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So I would hear out those lungs, The air split into nine levels, Some gift of tongues of the whistler In the invalid’s bed: my mother, Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations of one song; It is called Buckdancer’s Choice. For years, they have all been dying Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Of traveling minstrel shows; With them also an old woman Was dying of breathless angina, Yet still found breath enough To whistle up in my head A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel, An ex-slave who thrivingly danced To the ring of his own clashing light Through the thousand variations of one song All day to my mother’s prone music, The invalid’s warbler’s note, While I crept close to the wall Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break Through stratum after stratum of a tone Proclaiming what choices there are For the last dancers of their kind, For ill women and for all slaves Of death, and children enchanted at walls With a brass-beating glow underfoot, Not dancing but nearly risen Through barnlike, theatrelike houses On the wings of the buck and wing.

Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads At last we came into the unleashed wind; The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread. Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand. Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land. Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails, The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails, We pushed into an overworld of wind and light Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon, And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun. We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour, Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall, Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.

I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves seated in front of a fireplace, our house made somehow more gracious, and you said “There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I brought down with me to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature, and it is truth, that we came here, I told you, from other planets where we were lords, we were sent here, for some purpose the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted so beautifully over your face, did not return nor did that face of a bull you had acquired amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains, so cold, every star in the sky was a different color the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come I could not remember (then) what our purpose was but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that, I watched them propagated, flowing out, or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another. then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off: a madness, or a beginning?

Welcome, Flowers. Write your name on a name tag. Find a seat. Raise your leaf if you've taken a class here before. Let's go around the room. Call out your colors. I see someone's petal has fallen— please pick it up and put it in your desk where it belongs. Sprinklers at recess, fertilizer for lunch, and you may snack on the sun throughout the day. Excuse me . . . what's that in your mouth? A bee? Did you bring enough for everyone?

Buffalo Bill ’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death

I see him moving, in his legendary fleece, Between the superhighway and an Algonquin stone axe; Between the wild tribes, in their lost heat, And the dark blizzard of my Grandfather’s coat; Cold with the outdoor cold caught in the curls, Smelling of the world before the poll tax. And between the new macadam and the Scalp Act They got him by the short hair; had him clipped Who once was wild—and all five senses wild— Printing the wild with his hoof’s inflated script Before the times was money in the bank, Before it was a crime to be so mild. But history is a fact, and moves on feet Sharper than his, toward wallows deeper than. And the myth that covered all his moving parts, Grandfather’s time had turned into a coat; And what kept warm then, in the true world’s cold Is old and cold in a world his death began.

The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone. Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk, Those who saw the buffaloes are gone. And the buffaloes are gone.

The bug’s psalm: don’t get crushed. Afterlives feel meaningless but spring will come, push out the nubs the kids braid into pallets. Take up your pallet from lawns noon’s hardly touched. The small think gods just loll on clouds. Bugs think gods just crush.

lands on my pretty man’s forearm. Harmless, it isn’t deadly at all; makes his muscle flutter — the one that gets his hand to hold mine, or ball into a fist, or handle a gun. It’s a ladybug, or an Asian lady beetle everyone mistakes for a ladybug — eating whatever it lands on. My pretty man is asleep — at ease, or plotting like the bug. Or maybe the bug is a blowfly — eating my pretty man’s tan from his pretty arm. My man swats it without waking, as if he’s dreaming of an enemy, or me. When my pretty man isn’t asleep he’s got a temper. No, he is not asleep. He’s wide awake and wants me to tell you I’m wrong. Blowflies don’t eat skin, they lay eggs on skin. He knows all about blowfly larvae. Napoleon used them to clean war wounds, my cold pretty man says in that pretty way, with his cold pretty mouth. He’s eaten plenty of bugs before. On night watch, over there. Over there, they’re everywhere.

As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans, Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride, You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye, Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss. As my foot suggests that you leap in the air with your hips of a girl, My finger that praises your wheel and announces your voices of song, Flouncing your skirts, you blueness of joy, you flirt of politeness, You leap, you intelligence, essence of wheelness with silvery nose, And your platinum clocks of excitement stir like the hairs of a fern. But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and the smoke Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests, But now with your eyes that enter the future of roads you forget; You are all instinct with your phosphorous glow and your streaking hair. And now when we stop it is not as the bird from the shell that I leave Or the leathery pilot who steps from his bird with a sneer of delight, And not as the ignorant beast do you squat and watch me depart, But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.