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Each could picture probably with great care his brother drawing the corded string of a watered silk bag and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake pay your respects to mother's white hair now your eyebrows look a little white too

Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance. —Henry Miller The back roads I’ve traveled late at night, alone, a little drunk, wishing I were someone on whom nothing is lost, are the roads by day I take to the car wash in Hammonton or to Blue Anchor’s lawnmower repair shop when the self-propel mechanism goes. Fascinating how the lamplight that’s beckoned from solitary windows gives way to white shutters and occasionally a woman in her yard, bending over something conspicuously in bloom. So much then is duty, duty, duty, and so much with the sun visor tilted and destination known can be endured. But at night . . . no, even at night so much can be endured. I’ve known only one man who left the road, followed an intriguing light to its source. He told me that he knocked many times before it became clear to him he must break down the door.

The birds have flown their summer skies to the south, And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion, Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves. A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea, A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping An aging whiskey of distances and departures. Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land. My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave. I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe, Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.

Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead, (It was so strange to me that they should weep!) Tall candles burned about me in the dark, And a great crucifix was on my breast, And a great silence filled the lonesome room. I heard one whisper, "Lo! the dawn is breaking, And he has lost the wonder of the day." Another came whom I had loved on earth, And kissed my brow and brushed my dampened hair. Softly she spoke: "Oh that he should not see The April that his spirit bathed in! Birds Are singing in the orchard, and the grass That soon will cover him is growing green. The daisies whiten on the emerald hills, And the immortal magic that he loved Wakens again—and he has fallen asleep." Another said: "Last night I saw the moon Like a tremendous lantern shine in heaven, And I could only think of him-and sob. For I remembered evenings wonderful When he was faint with Life's sad loveliness, And watched the silver ribbons wandering far Along the shore, and out upon the sea. Oh, I remembered how he loved the world, The sighing ocean and the flaming stars, The everlasting glamour God has given— -His tapestries that wrap the earth's wide room. I minded me of mornings filled with rain When he would sit and listen to the sound As if it were lost music from the spheres. He loved the crocus and the hawthorn-hedge, He loved the shining gold of buttercups, And the low droning of the drowsy bees That boomed across the meadows. He was glad At dawn or sundown; glad when Autumn came With her worn livery and scarlet crown, And glad when Winter rocked the earth to rest. Strange that he sleeps today when Life is young, And the wild banners of the Spring are blowing With green inscriptions of the old delight." I heard them whisper in the quiet room. I longed to open then my sealèd eyes, And tell them of the glory that was mine. There was no darkness where my spirit flew, There was no night beyond the teeming world. Their April was like winter where I roamed; Their flowers were like stones where now I fared. Earth's day! it was as if I had not known What sunlight meant! . . Yea, even as they grieved For all that I had lost in their pale place, I swung beyond the borders of the sky, And floated through the clouds, myself the air, Myself the ether, yet a matchless being Whom God had snatched from penury and pain To draw across the barricades of heaven. I clomb beyond the sun, beyond the moon; In flight on flight I touched the highest star; I plunged to regions where the Spring is born, Myself (I asked not how) the April wind, Myself the elements that are of God. Up flowery stairways of eternity I whirled in wonder and untrammeled joy, An atom, yet a portion of His dream— His dream that knows no end. . . . I was the rain, I was the dawn, I was the purple east, I was the moonlight on enchanted nights, (Yet time was lost to me); I was a flower For one to pluck who loved me; I was bliss, And rapture, splendid moments of delight; And I was prayer, and solitude, and hope; And always, always, always I was love. I tore asunder flimsy doors of time, And through the windows of my soul's new sight I saw beyond the ultimate bounds of space. I was all things that I had loved on earth— The very moonbeam in that quiet room, The very sunlight one had dreamed I lost, The soul of the returning April grass, The spirit of the evening and the dawn, The perfume in unnumbered hawthorn-blooms. There was no shadow on my perfect peace, No knowledge that was hidden from my heart. I learned what music meant; I read the years; I found where rainbows hide, where tears begin; I trod the precincts of things yet unborn. Yea, while I found all wisdom (being dead), They grieved for me. . I should have grieved for them!

Mudd Club 4th floor gallery Manhattan, April 1981 If you bomb the IND or tag the 2 downtown —gallery-bound— dousing it in tribal shrapnel, you're it —the shit— If you can lie between the rails —Please Stand Clear the Closing— or press yourselves betw. train & the wall spray can rattling like a tooth— The roof the roof the roof is on fire

Sometimes up out of this land a legend begins to move. Is it a coming near of something under love? Love is of the earth only, the surface, a map of roads leading wherever go miles or little bushes nod. Not so the legend under, fixed, inexorable, deep as the darkest mine the thick rocks won't tell. As fire burns the leaf and out of the green appears the vein in the center line and the legend veins under there, So, the world happens twice— once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

if you didn’t mind the bible you’d surely mind the belt

Take sackcloth of the darkest dye, And shroud the pulpits round! Servants of Him that cannot lie, Sit mourning on the ground. Let holy horror blanch each cheek, Pale every brow with fears; And rocks and stones, if ye could speak, Ye well might melt to tears! Let sorrow breathe in every tone, In every strain ye raise; Insult not God’s majestic throne With th’ mockery of praise. A “reverend” man, whose light should be The guide of age and youth, Brings to the shrine of Slavery The sacrifice of truth! For the direst wrong by man imposed, Since Sodom’s fearful cry, The word of life has been unclos’d, To give your God the lie. Oh! When ye pray for heathen lands, And plead for their dark shores, Remember Slavery’s cruel hands Make heathens at your doors!

Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find people who would love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people? In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate if your hand gets trapped in the gears of the machine; if you acted fast, she said, you could save everything above the wrist. You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said. Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis over western Illinois — which then subsides and cools into a smooth gray sea. Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer. My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper. Hard to believe that death is just around the corner. What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny? I was on the road for so long by myself, I took to reading motel Bibles just for company. Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep, still feeling the motion of the car inside my body, I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone. And God said,You are worth more to me than one hundred sparrows.

II. Conversion I like to be stationary. —Bartleby Who is not a wild Enthusiast in a green meadow furious and fell Arriving on the stage of history I saw madness of the world Stripped of falsification and corruption anthems were singing in Authorem Father and the Father by my words will I be justified Autobiography I saw Legal righteousness makes us servants All good hearers Opposers or despisers Night page torn word missing The family silence gave up the ghost I feared the fall of my child resting quietly with some hopes as a bird before any Election—Vocation— Justification— Cape of Wind wreathe fame out laughing Seated on a cloud Seacret drift seacretly behest the dear She comes to all Guilty all circling Eye window soul body Pride cannot bow Ariadne’s diadem zodiac helmet belt