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“Being so caught up So mastered.” —Yeats I was too shy to say anything but Your poems are so beautiful. What kinds of things, feelings, or ideas inspire you, I mean, outside the raw experiences of your life? He turned a strange crosshatched color as if he stood in a clouded painting, and said, Thanks, but no other phenomena intrude upon my starlit mind. I see you are wondering what this is all about. Don’t mind me, I’m talking to myself again. Yes, poetry is nice and often beautiful, yet it doesn’t beget much attention, money, or even a simple thanks for placing the best words in the best order. That’s when I forget all about your incessant demands, and the restless subject leaps the stream in Technicolor— until the Remembrancer appears and says, Stop this wasteful life. Doctor, lawyer, thief. These fancies of yours could cost a life or worse, two. Meanwhile, he perceives my gifted body upholding my mind as I’m explaining my stuff on the Unicorn Tapestries, cheeks starting to color, feathers ruffling, quiet shudders. He shrugs, Your content sounds too beautiful but I’d like to read it sometime. Okay. He says all the right things, like I love you Hyacinth Girl. Things get interesting until the sudden blow: Thanks For the memories. What I’ll think seeing his new work in The New Yorker is Thanks for nothing, asshole, as he drops me for that prolific pastoral life with his wife upstate. The more I think about it, it all depends upon your phantom attention. Surely a world embroiders itself in one’s mind at any moment, words resounding, ardent present clarifyingly beautiful And beautifully truthful. You know? Here I should put in a lapis color Or a murky midnight blue. Or have the crowd stagger by in a riot of color pinning down the helpless beast with spears and ritualistic thanks to their gods. What one really wants to get at is the real, the eternally beautiful like The White Album or something. That’s what makes one perilous life worth living. All the brute indifference, humiliation, and failure can put one in the mind to give up, freak out, kill somebody, heart battered, so mastered. Oh you Wherever I go, on the subway, in my cubicle, at play, in sleep, it’s always you of the air, overpowering my senses like a Dutch master in one pure color, its fiction at full speed, walls breaking, a clarity panorama for the mind hunting for meaning and finding it at last! Now look at all the work I did, and not one thanks Not even flowers. Off you rush to watch him accept another award in that life We can only dream of. From where you sit it all seems so beautiful And I finally understand you. For that I can’t express enough thanks As the subject is the best color for me in the difficulty of this lonely life. It’s always caught up in my mind, what could be more beautiful.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body. —Yeats, “The Phases of the Moon” Whenever we wake, still joined, enraptured— at the window, each clear night’s finish the black pulse of dominoes dropping to land; whenever we embrace, haunted, upwelling, I know a reunion is taking place— Hear me when I say our love’s not meant to be an opiate; helpmate, you are the reachable mirror that dares me to risk the caravan back to the apogee, the longed-for arms of the Beloved— Dusks of paperwhites, dusks of jasmine, intimate beyond belief beautiful Signor no dread of nakedness beautiful Signor my long ship, my opulence, my garland beautiful Signor extinguishing the beggar’s tin, the wind of longing beautiful Signor laving the ruined country, the heart wedded to war beautiful Signor the kiln-blaze in my body, the turning heaven beautiful Signor you cover me with pollen beautiful Signor into your sweet mouth—

Into perplexity: as an itch chased round an oxter or early man in the cave mouth watching rain-drifts pour from beyond his understanding. Whether to admire the mere sensation, enough, or hold out for sweeter ornament, vessels of wonder born with that ur-charm of symmetry; lovely ones we ache to prize and praise, climb into and become because they try our day-by-day significance: some of us ugly and most of us plain, walked past in the drowned streets: pearls of paste, salted butter, secondary colors. They drift unapproached, gazed never-selves, blunt paragons of genetic industry. We desire them but cannot want such order. We stand, mouths open, and cannot help stammering our secrets, nailed to water.

What if I didn’t shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the old man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace? Or what if the boy—but he didn’t have a grenade, and the woman in Hue didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food, Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee, Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski didn’t die in a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Da Nang. In Vietnamese, Con Thien means place of angels. What if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud. What if the angels were Ames and Ski, or the lady, the man, and the boy, and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee? What if none of it happened the way I said? Would it all be a lie? Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful? Would the dead rise up and walk?

