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Welcome to Jackson: City of Grace and Benevolence City of Grace, you open, you part your curtains and smile like a hostess when we call your name, you tender what any traveler needs, a call to ease, a balm, a kindness, whatever storm. You take us in. City of Grace and Benevolence, you say you know what solace means, burned so often they called you Chimneyville, and now you can't forget, you've written it in bronze outside the City Hall the War made a hospital for the Yankee and for your Rebel sons, like the one who is always dying outside the Capitol. City of Fame, you hold him still, laurel on your crown, fan making a hand of wind to soothe his face and fill the eagle's wings spread above to promise, Virtute et armis, to say again just how far you'll go. City of Remembrance, you keep so well, you show us where Welty lived, the house still there, how she skated to the library, through the Capitol, the book now cast and open in her hands. Tell me now, City of Embrace, of the newsreels' children rounded from their march, flags gathered, the children trucked to the fairground cages, the ones who peer out through the chicken wire. City of Richard Wright and Ross Barnett, tell me not just where the Governor pled I love Mississippi, I love her people, her customs,

Over the edge of the purple down, Where the single lamplight gleams, Know ye the road to the Merciful Town That is hard by the Sea of Dreams – Where the poor may lay their wrongs away, And the sick may forget to weep? But we – pity us! Oh, pity us! We wakeful; ah, pity us! – We must go back with Policeman Day – Back from the City of Sleep! Weary they turn from the scroll and crown, Fetter and prayer and plough – They that go up to the Merciful Town, For her gates are closing now. It is their right in the Baths of Night Body and soul to steep, But we – pity us! ah, pity us! We wakeful; oh, pity us! – We must go back with Policeman Day – Back from the City of Sleep! Over the edge of the purple down, Ere the tender dreams begin, Look – we may look – at the Merciful Town, But we may not enter in! Outcasts all, from her guarded wall Back to our watch we creep: We – pity us! ah, pity us! We wakeful; ah, pity us! – We that go back with Policeman Day – Back from the City of Sleep!

marches in uniform down the traffic stripe at the center of the street, counts time to the unseen web that has rearranged the air around him, his left hand stiff as a leather strap along his side, the other saluting right through the decades as if they weren't there, as if everyone under ninety were pervasive fog the morning would dispel in its own good time, as if the high school band all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms across the drift, nothing but empty graves now to round off another century, the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew, the wives and children blowing kisses.

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year We ride by their music every hour in cabs on trains hearing the pit pat of our grown-wise pulse shut in shut out from the animals of the dry season the losers and boozers, we must not admit our eyes into the courtyard the whimsy of chance and our other excuses— dollars in pocket— to write beautiful songs is all I ask, God to do right with friends and love a woman and live to eighty have people listen to the story of my trip to America The elephants of reckoning are beaten and hungry and walk their solitary horrors out every sunrise slurping coffee bought with change while in some houses freedom-bound lovers embrace late and read Tagore about the people working underneath the falling of empires.

1 Who will honor the city without a name If so many are dead and others pan gold Or sell arms in faraway countries? What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent— Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge? This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole, —In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains— I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees. The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts. A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar. In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac, Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile For despite Metternich all was not yet lost. And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée. 2 In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo, About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball In the city from which no voice could reach me. Minerals did not sound the last trumpet. There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava. In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed. Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood. From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom. In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky. The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true. In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem Of someone who had lived next door, entitled "An Hour of Thought." I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill. 3 With flutes, with torches And a drum, boom, boom, Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row. He walks arm in arm with his young lady, And over them swallows fly. They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes, As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street. And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud Over the Humanities Student Club, Division of Creative Writing. 4 Books, we have written a whole library of them. Lands, we have visited a great many of them. Battles, we have lost a number of them. Till we are no more, we and our Maryla. 5 Understanding and pity, We value them highly. What else? Beauty and kisses, Fame and its prizes, Who cares? Doctors and lawyers, Well-turned-out majors, Six feet of earth. Rings, furs, and lashes, Glances at Masses, Rest in peace. Sweet twin breasts, good night. Sleep through to the light, Without spiders. 6 The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge And kindles fire on landscapes "made from nature": The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana; The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village. The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly, While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves, I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me. 7 When I got rid of grieving And the glory I was seeking, Which I had no business doing, I was carried by dragons Over countries, bays, and mountains, By fate, or by what happens. Oh yes, I wanted to be me. I toasted mirrors weepily And learned my own stupidity. From nails, mucous membrane, Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen Whose house is made? Mine. So what else is new? I am not my own friend. Time cuts me in two. Monuments covered with snow, Accept my gift. I wandered; And where, I don't know. 8 Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp. Thus the feast of Insubstantiality. Under a gathering of clouds anywhere. In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo. No density. No harness of stone. Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke. And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets. 9 Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing. For I love the light too, perhaps the light only. Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me. So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen, Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes, And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church. 10 Unexpressed, untold. But how? The shortness of life, the years quicker and quicker, not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn. Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts, giggles above a railing, pigtails askew, sittings on chamberpots upstairs when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter. Female humanity, children's snots, legs spread apart, snarled hair, the milk boiling over, stench, shit frozen into clods. And those centuries, conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night instead of playing something like a game of chess or dancing an intellectual ballet. And palisades, and pregnant sheep, and   pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters, and cows cured by incantations. 11 Not the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river. Small whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts. So we trudged through the slush of melting snow To buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie. A fortune-teller hawking: "Your destiny, your planets." And a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine. Another, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking, By the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine. 12 Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert seven centuries ago. Where ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone it would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one. What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering? It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us. Perhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles inside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever lived. They trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets from Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray hair. Here there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the day are simultaneous. At dawn shit-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees at the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags. Rattling their wheels, "Courier" and "Speedy" move against the current to Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spread- eagled by his oars. At St. Peter and Paul's the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile over a nun who has indecent thoughts. Bearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the counter, instructing her twelve shopgirls. And all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric, preparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem. Black and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the cathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the half-charred oak logs in the hearth. Carrying her servant's-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in mourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the Romers' house in Bakszta Street. How it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not to be melted by the breath of these brief lives. And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open my eyes once more on a useless end of the world? I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door. But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away. The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atro- cious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire. And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights, there was not less bitterness but more. If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is transformed, at last, into harmony. Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun's secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names. The castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still a hardly audible—is it Mozart's Requiem?—music. In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not to find the desired word. Berkeley, 1968

