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When the world was loveliness I was A composer, Borodin, my left eye Level with the floor beside toy men. Wild work and havoc they made, Being glad. I could draw a line Would run straight through the minds of men, Being a sociable angel, Music before and after, blushing. Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible. I was a child on the floor beside you, Making music, becoming small in the rosy Embrace of God’s best messenger. I loved your havoc and your hair.

Where we’d recently lain, exchanging a kiss, stork consorted with crane, limpkin with ibis. Was this as much wedding as there would ever be, the fowls’ foot-webbing, the identificatory ring around a throat? Exchange of earth and air: not a vow but a vote of confidence a feather might tip by a single scale ... That one’s a raconteur, so much salt in his tale; this one’s a countertenor, lilting above the feast. The archon of his hectare — spotted — spotted least. Here’s a little heckler ... penciled seagull in the margin. Following line by line the path you took, I imagine no print so fine.

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. When evening quickens faintly in the street, Wakening the appetites of life in some And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript, I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he at the end of the street, And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window, open to ask directions. I was always asking directions and always driving: to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror. The floors of my apartment would never come clean. Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp, smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke. What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar. Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre. Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head. I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg. No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.

Argument

My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton precluded fascination with flowers. I don’t remember communes, I remember ghettos. The riots were real, not products of hallucinogens. Free love had been at Redbones since black unemployment and credit saturation. The white women my mother cleaned for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess it was a small event, a resurrected African jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s what she was supposed to have, not dignity. My mother just couldn’t get excited about the Beatles, those mops she swilled in ammonia everyday on their heads. Besides, she didn’t work like a dog but like a woman; they aren’t the same. The hair was growing long for the same reasons Pinocchio’s nose did. I can think only of a lesbian draping crepe paper chains over my head to make a black Rapunzel possible; that’s how a white woman tried to lift my burdens. At the time I didn’t reject her for being lesbian or white but for both burdens. That was when I didn’t want Ivory soap to be what cleaned me, made me presentable to society. All the suds I’d seen were white, they still are but who cares? I’m more interested in how soap dwindles in my hand, under the faucet. I’m old enough to remember blocks of ice, old enough or poor enough. I remember chipping away at it, broken glass all over the floor. Later in the riots, the broken glass of looting tattled how desperate people were to keep cool. There are roses now in my mother’s yard. Sometimes she cuts them, sets them in Pepsi bottles throughout her rooms. She is, I admit, being sentimental. Looting her heart. My father who planted them is gone. That mop in the corner is his cane growing roots.

“Bottle gatherer, what do you hope to gain from this gathering of the discards of other people’s merrymaking, beyond the few cents you’ll accrue?” “I will enjoy the echo of their celebrating. And besides, the giant snake-head of the bottle bank is at least a block away. I am helping them.” “And does that offer you a pleasure in these days of random mass shootings in bars and music venues?” “Any bottle that has drops of wine in it and no drops of blood pleases me.” “Do you believe in God, my friend?” “I am not your friend, good Sir, although I wish you well. And I’ll need at least a year to answer your question.” “Fine then, tell me, do you differentiate between green, brown, and colorless bottles?” “No more than the skin colors or hair colors of our citizens.” “Can I help you, for no recompense, to bring the bottles to the big metal snake? “Ah, kind sir, I thank you, but some journeys are better taken alone."

They gave the city a stroke. Its memories are cordoned off. They could collapse on you. Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget now squares with another. If the word is Manchester it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels. To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her. Now Engels supports Max, and the British Union of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up, blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange, umber gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel. Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules. When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.

The bottoms of my shoes are clean From walking in the rain

Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured, Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell— We, who have sung the praises of the lord With every fiber in us, every cell. We, who did not manage to devote Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat, Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away. Every morning, every day, we’d rise And have the finest Chinese silks to wear; And we’d strike up the songs of paradise Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair, We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran, Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan: The world was ours, each one of us a queen. First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled, Then plaited with a starry diadem; We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled: But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them, Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden Where apple trees from paradise are found. No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.