Corinna, pride of Drury-Lane For whom no shepherd sighs in vain; Never did Covent Garden boast So bright a battered, strolling toast; No drunken rake to pick her up, No cellar where on tick to sup; Returning at the midnight hour; Four stories climbing to her bow’r; Then, seated on a three-legged chair, Takes off her artificial hair: Now, picking out a crystal eye, She wipes it clean, and lays it by. Her eye-brows from a mouse’s hide, Stuck on with art on either side, Pulls off with care, and first displays ’em, Then in a play-book smoothly lays ’em. Now dexterously her plumpers draws, That serve to fill her hollow jaws. Untwists a wire; and from her gums A set of teeth completely comes. Pulls out the rags contrived to prop Her flabby dugs and down they drop. Proceeding on, the lovely goddess Unlaces next her steel-ribbed bodice; Which by the operator’s skill, Press down the lumps, the hollows fill, Up goes her hand, and off she slips The bolsters that supply her hips. With gentlest touch, she next explores Her shankers, issues, running sores, Effects of many a sad disaster; And then to each applies a plaister. But must, before she goes to bed, Rub off the dawbs of white and red; And smooth the furrows in her front With greasy paper stuck upon’t. She takes a bolus ere she sleeps; And then between two blankets creeps. With pains of love tormented lies; Or if she chance to close her eyes, Of Bridewell and the Compter dreams, And feels the lash, and faintly screams; Or, by a faithless bully drawn, At some hedge-tavern lies in pawn; Or to Jamaica seems transported, Alone, and by no planter courted; Or, near Fleet-Ditch’s oozy brinks, Surrounded with a hundred stinks, Belated, seems on watch to lie, And snap some cully passing by; Or, struck with fear, her fancy runs On watchmen, constables and duns, From whom she meets with frequent rubs; But, never from religious clubs; Whose favor she is sure to find, Because she pays ’em all in kind. Corinna wakes. A dreadful sight! Behold the ruins of the night! A wicked rat her plaster stole, Half eat, and dragged it to his hole. The crystal eye, alas, was missed; And puss had on her plumpers pissed. A pigeon picked her issue-peas; And Shock her tresses filled with fleas. The nymph, tho’ in this mangled plight, Must ev’ry morn her limbs unite. But how shall I describe her arts To recollect the scattered parts? Or shew the anguish, toil, and pain, Of gath’ring up herself again? The bashful muse will never bear In such a scene to interfere. Corinna in the morning dizened, Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison’d.

The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes looked so nibbled. When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey. Finally in a bower under the diaphragm they found a nest of young rats. One little thing lay dead. The others were living off kidneys and liver drinking the cold blood and had had themselves a beautiful youth. And just as beautiful and quick was their death: the lot of them were thrown into the water. Ah, will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!

Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from the mountains across, although the day was harsh and tomorrow foreign. But, when it darkened well and out came the priest’s hand over the little garden of the dead, She Alone, Standing, with the few domestics of the night—the blowing rosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns— at sea’s entry, wakeful Otherly beauty! Only the waves’ words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others resembling the dead’s that startle in the cypress, strange zodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head. And one Unbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real landscape to be seen, Where, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel, exactly showing how she’s born, Beauty Or what we otherwise call tear. And long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the glowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an ancient prostitute’s, cheekbones Stretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin. “Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place where a tear may have no meaning and the only light be from the flame that ravishes all that for me exists. “Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence and the co-ruling of the stars, “As if I didn’t know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme silence are the most repellent thuds “And that, since it became unbearable inside a man’s chest, solitude dispersed and seeded stars!”

(May 22, 1965) When we look at ourselves We see ourselves through eyes Which have been schooled To see comely only the opaque, Comely to us skin that is fair, Comely to us eyes that are light, Comely to us hair that is straight, Comely to us lips that are thin, Our gods and goddesses Glow in opalescent whiteness And daily we worship at this shrine. Ugly to us our satin black skin, Ugly to us our fulsome lips, Ugly to us our midnight eyes, Ugly to us our crisping hair Thus we have rejected our image. But this is not as it should be We black people must be born again. Know that the black people like other races Have their own distinct beauty, Know that the Stygian night too is beautiful.

Think Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” Belle as beast Eel as style Bats testy Best lastly Bluely astute — as bull as beetle as Bey as butte Beauty as lute thus beauty as lush Late lethal Lust salty She’ll eye She’ll tally Yes stately yet stealth Yes steely yet sly Hey lathe — [she taut] Hey sleuth — [she tale] He heel He that She bluesy She ballsy She byte She shall

Because he swings so neatly through the trees, An ape feels natural in the word trapeze.