1940 These are savannas bluer than your dreams Where other loves are fashioned to older music, And the romantic in his light boat Puts out among flamingos and water moccasins Looking for the river that went by last year. Even the angels wear confederate uniforms; And when the magnolia blooms and the honeysuckle, Golden lovers, brighter than the moon, Read Catullus in the flaring light Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight. And the Traveller, moving in the hot swamps, Where every human sympathy sends up the temperature, Comes of a sudden on the hidden glacier, Whose motives are blonder than Hitler’s choir boys. Here is the ambiguous tenderness of ’gators Trumpeting their loves along a hundred miles Of rivers writhing under trees like myths— And human existence pursues the last, The simple and desperate life of the senses. Since love survives only as ironic legend— Response to situations no longer present— Men lacking dignity are seized by pride, Which is the easy upper-class infection. The masters are at home in this merciless climate But deep in the caves of their minds some animal memory Warns of the fate of the mammoth at the end of the ice-age; As sleeping children a toy, they hug the last, fatal error, But their eyes are awake and their dreams shake as with palsy. Over Birmingham where the blast furnace flowers And beyond the piney woods in cotton country, Continually puzzling the pale aristocrats, The sun burns equally white man and black. The labor which they do makes more and more Their brotherhood condition for their whole existence; They mint their own light, and their fusing fires Will melt at last these centuries of ice. This is a nightmare nimble in the Big House, Where sleepers are wakeful, cuddling their terror, In the empty acres of their rich beds, dreaming Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn.

It was there, the elemental center, All the time. Eternally present, repeating itself Like seasons, where the times and dates For swallows and household fires are written down, The grouse are counted, the quotas of stocked rainbows. All that love of order, for its own sake. Only the hill-farms, and the high sheep country Above politics—the enormous relief Up there, as the dialect names of skies Return, along with their clouds, and the old knowledge Opens the mind again. To dream, to just potter In the yard, to fiddle with local stations In the kitchen, where news that is no news Finally, at last, fills up the years With pure existence. Lit from beneath The fields are evenings long, the tree by the house Where Vladimir and Estragon kept vigil With the stillness of commando and insurgent Frightens no one. Slow through the air A heron, shouldering aside the weight of the world, Is making for its colonies, coevals In a state plantation . . . Nowhere but here In the high right hand of Ireland, do the weather fronts Give way so slowly, to such ambivalent light.

Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters Always out of office hours running with her social betters But when daylight and the darkness of the office closed about her Not for this ah not for this her office colleagues came to doubt her It was that look within her eye Why did it always seem to say goodbye? Joan her name was and at lunchtime Solitary solitary She would go and watch the pictures In the National Gallery All alone all alone This time with no friend beside her She would go and watch the pictures All alone. Will she leave her office colleagues Will she leave her evening pleasures Toil within a friendly bureau Running later in her leisure? All alone all alone Before the pictures she seems turned to stone. Close upon the Turner pictures Closer than a thought may go Hangs her eye and all the colours Leap into a special glow All for her, all alone All for her, all for Joan. First the canvas where the ocean Like a mighty animal With a really wicked motion Leaps for sailors’ funeral Holds her panting. Oh the creature Oh the wicked virile thing With its skin of fleck and shadow Stretching tightening over him. Wild yet captured wild yet captured By the painter, Joan is quite enraptured. Now she edges from the canvas To another loved more dearly Where the awful light of purest Sunshine falls across the spray, There the burning coasts of fancy Open to her pleasure lay. All alone, all alone Come away, come away All alone. Lady Mary, Lady Kitty The Honourable Featherstonehaugh Polly Tommy from the office Which of these shall hold her now? Come away, come away All alone. The spray reached out and sucked her in It was a hardly noticed thing That Joan was there and is not now (Oh go and tell young Featherstonehaugh) Gone away, gone away All alone. She stood up straight The sun fell down There was no more of London Town She went upon the painted shore And there she walks for ever more Happy quite Beaming bright In a happy happy light All alone. They say she was a morbid girl, no doubt of it And what befell her clearly grew out of it But I say she’s a lucky one To walk for ever in that sun And as I bless sweet Turner’s name I wish that I could do the same.

Deeply repentant of my sinful ways And of my trivial, manifold desires, Of squandering, alas, these few brief days Of fugitive life in tending love's vain fires, To Thee, Lord, Who dost move hard hearts again, And render warmth unto the frozen snow, And lighten every bitter load of pain For those who with Thy sacred ardours glow, To Thee I turn, O stretch forth Thy right hand And from this whirlpool rescue me, for I Without Thine aid could never reach the land; O willingly for us didst suffer loss, And to redeem mankind hung on the Cross, O gentle Saviour, leave me not to die.

I have my father’s hair.Not much of a gift, chick, but can’t say I’m not generous.

Perhaps she came down for the apples, or was flushed out by the saws powering the far woods, or was simply lost, or was crossing one open space for another. She was a figure approaching, a presence outside a kitchen window, framed by the leafless apple trees, the stiff blueberry bushes, the after-harvest corn, the just-before-rain sky, a shape only narrow bones could hold, turning its full face upward, head tilted to one side, as if to speak. I want my life back. Morning settles around her like a silver coat. Rustling branches, hooves in flight.

Perhaps to those familiar with their ways The sight would not have been so startling: A deer fording the Missouri in the early afternoon. Perhaps they would not have worried as much As I about the fragility of it all: Her agonizingly slow pace, the tender ears And beatific face just above the water. At one point she hit upon a shoal And appeared to walk upon a mantle, The light glancing off her thin legs and black hooves. I thought she might pause for a while to rest, To gain some bearings, but instead she bound Back in, mindful I suppose Of the vulnerability of open water. When she finally reached the island And leapt into dark stands Of cottonwoods and Russian olives, I swear I almost fell down in prayer. And now I long to bear witness of such things, To tell someone in need the story Of a deer fording the Missouri in the early afternoon.