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Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed he. O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short and baffled, bassett-legged. All things knuckled, I have no winter left, in my sore rememory, to melt down for drinking water. Shrunk down. Your wedding slides the way wiry dark hairs do, down a swimming pool drain. So I am drained. Sincerely. I wish you every chapped bird on this pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust. Dust is plural: infinite dust. I will sink in the sun, I will crawl towards the heavy drawing and design the curtains in the room of never marrying you. Because it is a sinking, because today’s perfect weather is a later life’s smut. This soiled future unplans love. I keep unplanning the same Sunday. Leg and flower, breeze and terrier, I have no garden and couldn’t be happier. Please, don’t lose me here. I am sorry my clutch is all tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed kind of muscle and alone. I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine in another room. In another’s.

It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine. And finding him, as always, newly minted From when I first encountered him in school. Today I’m overcome with astonishment At the way we girls denied all that was mean In those revered philosophers we studied; Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive; Irrelevant, at best, to noble discourse Among the sex, the only sex that counted. Wounded, we pretended not to mind it And wore tight sweaters to tease our shy professor. We sat in autumn sunshine “as the clouds arose From slimy desires of the flesh, and from Youth’s seething spring.” Thank you, Augustine. Attempting to seem blasé, our cheeks on fire, It didn’t occur to us to rush from the room. Instead we brushed aside “the briars of unclean desire” And struggled on through mires of misogyny Till we arrived at Kierkegaard, and began to see That though Saint A. and Søren had much in common Including fear and trembling before women, The Saint scared himself, while Søren was scared of us. Had we, poor girls, been flattered by their thralldom? Yes, it was always us, the rejected feminine From whom temptation came. It was our flesh With its deadly sweetness that led them on. Yet how could we not treasure Augustine, “Stuck fast in the bird-lime of pleasure”? That roomful of adolescent poets manqué Assuaged, bemused by music, let the meaning go. Swept by those psalmic cadences, we were seduced! Some of us tried for a while to be well-trained souls And pious seekers, enmeshed in the Saint’s dialectic: Responsible for our actions, yet utterly helpless. A sensible girl would have barked like a dog before God. We students, children still, were shocked to learn The children these men desired were younger than we! Augustine fancied a girl about eleven, The age of Adeodatus, Augustine’s son. Søren, like Poe, eyed his girl before she was sixteen, To impose his will on a malleable child, when She was not equipped to withstand or understand him. Ah, the Pygmalion instinct! Mold the clay! Create the compliant doll that can only obey, Expecting to be abandoned, minute by minute. It was then I abandoned philosophy, A minor loss, although I majored in it. But we were a group of sunny innocents. I don’t believe we knew what evil meant. Now I live with a well-trained soul who deals with evil, Including error, material or spiritual, Easily, like changing a lock on the kitchen door. He prays at set times and in chosen places (At meals, in church), while I Pray without thinking how or when to pray, In a low mumble, several times a day, Like running a continuous low fever; The sexual impulse for the most part being over. Believing I believe. Not banking on it ever. It’s afternoon. I sit here drinking kir And reading Kierkegaard: “All sin begins with fear.” (True. We lie first from terror of our parents.) In, I believe, an oblique crack at Augustine, Søren said by denying the erotic It was brought to the attention of the world. The rainbow curtain rises on the sensual: Christians must admit it before they can deny it. He reflected on his father’s fierce repression Of the sexual, which had bent him out of shape; Yet he had to pay obeisance to that power: He chose his father when he broke with his Regina. Søren said by denying the erotic It is brought to the attention of the world. You must admit it before you can deny it.

I never had to make one, no sickening weeks by ocean, no waiting for the aerogrammes that gradually ceased to come. Spent the babysitting money on novels, shoes, and movies, yet the neighborhood stayed empty. It had nothing to do with a journey not undertaken, not with dialect, nor with a land that waited to be rediscovered, then rejected. As acid rain collected above the suburban hills, I tried to imagine being nothing, tried to be able to claim, “I have no culture,” and be believed. Yet the land occupies the person even as the semblance of freedom invites a kind of recklessness. Tradition, unobserved, unasked, hangs on tight; ancestors roam into reverie, interfering at the most awkward moments, first flirtations, in doorways and dressing rooms— But of course. Here in America, no one escapes. In the end, each traveler returns to the town where, everyone knew, she hadn’t even been born.

I just had the old Dodge in the shop with that same damned front-end problem, and I was out, so to speak, for a test run, loafing along, maybe 35 m.p.h., down the old Corvallis road, holding her out of the ruts and potholes. That’s out in Montana, the Bitterroot Valley. Long ways from home is how they say it. Long ways from home, boys, long long ways from home. Might as well not put this clunker in the shop and keep my hard-earned in my pocket, she wobbles and humps like a scared rabbit. But it’s a real fine summer day in Corvallis, and I’m loafing along watching the sprayers do their slow drag on the fields of alfalfa, and I come to a side road with a little green sign says “Kurtz Lane” and I said to myself out loud, “Mistah Kurtz—he alive. Him doing just fine,” because of the sign, you see, and because I’m lonesome and maybe kind of bitter in spite of the sunshine. It’s still a goddamn long ways from home. That’s one thing, though, that Heart of Darkness, I read that story every year, I never forget that crazy old son-of-a-bitch, that Kurtz. And the next thing I see about a quarter-mile down the road is somebody small on the shoulder, a kid looking for a ride home, I figure. And he’s a kid all right, maybe ten or eleven, but no Montana boy, he’s an Oriental, one of those Laotians that got resettled. Can’t figure why they brought them to Montana. He’s got those big eyes and caved-in cheeks like the pictures on the TV during Vietnam, and his mouth is open a little. I say to myself, I’ll give him a ride if he wants, and I even begin to slow down, but he didn’t put up his thumb. Just when I went by, he waved, real quick and shy, but still like he was trying to reach me. I drove on. Then I bust out crying.

Past the fountain out of repair And the boarded diner A small studio You’d never told anyone about Where old clothes have remained Right where you’ve dumped them Side by side With random notes and sketches When someone close to you Has a different idea of what you represent He insisted You’ll write a check for the loan There were other misjudgments As well. Exits were being blocked Down every hall I walked Until a sort of muscle memory— Well, I knew it all along, of course, But thought it was in the future, It rested like a memory— This desire For a place respecting anonymity Oiling your .38 Special, Like a criminal readying for benefits A bottle of Jack Daniels— This and more Shaded by echoing buildings With a glance toward the harbor The water rough with small debris Today

(excerpt) I A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink, Might tempt, should heaven see meet, An angel's lips to kiss, we think, A baby's feet. Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat They stretch and spread and wink Their ten soft buds that part and meet. No flower-bells that expand and shrink Gleam half so heavenly sweet As shine on life's untrodden brink A Baby's feet. II A baby's hands, like rosebuds furled Whence yet no leaf expands, Ope if you touch, though close upcurled, A baby's hands. Then, fast as warriors grip their brands When battle's bolt is hurled, They close, clenched hard like tightening bands. No rosebuds yet by dawn impearled Match, even in loveliest lands, The sweetest flowers in all the world— A baby's hands. III A baby's eyes, ere speech begin, Ere lips learn words or sighs, Bless all things bright enough to win A baby's eyes. Love, while the sweet thing laughs and lies, And sleep flows out and in, Sees perfect in them Paradise. Their glance might cast out pain and sin, Their speech make dumb the wise, By mute glad godhead felt within A baby's eyes.

Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend, Veiling with gentlest hush the landscape still, The lonely battlement, the farthest hill And wood, I think of those who have no friend; Who now, perhaps, by melancholy led, From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts, Retiring, wander to the ring-dove’s haunts Unseen; and watch the tints that o’er thy bed Hang lovely; oft to musing Fancy’s eye Presenting fairy vales, where the tir’d mind Might rest beyond the murmurs of mankind, Nor hear the hourly moans of misery! Alas for man! that Hope’s fair views the while Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

I stood at a bus corner one afternoon, waiting for the #2. An old guy stood waiting too. I stared at him. He caught my stare, grinned, gap-toothed. Will you sign my coat? he said. Held out a pen. He wore a dirty canvas coat that had signatures all over it, hundreds, maybe thousands. I’m trying to get everybody, he said. I signed. On a little space on a pocket. Sometimes I remember: I am one of everybody.

What I like about your country she tells me is the toilets I wouldn’t mind bringing one home but it wouldn’t do much good she says she likes the bathtubs and the refrigerators but she is not so crazy about the tortillas which are not made properly or the cilantro which tastes like soap Also the freeways ruin the landscape and the children watch television when they could be playing soccer and the teenagers stare at their parents with bare faces that say give it to me and the abuelitos are like dogs to the children the children walk by with no respect mangoes here are not so good not enough rain and the women here have so many clothes I think your country has the most wonderful bathrooms and everyone has a house although tents would be nicer I think or boats or even just sleeping in a tree My family has a tree we live under but the tree has no toilet I grant you that.