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This early the garden’s bare but people pay to walk it, at plots of budless brush stop, as if remembering, and stoop to mouth the names— araucaria araucana, monkey puzzle tree, something Japanese—each particular ridiculous to be.

Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I’ve mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

Lo! ’t is a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

Not in that wasted garden Where bodies are drawn into grass That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens That bear no fruit — There where along the shaded walks Vain sighs are heard, And vainer dreams are dreamed Of close communion with departed souls — But here under the apple tree I loved and watched and pruned With gnarled hands In the long, long years; Here under the roots of this northern-spy To move in the chemic change and circle of life, Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree, And into the living epitaphs Of redder apples!

Chonac smólach marbh sa choill é seargtha ar an screablach. Bhíos ag déanamh trua de nuair a tháinig madraí de rúid is thugadar ruathar fúm ag snapadh, ag glamadh agus drant orthu. Uaimse do tháinig liúbhéic, gach bagairt is buille coise: Bhí ina bhúirchath eadrainn. Chorraigh na ba sna goirt is chuireadar leis an gcór allta. Theith lucha is dallóga fraoigh isteach faoin doire donn, sheas madra rua ar shiolpa, a cholainn iomlán righin. Chuimhníos ar mo choisíocht; bhí ceithre chrúb fúm. I saw a thrush-corpse shriveling on the woodland’s scrabbly floor. I was busy pitying it when there came a harrying pack of strays that set about me; they bayed and snapped, growling bare-toothed. From my throat such roaring; my every curse and foot-swing made a bellow-war between us. Fields of agitated cattle augmented that wild choir. Mice and shrewmice shrunk back into the oakleaf brown interior as a fox reared upward on a stony ridge, its stance utterly rigid. I remembered to run, felt the four paws under me. Translated from the Irish by Billy Ramsell

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail More tense than felons but relieved to find The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped From every mother’s windowpane, obscene The bloodlust sweating from the public heart, The dog authority slavering at your throat. A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean. The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew Troubling the captains for plain decencies, A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out To establish new theocracies to west, A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas Ten miles above the sodomites and fish. These inmates loved the only living doves. Like all men hunted from the world you made A good community, voyaging the storm To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat; Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed, The gaunt politicals construed our hate. The opposite of all armies, you were best Opposing uniformity and yourselves; Prison and personality were your fate. You suffered not so physically but knew Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind. Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach Erupting in his face damn all your kind. Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us Are equally with those who shed the blood The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is What we come back to in the armistice.

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander the halls of the skull with the fluorescents softly flickering. It rests on the head like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel and awkward as soon as one stops to look. That pile of fallen leaves drifting from the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove, to the grooves in that man’s voice as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves of books with moonlit opossums and Chevrolets easing down the roads of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet itself is a swarm, a pulse with no indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo. Our compacted galaxy, its constellations trembling like flies caught in a spider web, until we die, and then the flies buzz away—while another accidental coherence counts to three to pass the time or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds a fraying map from the pocket of the day.

Your landscape sickens with a dry disease Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars Are of a child’s height in these battlefields. For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed —High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee— The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell. Is it for love, you ancient-minded towns, That on the tidy grass of your great graves And on your roads and riverways serene Between the corn with green flags in a row, Wheat amorous as hair and hills like breasts Each generation, ignorant of the last, Mumbling in sheds, embarrassed to salute, Comes back to choke on etiquette of hate? You manufacture history like jute— Labor is cheap, Virginia, for high deeds, But in your British dream of reputation The black man is your conscience and your cost. Here on the plains perfect for civil war The clapboard city like a weak mirage Of order rises from the sand to house These thousands and the paranoid Monroe; The sunrise gun rasps in the throat of heaven; The lungs of dawn are heavy and corrupt; We hawk and spit; our flag walks through the air Breathing hysteria thickly in each face. Through the long school of day, absent in heart, Distant in every thought but self we tread, Wheeling in blocks like large expensive toys That never understand except through fun. To steal aside as aimlessly as curs Is our desire; to stare at corporals As sceptically as boys; not to believe The misty-eyed letter and the cheap snapshot. To cross the unnatural frontier of your name Is our free dream, Virginia, and beyond, White and unpatriotic in our beds, To rise from sleep like driftwood out of surf. But stricter than parole is this same wall And these green clothes, a secret on the fields, In towns betray us to the arresting touch Of lady-wardens, good and evil wives. And far and fabulous is the word “Outside” Like “Europe” when the midnight liners sailed, Leaving a wake of ermine on the tide Where rubies drowned and eyes were softly drunk. Still we abhor your news and every voice Except the Personal Enemy’s, and songs That pumped by the great central heart of love On tides of energy at evening come. Instinctively to break your compact law Box within box, Virginia, and throw down The dangerous bright habits of pure form We struggle hideously and cry for fear. And like a very tired whore who stands Wrapped in the sensual crimson of her art High in the tired doorway of a street And beckons half-concealed the passerby, The sun, Virginia, on your Western stairs Pauses and smiles away between the trees, Motioning the soldier overhill to town To his determined hungry burst of joy.

The man in the yellow hard hat, the one with the mask across his nose and mouth, pulls the lever that turns the great arm of the crane up and over and sideways toward the earth; then the wrecking ball dangles crazily, so delicately, like a silver fob loosened from a waistcoat pocket: shocking to see the dust fly up and the timber sail up, then so slowly down, how the summer air bristles with a hundred splinters and the smallest is a splintered flame, for it takes so many lengthening erratic movements to tear away what stands between the sidewalk and the bell tower, where the pigeons now rise in grand indignant waves at such poor timing, such a deaf ear toward the music; in this way the silence between hand and lever is turned into a ragged and sorely lifted wing: the wrecking ball lurches in a narrowing arc until only the dust resists—the rest comes down, story by story, and is hauled off in flatbed trucks. Meanwhile the pedestrians come and go, now and then glancing at their accurate watches. Gradually, the dust becomes the rose light of autumn. But one evening a woman loses her way as she’s swept into a passing wave of commuters and she looks up toward the perfectly empty rectangle now hanging between the rutted mud and the sky. There along the sides of the adjacent building, like a set for a simple elementary school play, like the gestures of the dead in her children’s faces, she sees the flowered paper of her parents’ bedroom, the pink stripes leading up the stairs to the attic, and the outline of the claw- footed bathtub, font of the lost cathedral of childhood.

Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light. What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time. If a star at any time may tell us:Now.