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Set up curbside, jewelry tray entanglement with things looking up, but nothing sells unless there is someone looking down, and who might that be? For the moment it’s not raining and off-coast in pods the gray whales parade south. Photographs sprout with the season. The gray whale’s spout is heart shaped, enough said. Just listen for the icon’s intake of breath and see what you can see. Yes, but that was yesterday and which way are prices going to go? There is a pack forming and they will need a leader. It’s then you kick the snot out of them, not before, and make it believable this one last time; but don’t depend on it, auditors, even though it’s turned out like this so many times before. There may be an image whose mind has changed. Sorry, no rain checks in this scheme of things, the windows are broken and boards keep out the light, it’s the cheapest thing to do and then forget it, as has been done before, before, etc. Could you pick out of a lineup who is the culprit here? The mirror is one-way and there’s no way to be sure which side you’re on, but so what? Go on making faces anyway, but be sure, now and then, to check your hand before your face, if just to say Wheaties, the best is yet to be. Our inventions, gods and needles, for instance, are built to say this to us ever and forever. It’s obvious why we can’t give them up, they’re ours, for ourself self’s sake! We live in the afterlife of what, unalterable, has already taken place. The minute you start acting like Robinson Crusoe it’s plain to see you’ve lost your hold on the world. There are many such, so many, washed up on our island shores! They end up sleeping over grates and in doorways at night, far distant from tree ripe fruit and warm sand. The dumps of our artifacts bewilder them. They probe, not knowing what to expect from excess. They act out an experiment, a hairline calculation for survival: is the expenditure of energy to dig up carrots from the frozen ground more than their return in calories? Did you notice the price tag when the wine was poured, the cool chardonnay, the special cabernet, white and red absurdities of words? The motion lights are set to react outside the house but, tell me, did you see the clutter in the study, one would think! Those catalogs, the cave, shadows.

See, the grass is full of stars, Fallen in their brightness; Hearts they have of shining gold, Rays of shining whiteness. Buttercups have honeyed hearts, Bees they love the clover, But I love the daisies' dance All the meadow over. Blow, O blow, you happy winds, Singing summer's praises, Up the field and down the field A-dancing with the daisies.

The lights in the theater fail. The long racks Of costumes abandoned by the other dancers Trouble Celeste. The conductor asks If she is sad because autumn is coming on, But when autumn comes she is merely pregnant and bored. On her way back from the holidays, a man Who appears to have no face rattles the door To her compartment.How disgusting, she thinks; How disgusting it always must be to grow old. Dusk falls, and a few drops of rain. On the train window trembles the blurred Reflection of her own transparent beauty, And through this, beautiful ruined cities passing, Dark forests, and people everywhere Pacing on lighted platforms, some Beating their children, some apparently dancing. The costumes of the dancers sway in the chill darkness. Now sinking into sleep is like sinking again Into the lake of her youth. Her parents Lean from the rail of a ferryboat waving, waving, As the boat glides farther out across the waves. No one, it seems, is meeting her at the station. The city is frozen. She warms herself In the pink and scented twilight of a bar. The waiter who serves her is young. She nods assent. The conversation dies in bed. Later, She hurries off to rehearsal. In the lobby, Dizzy still with the weight of her own body, She waits, surrounded by huge stills of herself And bright posters announcing events to come. Her life—she feels it closing about her now Like a small theater, empty, without lights.

If thy own hand . . . offend thee —Matthew 18:8 Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated — chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw for reasons they leave tactfully unstated, leaving you to guess at your faux pas From all you did and didn’t say for ages, as in some vast congressional report, your sin, at last, is lost among the pages; a snow of detail cuts inquiry short. In downtown windows where late sunlight glares, you see yourself, as if you’d never met. Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat? Your eighth grade diary still makes you cringe saved—for what?—that you might now despise pages time has lent a jaundiced tinge pouring forth their daisy-dotted

My father had our yard cemented over. He couldn’t tell a flower from a weed. The neighbors let their backyards run to clover and some grew dappled gardens from a seed, but he preferred cement to rampant green. Lushness reeked of anarchy’s profusion. Better to tamp the wildness down, unseen, than tolerate its careless brash intrusion. The grass interred, he felt well satisfied: his first house, and he took an owner’s pride, surveying the uniform, cemented yard. Just so, he labored to cement his heart.

