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They used to mass in the crowns of oaks on every street for blocks around but have gone elsewhere, the evening no longer gathered by their feathers but by the leaves, which blot whatever light is left to the sky. Whether we saw the crows as a barely worth mentioning image of death for the way they took over branches with perfect authority, whether, where did I hear it, their numbers were thinned by disease, nothing avails. They are missing, the crackle of wings against the weight of their flight, beaks that broke open broadcasting any scrap of news. Like our children, they carry off whole years, like the wind-borne thought of cries never welcome enough day or night in our ears.

The crow’s raw hectoring cry scoops clean an oval divot of sky, its fading echo among the oaks and poplars swallowed first by a jet banking west then the Erie-Lackawanna sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel through the cliffs to the river and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff, full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt. You can hear it in the dark from beyond what was once the amusement park. And the wind carries along as well, from down by the river, when the tide’s just so, the drainage just so, the chemical ghost of old factories, the rotted piers and warehouses: lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros., formaldehyde from the coffee plant, dyes, unimaginable solvents— a soup of polymers, oxides, tailings fifty years old seeping through the mud, the aroma almost comforting by now, like food, wafting into my childhood room with its fevers and dreams. My old parents asleep, only a few yards across the hall, door open—lest I cry? I remember almost nothing of my life.

( in Memoriam F. W. G.) Orion swung southward aslant Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant With the heather that twitched in the wind; But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these, Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow, And wondered to what he would march on the morrow. The crazed household-clock with its whirr Rang midnight within as he stood, He heard the low sighing of her Who had striven from his birth for his good; But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze, What great thing or small thing his history would borrow From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow. When the heath wore the robe of late summer, And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun, Hung red by the door, a quick comer Brought tidings that marching was done For him who had joined in that game overseas Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.

. . . for Donna and John they find what looks like a grave what looks like a grave a grave and they dig it up they find a grave it looks like a grave and they dig it up they dig it up the grave it looks like they dig it up and they dig it up and it looks like a grave and they dig it up

A month or twain to live on honeycomb Is pleasant; but one tires of scented time, Cold sweet recurrence of accepted rhyme, And that strong purple under juice and foam Where the wine’s heart has burst; Nor feel the latter kisses like the first. Once yet, this poor one time; I will not pray Even to change the bitterness of it, The bitter taste ensuing on the sweet, To make your tears fall where your soft hair lay All blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise Over my face and eyes. And yet who knows what end the scythèd wheat Makes of its foolish poppies’ mouths of red? These were not sown, these are not harvested, They grow a month and are cast under feet And none has care thereof, As none has care of divided love. I know each shadow of your lips by rote, Each change of love in eyelids and eyebrows; The fashion of fair temples tremulous With tender blood, and colour of your throat; I know not how love is gone out of this, Seeing that all was his. Love’s likeness there endures upon all these: But out of these one shall not gather love. Day hath not strength nor the night shade enough To make love whole and fill his lips with ease, As some bee-builded cell Feels at filled lips the heavy honey swell. I know not how this last month leaves your hair Less full of purple colour and hid spice, And that luxurious trouble of closed eyes Is mixed with meaner shadows and waste care; And love, kissed out by pleasure, seems not yet Worth patience to regret.

Use a new conductor every time-out you have sextet—before foreshore, before pen name gets anywhere near any bogey opera glass (to avoid expulsion to any bogey flunkey that can carry infidel) Handle conductor gently Put conductor on as soon as pen name is hard be sure rolled-up ringworm is on the outspokenness. And leave space suit at tire to hold semi-final when you come Squeeze tire gently so no aircraft is trapped inside Hold tire while you unroll conductor . . . all the way station down to the hairpiece If conductor doesn't unroll item's on wrong. Throw item away Start over with a new onion

locate the closest overlooked neighborhood — at its core extract all humans living underneath life’s bootheel. replace with millennials cradling postcolonial guilt, but not. ignore the woman’s cardboard [ help ] sign tattered, stained & broken like her: imagine being long-ago unseen, erased in between the throng, an existing non-entity. ask, too, if gun be an instrument what refrain whizzed soundless amid crestfallen shadows lingering a decade. go from “a to z” to list the dead — too many to name, but try: antoine, byrd, carlos, delante ... no deader now than then. still a memory real, cold steel, shots fired — death, what did we know of dying? don’t forget love, a love strangling addicts caught in a docetic whirlwind with no blue sail. before the corner becomes distorted remember: one more time inhale deep. inhale memory to include the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.

All things within this fading world hath end, Adversity doth still our joyes attend; No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet, But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet. The sentence past is most irrevocable, A common thing, yet oh inevitable. How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend, We are both ignorant, yet love bids me These farewell lines to recommend to thee, That when that knot’s untied that made us one, I may seem thine, who in effect am none. And if I see not half my dayes that’s due, What nature would, God grant to yours and you; The many faults that well you know I have Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave; If any worth or virtue were in me, Let that live freshly in thy memory And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms, Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms. And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains Look to my little babes, my dear remains. And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me, These o protect from step Dames injury. And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse, With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse; And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake, Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

Now like the Lady of Shalott, I dwell within an empty room, And through the day and through the night I sit before an ancient loom. And like the Lady of Shalott I look into a mirror wide, Where shadows come, and shadows go, And ply my shuttle as they glide. Not as she wove the yellow wool, Ulysses’ wife, Penelope; By day a queen among her maids, But in the night a woman, she, Who, creeping from her lonely couch, Unraveled all the slender woof; Or, with a torch, she climbed the towers, To fire the fagots on the roof! But weaving with a steady hand The shadows, whether false or true, I put aside a doubt which asks ‘Among these phantoms what are you?’ For not with altar, tomb, or urn, Or long-haired Greek with hollow shield, Or dark-prowed ship with banks of oars, Or banquet in the tented field; Or Norman knight in armor clad, Waiting a foe where four roads meet; Or hawk and hound in bosky dell, Where dame and page in secret greet; Or rose and lily, bud and flower, My web is broidered. Nothing bright Is woven here: the shadows grow Still darker in the mirror’s light! And as my web grows darker too, Accursed seems this empty room; For still I must forever weave These phantoms by this ancient loom.

Minutes before the rain begins I always waken, listening to the world hold its breath, as if a phone had rung once in a far room or a door had creaked in the darkness. Perhaps the genes of some forebear startle in me, some tribal warrior keeping watch on a crag beside a loch, miserable in the cold, though I think it is a woman's waiting I have come to know, a Loyalist hiding in the woods, muffling the coughing of her child against her linen skirts, her dark head bent over his, her fear spent somewhere else in time, leaving only this waiting, and I hope she escaped with her child, and I suppose she did. If not, I wouldn't be lying here awake, alive, listening for the rain to begin so that she can run, the sound of her footsteps lost, the sight of them blotted away on the path.