I have a word for it — the way the surface waited all day to be a silvery pause between sky and city — which is elver. And another one for how the bay shelved cirrus clouds piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, which is elver too. The old Blackrock baths have been neglected now for fifty years, fine cracks in the tiles visible as they never were when I can I can I can shouted Harry Vernon as he dived from the highest board curving down into salt and urine his cry fading out through the half century it took to hear as a child that a glass eel had been seen entering the seawater baths at twilight — also known as elver— and immediately the word begins a delicate migration — a fine crazing healing in the tiles — the sky deepening above a city that has always been unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea to which there now comes at dusk a translucent visitor yearning for the estuary.

Emotion scoops the footpath’s velvet edges, estate agents’ bluster calibrates the street’s livability, treeless, ajar with fridges bunked out. Investors wave sheets of sums to air, a tiny computer chalked on glass, loving the artist’s marble noose in adjacent pop-up gallery they might’ve forked out for, but didn’t. It was no use crying now though her vale of tears candies a conquest, with stuck name tag and good insurance that barely cost a sou. A countdown into space echoes, blue lorikeets flit the race and pigeons chew the eaves for reassurance over suckling locals and tourist dandies.

Acts of love have material effects. For a woman tending the sacred fire, these include the risk of becoming an extinguisher of flames essential to civic life. It is a burden to put out what others hold as central to faith in coherence. Acts of faith have material effects — a Vestal Virgin touched by encounter must be buried alive, a beautiful metaphor for shame itself, which squirms even under all that dirt. Thus, the dead learn too late that devotion should be unidirectional, a straight line from here to suffocation. Love must not bleed at the edges, must not meet others in the banal spaces of civic life. It is a burden to personify. If Vesta’s hearth is the site of the sacred, its material effects are destruction: burning, consumption, constant hunger for more wood. Acts of destruction have fantasmatic effects. For a body surviving encounter, these include civic life, shame; the risk of being a proxy — tender of the hearth belonging to the public, by way of the goddess, who embodies a dream of faith in coherence. Material effects extinguish themselves, eventually, as when a woman touched in the correct way undoes the burden of love and puts out, taking the goddamn city in and under.

for Stanley Cavell I Must we mean what we say? Stick to it, Be bound to, chained up beside the house, Teased by boys on bicycles, fireflies, The seasons as they pass out of reach? We could try meaning nothing, a way Favored in the brightest corridors By those who pass from life to death through Halls of learning and replace marriage With justice. To mean nothing is to Have nothing at heart, to be chained up To the right of and a bit behind The body: without marriage, justice Prevails as the clenched hand of culture On the most brutal bridle prevails Against the motion beneath that wants To claim the hand of culture. Against The Horse in the horse, the Rider in The rider, the heart beneath the tongue. II In the anarchies of the sensuous Hands the order of love is leaping. In a far corner of the landscape A lover’s hands leap in the skin’s light, And heroes’ hands lap like tongues on necks Curved with significance. The horses Stamp and whinny, hint of caprioles As urgently as our mute souls And it is impossible to mean Anything but motion. A dispatch From the graceful landscape will arrive: “He must be told.” Lovers will obey Thus leaving terror and time alone To fend for themselves. I will obey, Am obeying now, making poems From chains, leaving the season alone— You must be told(already your horse Leaps beneath you!)what you meant to say.