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Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle – We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity –

Once I have the freedom to say my tongue will lose its power. Since my poems strive to break the walls that cut off people’s voices, they become drills and hammers. But I will be silenced. The starred tie around my neck at any moment can tighten into a cobra. How can I speak about coffee and flowers?

September 14, 1915 It's how she spreads, without a sound, her scent of orange blossom on the dark of me, it is the way she shrouds in mourning black her mother-of-pearl and ivory, the way she wears the lace ruff at her throat, and how she turns her face, quite voiceless, self-possessed, because she takes the language straight to heart, is thrifty with the words she speaks. It's how she is so reticent yet welcoming when she comes out to face my panegyrics, the way she says my name mocking and mimicking, makes gentle fun, yet she's aware that my unspoken drama is really of the heart, though a little silly; it's how, when night is deep and at its darkest, we linger after dinner, vaguely talking and her laughing smile grows fainter and then falls gently on the tablecloth; it's the teasing way she won't give me her arm and then allows deep feeling to come with us when we walk out, promenading on the hot colonial boulevard. . . Because of this, your sighing, modest style of love, I worship you, my faithful star who like to cloud yourself about in mourning, generous, hidden blossom; kindly mellowness who have presided over my thirty years with the self-denying singleness a vase has, whose half-blown roses wreathe with scent the headboard of a convalescent man; cautious nurse, shy serving maid, dear friend who trembles with the trembling of a child when you revise the reading that we share; apprehensive, always timid guest at the feast I give; my ally, humble dove that coos when it is morning in a minor key, a key that's wholly yours. May you be blessed, modest, magnificent; you have possessed the highest summit of my heart, you who are at once the artist of lowly and most lofty things, who bear in your hands my life as if it was your work of art! O star and orange blossom, may you dwindle gently rocked in an unwedded peace, and may you fade out like a morning star which the lightening greenness of a meadow darkens or like a flower that finds transfiguration on the blue west, as it might on a simple bed.

the plates are broken after just one meal: plates that mimic lily pads or horseshoe crabs, swifts’ wings, golden koi, whirlpools, blowholes in rictus: all smashed against the table’s edge—

we had to read the instructions as we sank. In a hand like carded lace.Not nuclear warheads on the sea's floor nor the violet flow over the reactor will outlive this sorrowful rhyme.

We keep my sister alive by force, pin her down and nurse her with raw eggs from the chickens that did not drown and milk taken from a goat staked to the ground. The dull tolling of the bell around her neck speaks as she moves. Here, I am here. She wanders to the river, and we find her. In a tree, singing to a starling, we find her. We dig a grave for the missing body, but nothing consoles her. In mourning, the cure is the sickness. A year ago, a lion took our mother as she tended the fire. This hunger bewilders me. We found half of her bones and buried her uneaten heart in a dead cub's rib cage. When we returned three days later we saw no bones, no heart, only tracks in the sand leading east.Ghost me. Fossil me. Resurrect me near dawn. We're always at the mercy of one menacing grace, one rite, an art that makes us suffer twice. At night we wait with out knives where the tall grass begins. We will kill it or die or become the lion.

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds start up again. The crickets, the invisible toad who claims that change is possible, And all the other life too small to name. First one, then another, until innumerable they merge into the single voice of a summer hill. Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour, fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure. And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone can bear to be a stone, the pain the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust. Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill, rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light. The old windmill creaks in perfect time to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass, and the last farmhouse light goes off. Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt these hills and packs of feral dogs. But standing here at night accepts all that. You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon, moving more slowly than the crippled stars, part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls, Part of the grass that answers the wind, part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows there is no silence but when danger comes.

Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers. Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers of agave bristle in primordial defense, like a cornered monster backed up against the sea. A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily. Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit two worlds of associations, or references, drought that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa, veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of— heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours, the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise. We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows, our origins that range from the most disparate places, from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows. II The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud, in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes, and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud drawn over associations that are Greece’s and Rome’s and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven, but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us, and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess, the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas’ inflexible postures without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.

i. Awake Each entry consisting of the statements I am awake or I am conscious entered every few minutes: 2:10 p.m.: this time properly awake. 2:14 p.m.: this time finally awake. 2:35 p.m.: this time completely awake. At 9:40 p.m.I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims. This in turn was crossed out, followed by: I was fully conscious at 10:35 p.m., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks. This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry. ii. Passport How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night, a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years the great amnesiac HM never recognized his doctor, and after lunch gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again. You must be starving. God, I am starving. Without a body, collection cannot precede recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl of its quick tip, a mouthful of familiars: smoke, strawberry candy. Memory in the web between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune, duplicates. What kind of game is this? I’m no longer a boy, HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face genuine. What kind of game is this? The mirror a passport like any other, its picture out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair even the photographer declared beautiful then. Then: the word smiles like a stranger on your first day at school, sitting on stone steps, worn with use. iii. Taxonomy “Red but not bird comes to mind.” Only the kingdom of living names was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa remained, but not the blur at the feeder, the undersea creature on the card— it’s a danger, a killer swimmer, they coaxed him—it’s called a (waiting for the word to stir from its depth; how could he forget the ones who dressed, fed, taught him word by word the order of the world? What noise does that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously like his parents, he thought: strangers posing unanswerable questions)— “It has no name, it has no need.”

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see The birds still hopping on the tree, Or hear the grown-up people's feet Still going past me in the street. And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?