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He rides at their head; A crutch by his saddle just slants in view, One slung arm is in splints, you see, Yet he guides his strong steed—how coldly too. He brings his regiment home— Not as they filed two years before, But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn, Like castaway sailors, who—stunned By the surf’s loud roar, Their mates dragged back and seen no more— Again and again breast the surge, And at last crawl, spent, to shore. A still rigidity and pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle’s pains and prayers, Marches and watches slow. There are welcoming shouts, and flags; Old men off hat to the Boy, Wreaths from gay balconies fall at his feet, But to him— there comes alloy. It is not that a leg is lost, It is not that an arm is maimed, It is not that the fever has racked— Self he has long disclaimed. But all through the Seven Days’ Fight, And deep in the Wilderness grim, And in the field-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim Lean brooding in Libby, there came— Ah heaven!—what truth to him.

A single bed. A single room. I sing Of man alone on the skew surface of life. No kith, no kin, no cat, no kid, no wife, No Frigidaire, no furniture, no ring. Yes, but the perfect state of weightlessness Is a vacuum the natural mind abhors: The strait bed straightway magnetizes whores; The bare room, aching, itches to possess. Thus I no sooner shut the tan tin door Behind me than I am at once at home. Will I, nill I, a budget pleasure dome Will rear itself in Suite R-34. A pleasure dome of Klees and Watteaus made, Of chairs and couches from the Fair Exchange, Of leavings from the previous rich and strange Tenant, of fabrics guaranteed to fade. Here I will entertain the young idea Of Cambridge, wounded, winsome, and sardonic; Here I will walk the uttermost euphonic Marches of English, where no lines are clear. Here I will take the interchangeable Parts of ephemerid girls to fit my bed; Here death will first enter my freshman head On a visitor’s passport, putting one tangible Word in my mouth, a capsule for the day When I will be evicted from my home Suite home so full of life and damned to roam Bodiless and without a thing to say. Footnote: Mrs. Circassian An orphan home. But into this eclectic Mass of disasters sails Mrs. Circassian, Maid without parallel, queen beyond question Of household gods, gas and electric. She puts the room right with a basilisk Look, pats it into shape like a pillow; Under her hard hand, the Chinese willow Learns how to live with an abstraction. Risk All and win all is her maiden motto, Which makes mere matter fall into its place, Dress right and form platoons to save its face, And suffers Pollock to lie down with Watteau.

On the news tonight, a presidential colonoscopy — a tale of   how for three whole hours the chief  exec of   trouble handed trouble to his vice (although no double trouble came), but then no more details revealed: no bacterial armies multiplying in a flare of  war among kingly polyps & no kinky creases. Welcome to the presidential gut, bubble gum pink, not a spot of  shit (after a quick administrative cleanout) where global decisions stir & sit in state, and the first physician’s mighty pointer traces only microdrops of   blood in secret places.

More than the beetles turned russet, sunset, dragging their shield, more than the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon, it’s the bees I love this time of year. Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips of too many flowers for one summer but still must go on hunting, one secret closing, another ensuing, picking lock after lock, rapping the glass, getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap, almost winter, almost dark, reading far past the last paragraph into the back blank page, acknowledgments, and history of type. I think when my head finally cracks out will come one of those ravening scouts autumnal with hunger beyond any sipping, swallowing, beyond the hive’s teeming factory’s needs. I think maybe then, when I’m dying like a bug in a puddle of dish soap, I’ll be relieved, my wings wet capes and not working, antennae slicked back and not working, eye that sees the ruby above going out, eye that sees the ruby within getting brighter as I drag myself to a tomato ripening on the window sill, reddest, softest island of my last planet, last aureola, stinger waving and useless. I’ll wait then, while air from the north rushes gulf air, a tree indicating wildly, each leaf woke in orange outcry. It won’t be suffering, exactly. Rain coming, then gone, a chill that means all my barbarous kind are alone and perishing, our unrecognizable young buried and waiting, bodies of fire becoming bodies of air. I don’t think there’s any way to prepare.

Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck, he’s clamped for good in an iron lung. When it’s time to eat he nudges his head a sweaty mile to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while. His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes steer me from cupboard to fridge: he would like his chicken burrito cut into bite-size pieces, a bent straw for his glass of water, please. How does the body live its only life in a cage? I watch him compute the distance from bar to bar, and squeeze between them with a violent compression, a fury of bursting free that doesn’t last. His will is a crowbar, angled to pry up the rooted intractable weight of matter. I watch him slyly, I check out the way he does it. He does it. But pain in its absolute privacy weighs what it weighs. I come here to study the soul, posing one question a dozen ways, most of them silent. “If I’m only a body,” he laughs, “I’m up shit creek.” His laugh a gritty eruption of rock, salt and breath. Like me he writes poems but he does it letter by letter on a propped keyboard, the mouth-stick wobbling between his teeth. That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable. He won’t ever say, “The grass is very green” when it’s only green.

Did they enjoy this, those honorary ancestors Of ours, whom we may not speak of as Indians now, But, rather, as Native Americans? Did they, that is, Have the opportunity to take in such views? For there were no roads then, slicing through The hills, opening vistas like this. Astonishing! Unless, perhaps, they were upon the Delaware, A kind of road itself. But, otherwise, would not The land itself have been an inconvenience, The changing leaves an oracle of cruelties To come and not, as for the tourists on a bus, A postcard to sweep up at a glance and then Go home to the similar view they own— One stately maple, or two, intensely orange? Only the birds, may be, might have known These colors, the sudden shift of gears from green To ocher, umber, brightest yellow, deepest red, The colors of the gleeful dead. For birds can fly Above the trees and see what we see from a bus. But is there gladness in their flight? Might it Not as well be night? And Indians (forgive the word), Did they delight more than a bird? Were there Esthetes then as now, before the ax, The ox, the plow? I must believe there were— And why? Because they traded all Manhattan For a handful of ceramic beads. They knew, As we, that a glint of pure bright blue Is worth a whole October day, or two.

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant, driving over the hills from work. There are the dark parts on the road when you pass through clumps of wood and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean, but that doesn’t make the road an allegory. I should call Marie and apologize for being so boring at dinner last night, but can I really promise not to be that way again? And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing in what certainly looks like sexual arousal. Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail; the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves are full of infant chlorophyll, the very tint of inexperience. Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio, and on the highway overpass, the only metaphysical vandal in America has written MEMORY LOVES TIME in big black spraypaint letters, which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back. Last night I dreamed of X again. She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets. Years ago she penetrated me but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, I never got her out, but now I’m glad. What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky. Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more.

Red Mupits’ breath, in moonlight, outside a child’s bedroom window Hunter’s bones scattered on the prairie Fragrance of Comanche gangstas who entered The Zoo Club and assassinated the bosses of Underworld Seven, a Navajo crime syndicate Little Stoney Burgess’s footprints after catching ghost sickness by running through Post Oak Cemetery chased by snot-nosed bully, Blender Plenty Bear Blue Lips of the poisoned tribal chairman collapsed on the buffet table at the 1974 Comanche Nation Inaugural Dinner Silk handkerchief drawn over the stuffed owl used to converse with the dead In the woods, it’s the laughter of Deer Woman as she stomps her male victim to death Electric guitar distortion of the Messiah playing Jimi Hendrix’s Machine Gun as she strolls into the Indian bar Yellow Coyote’s eyes in the darkness of the backseat at midnight as you speed down Mt. Scott, on a dare, with the headlights off Crushed buffalo kidney stones used in graffiti to magically imprison the river-witch underneath the I-44 bridge Intricate beadwork on Lucifer’s cane left at the funnel cake stand at Comanche Fair Flashing ignition light to the engines of the great abyss

Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I will give you a color, like a new flower in a bud vase on your desk. Every day I will paint you, as women color each other with henna on hands and on feet. Red as henna, as cinnamon, as coals after the fire is banked, the cardinal in the feeder, the roses tumbling on the arbor their weight bending the wood the red of the syrup I make from petals. Orange as the perfumed fruit hanging their globes on the glossy tree, orange as pumpkins in the field, orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs who come to eat it, orange as my cat running lithe through the high grass. Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes, yellow as a hill of daffodils, yellow as dandelions by the highway, yellow as butter and egg yolks, yellow as a school bus stopping you, yellow as a slicker in a downpour. Here is my bouquet, here is a sing song of all the things you make me think of, here is oblique praise for the height and depth of you and the width too. Here is my box of new crayons at your feet. Green as mint jelly, green as a frog on a lily pad twanging, the green of cos lettuce upright about to bolt into opulent towers, green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear glass, green as wine bottles. Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums, bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort, blue as Saga. Blue as still water. Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat. Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop. Cobalt as the midnight sky when day has gone without a trace and we lie in each other’s arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.