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I watched the nesting redstart when we camped by Lake Winnepesaukee. The tent pegs pulled out in soft soil. Rain made pawprints on the canvas. So much clings to the shoes, the old shoes must be discarded, but we're fools to think that does it: burning the scraps. I listened for the rain at Mt. Monadnock, for the barred owl on a tent peak among scrub pines in Michigan. I can hear my father stir and the cot creak. The flap opens. He goes out and never returns though the coffee steams on the grill and the redstart sings in the alders.

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down. On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors' shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by the martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on. Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word. Warsaw, 1943

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died (it’s there in her museum in Meersburg), on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s, Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland, in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes rested on white pillows till they looked their last— all of it junk now, or no longer extant, unattributable, anonymous in its insentient and continual disintegration. We bear within us the seeds of all the gods, the gene of death and the gene of love— who separated them, the words and things, who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end, the few boards and the floods of tears, home for a few wretched hours. Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote, bed and tears too impalpable, no No, no Yes, birth and bodily pain and faith an undefinable surge, a lurch, a power stirring in its sleep moved bed and tears— sleep well!

can I do this spiritual drag, collective agony wishful thinking, fearful peek-a-boo actuality about to be read in unapologetic disinterested participation against fantasy without benefit familiarity, remembering distortion, forgetting drudgery necessary to consume anything cement sorrow, surrounded by transfer credit surcharge immortal siege ideology, submissive to appliance bodyisms in doubt in the face of stupidity—oops—knowledge, derivative of skin, bones, eyes and the rest, opposite abrupt aggressive remoteness here to serve another ascendant say-so? I tremble in doubt, divided by multiple entry points and explosive content wrapped in rambling overlays sent to the council on commentary, and without exception the animation either frenetic or dull, shifts to no options left, recognizing useless hope in the face of bomb holes caused by numbering digits.

Happens this time in answer to indecency Lit by the yellow shop windows cast Unkind to you, that light You say, Sit, Ubu, sit, or Hey, I like your weave This avenue for instance Gateway to escapade You can see from the beginning to its end All-embracing greed Distracting appliqués of altruism Small pomme de terre Can you tell whose hand on the basinet and that does what for you Warmth all in the light Sight all in garage park hallway Morning's dusk on pause You stand body in profile What you don't fill in the doorway stays empty More than overcome I know you're there and unseal my lips

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark that I cut from a tree with a penknife. There is no other way to express adequately the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility that hands you the horizon on a platter. I am also writing this in a wooden canoe, a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching, resting the birch bark against my knees. I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back, but I am thinking of winter, snow piled up in all the provinces and the solemnity of the long grain-ships that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound. O Canada, as the anthem goes, scene of my boyhood summers, you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table, you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night, you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock. You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery, So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin, and Peril Over the Airport, one of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series by Helen Wills whom some will remember as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories. What has become of the languorous girls who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse, Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse,

I count nineteen white blossoms which would not be visible except for their wiry stems that catapult them above the grass like the last white pop of fireworks, a toothed blast of leaf below. It’s the Fourth of July on the bank of Hinkson Creek fifty years ago, the powder- bitterness, the red combustion, my life, since anemos means wind, means change, no matter that I’ve been held all along in this thin twenty miles of atmosphere. The wind’s disturbed the leaves, rolled the waves, convincing enough. Each star of a bloom is driven upward almost against its small nature. All it can do is hang on and die. Still, it did want to go as high as possible, for some reason, to sway up there like an art object.

for Michael S. Harper Billie Holiday’s burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia her signature under that ruined face. (Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass, magic spoon, magic needle. Take all day if you have to with your mirror and your bracelet of song.) Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

Because the silence of the dead, that blue expanse of sky about to ashen here above my head, is easily ignored, our tears are blamed on flowers whitening limbs of trees, the very air, with hymns of summer pollen no one hears except for women—old, devout. And now, these humid months, dispute them not: midsummer has no name among the dead, no Latin root to which it can be traced, no swarm of conjugations to decipher. So little left to write this summer, my mind now weak in handling form, which I still cling to just the same.

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations Mad and stark naked Sidles The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis Sidles All three across heaven with a rocking motion. The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.' But the calms are rare The winds baffling but not light And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon All in the pallescent Sargasso weed And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance For What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon? (Truth like starlight crookedly) What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'? And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we. But there is no snow here, nor lilies. The night is glutinous In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps Smoulder: distant fireback of copse Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond The constellations which have stopped working (?) Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps. On edge of lawn a glowworm Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn And in the centre the rugate trees Though seeming as if they go up in smoke Are held like cardboard where they are. Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move. Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation (prandial).' But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother. Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for Praxinoê' But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's eyelashes. Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the value of its beauty.' Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.' But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse. Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.' Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool." Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy? Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college, Iphogenês saw God and died, And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian, With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and tripthongs, Choctaw with three different clicks Each letter is somebody But the Crab is nobody Nobody Nobody A ganglion of neurotic imitations Composed of each letter in turn Jointed by conflicts he does not want A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand. Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude Haunted by phantoms of his female self Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus: Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen This he desires, but despises: Bhah! Always sideways, crabs walk. Either he is not fit for this world Or this world not fit for him. But which? After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward? They lured him with promises, Now it has all slipped sideways What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot If fated to melt again after getting out of it? The answers are: He is not out of it Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth For chance is not blind but unimpedable And we call it blind because Since we frustrate it only by chance We prefer to shut our own eyes. The crab however crawls on. He must therefore be a crab subnormal. One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men, Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer And the process is reversed. In mass production one hand never knows The evil the other is inspiring it to do This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe So worthless, awkward, unintelligible, The crab crawls on. He has sufferd because he was ugly Let him be cruel now that he is attractive Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self. We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods: We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer We don't. We drink and drivel. My poor Catullus, do stop being such a fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is gone. O, once the days shone very bright for you, when where that girl you loved so (as no other will be) called, you came and came. And then and there were odd things done and many which you wanted and she didn't not want. Yes indeed the days shone very bright for you. But now she doesn't want it. Don't you either, booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened. Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened, doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked. Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted? Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to? Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble? —Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened. How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid? O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind Wind humming like distant rooks Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization Civilization being relative our to Greek Greek to Persian Persian to Chinese Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction Satisfaction a matter of capacity Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram Epigrams—poems with a strabismus Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the Zodiac And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways