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No dead on the streets today is a calm day, traffic is normal, there's ample room for the procession of yesterday's dead, room to add a dream, an idea, a little boy, an extra push for the beloved boat, a nom de guerre for the cell, a rose for a new love, a hand to a comrade Some room to stay alive for some time, enough time to shake your hands and reach the sun Today is a calm day, a pedestrian day in Beirut dancing in the streets, obstructing buses and not buying newspapers: the newspapers already went out to offices and the dead are resting on the Pavement of Martyrs at the outskirts of Sabra A calm day, our neighbor will step out in her nightgown to hang some sleepiness around us, some sluggish waking she's too lethargic to gather letters into words Where is life on this vast sauntering morning? We won't leave Out of the whiteness of her gown a reason will come to carry us down to the streets dead in her "Good morning"

At the mouth of the river, Moon, stars, an Arctic calm, The twin lights at the end of the piers Revolving with the smoothness We expect of supernatural machinery. Seen from down here on the beach The harbored ocean slowly tilts, Like a mirror discreetly manhandled By night from the giant room It was supposed to occupy forever. The mind says now, but the stars On their angelic gimbals roll And fade, a tide of constellations Breaking nowhere, every night About this time. Strike up the band. In the tumbledown bar, the singer Has fallen from stardom and grace, But though her interests nowadays Are wholly secular, she can Still refer back to the angels, And knowing that song, we share A moment with the saved before We leave to make the crossing. No captain, no ferry, but Cross we shall, believe you me.

Our storm is past, and that storm's tyrannous rage, A stupid calm, but nothing it, doth 'suage. The fable is inverted, and far more A block afflicts, now, than a stork before. Storms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us; In calms, Heaven laughs to see us languish thus. As steady'as I can wish that my thoughts were, Smooth as thy mistress' glass, or what shines there, The sea is now; and, as the isles which we Seek, when we can move, our ships rooted be. As water did in storms, now pitch runs out; As lead, when a fir'd church becomes one spout. And all our beauty, and our trim, decays, Like courts removing, or like ended plays. The fighting-place now seamen's rags supply; And all the tackling is a frippery. No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday. Earth's hollownesses, which the world's lungs are, Have no more wind than the upper vault of air. We can nor lost friends nor sought foes recover, But meteor-like, save that we move not, hover. Only the calenture together draws Dear friends, which meet dead in great fishes' jaws; And on the hatches, as on altars, lies Each one, his own priest, and own sacrifice. Who live, that miracle do multiply, Where walkers in hot ovens do not die. If in despite of these we swim, that hath No more refreshing than our brimstone bath; But from the sea into the ship we turn, Like parboil'd wretches, on the coals to burn. Like Bajazet encag'd, the shepherds' scoff, Or like slack-sinew'd Samson, his hair off, Languish our ships. Now as a myriad Of ants durst th' emperor's lov'd snake invade, The crawling gallies, sea-gaols, finny chips, Might brave our pinnaces, now bed-rid ships. Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair death, out-push'd me first, I lose my end; for here, as well as I, A desperate may live, and a coward die. Stag, dog, and all which from or towards flies, Is paid with life or prey, or doing dies. Fate grudges us all, and doth subtly lay A scourge, 'gainst which we all forget to pray. He that at sea prays for more wind, as well Under the poles may beg cold, heat in hell. What are we then? How little more, alas, Is man now, than before he was? He was Nothing; for us, we are for nothing fit; Chance, or ourselves, still disproportion it. We have no power, no will, no sense; I lie, I should not then thus feel this misery.

Calmly we walk through this April’s day, Metropolitan poetry here and there, In the park sit pauper and rentier, The screaming children, the motor-car Fugitive about us, running away, Between the worker and the millionaire Number provides all distances, It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now, Many great dears are taken away, What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...) Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.) (This is the school in which we learn ...) What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suffer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days Restored all life from infancy, The children shouting are bright as they run (This is the school in which they learn ...) Ravished entirely in their passing play! (... that time is the fire in which they burn.) Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then? No more? No more? From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day, Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume Not where they are now (where are they now?) But what they were then, both beautiful; Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

The mind goes caw, caw, caw, caw, dark and fast. The orphan heart cries out, “Save me. Purchase me as the sun makes the fruit ripe. I am one with them and cannot feed on winter dawns.” The black birds are wrangling in the fields and have no kindness, all sinew and stick bones. Both male and female. Their eyes are careless of cold and rain, of both day and night. They love nothing and are murderous with each other. All things of the world are bowing or being taken away. Only a few calves will be chosen, the rest sold for meat. The sound of the wind grows bigger than the tree it’s in, lessens only to increase.Haw, haw the crows call, awake or asleep, in white, in black.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things— at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

There was a graven image of Desire Painted with red blood on a ground of gold Passing between the young men and the old, And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire, And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire. Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold, The insatiable Satiety kept hold, Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire. The senses and the sorrows and the sins, And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture, Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins. Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate, Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.

Eight-year-old sitting in Bramhall’s field, shoes scuffed from kicking a stone, too young for a key but old enough now to walk the short mile back from school. You’ve spied your mother down in the village crossing the street, purse in her fist. In her other hand her shopping bag nurses four ugly potatoes caked in mud, a boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fish in grease-proof paper, the price totted up in penciled columns of shillings and pence. How warm must she be in that winter coat? On Old Mount Road the nearer she gets the smaller she shrinks, until you reach out to carry her home on the flat of your hand or your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.

The pathways of my thoughts are cobbled with mesquite blocks and narrow-winding, long and aged like the streets of san fernando de bexar y la villa real de san antonio pensive y callados cada uno con su chiste idiosyncracy crazy turns that are because they are, centuries magic cada uno hecho as í , y with a careful capricho touch, as í . They curl slowly into ripples, earthy and cool like the R í o Medina under the trees silently singing, standing still, and flowing, becoming, became and always as always still fertile, laughing, loving, alivianada R í o Medina under the trees, celebrating life. They end up in the monte, chaparral, llenos de burrs, spurs pero libres Running through the hills freefoot con aire azul blue breaths peacefully taken between each lope remembering venado remembering conejos remembering where we came from

They had questioned him for hours. Who exactly was he? And when He told them, they questioned him again. When they accepted who he was, as Someone not involved, they pulled out his fingernails. Then They took him to a waste-ground somewhere near the Horseshoe Bend, and told him What he was. They shot him nine times. A dark umbilicus of smoke was rising from a heap of burning tyres. The bad smell he smelt was the smell of himself. Broken glass and knotted Durex. The knuckles of a face in a nylon stocking. I used to see him in the Gladstone Bar, Drawing pints for strangers, his almost perfect fingers flecked with scum.