How did you come How did I come here Now it is ours, how did it come to be In so many presences? Some I know swept from the sea, wind and sea, Took up the right wave in their fins and seal suits, Rode up over the town to this shore Shining and sleek To be caught by a tide As of music, or color, or shape in the heart of the sea. Was it you? Was it you who came out from the sea-floor as lab into lab Weightless, each breath Bubbling to surface, swaying in currents of kelp plants, Came in your cars Freewayed in valleys millions of miles from the shore To converge where the highways converge saying welcome to here, And to where? To tape and percussion, raga computers, Rare texts and components of clay, With the sea down away past the freeways and out of the town To the blockbusting towers of learning and quiet Shades of administering redwood, Azure dome over all like a bellflower And star above star. Did you come Out of borderlands dear to the south Speaking a language Riveran, Nerudan, and saying Aqui estáun hombre; my first lesson? And come as Quixote, the man of romance In its new century, tilting At windmill giants of concrete, Slim lance at the ready? Woe unto them That join house to house, that lay field to field Till there be no place that they may be alone In the midst of the earth. Did you come With a handful of questions Leaping like jewels To shock answers, to start Sparks of inquiry into the evening air? I came as a kid From the Midwest all recognize As part of home, To this another Which the salt sea answered in its time And Viscaino mapped his ports upon. You came As concertmaster of hte Philharmonic As mayor of Del Mar As reader of magnetic messages in DNA As archivist for the time’s poetry, or PTA, As land-grant scholar Holding his gray moon rocks. What is this that we come to, Its walls and corridors Gaping in space, its north lights Seeking the north, its substance Concrete brushed by the grains of its boards, Its boards reaching extension in all of their lenghts In architectural solidity? It is A break in the galaxies of our imagination. It needs our lives To make it live. A building, a dark hole in space, Compact of matter, Draws into it buzzing disinterests, Idelologies. Incomplete being Enters into the dense room, emerges Another, further, Compact of matter, this is the place that we enter, It paints pictures here and plays drums. It turns us around and we emerge Out of old space into the universe. This building Between buildings as between galaxies, Between fields as between flights of fancy, Will reshape our ears and turn us, Our work of art Beating in the breast like a heart. What are we here for? To err, To fail and attempt as terribly as possible, to try Stunts of such magnitude they will lead To disasters of such magnitude they will lead To learnings of such magnitude they will lend Back in enterprise to substance and grace. What learning allows for is the making of error Without fatality. The wandering off, the aberration, Distortion and deviation By which to find again the steady center And moving center. What art allows for is the provisional Enactments of such learning In their forms Of color and line, of mass and energy, of sound And sense Which bulk disaster large, create evil To look it in the eye. To forge Villainies of the wars, to indispose Villainies of petty establishment To make them lead their lives in sound and sense To no good end, that we may see them so. To make mistakes All of our own mistakes Out of the huddle of possibilities Into a color and form which will upbraid them Beyond their being. Give us to err Grandly as possible in this complete Complex of structure, risk a soul Nobly in north light, in cello tone, In action of drastic abandonment, That we return to what we have abandoned And make it whole. Domesticate the brushed Cement and wood marquee, Fracture the corridors, Soften the lights of observation and renew Structural kindness into its gentler shapes. Out of the sea The kelp tangles, out of the south The cities crowd, out of the sky The galaxies emerge in isolation One from another, and the faces here Look one to antoher in surprise At what has been made. Look at the actual Cliffs and canyons of this place, People and programs, mass and energy Of fact, Look at the possibilities. Irradiating all these possibilities. Praise then The arts of law and science as of life The arts of sound and substance as of faith Which claim us here To take, as a building, as a fiction, takes us, Into another frame of space Where we can ponder, celebrate, and reshape Not only what we are, where we are from, But what in the risk and moment of our day We may become.

The meek inherit nothing. God in his tattered coat this morning, a quiet tongue in my ear, begging for alms, cold hands reaching up my skirt. Little lamb, paupered flock, bless my black tea with tears. I have shorn your golden fleece, worn vast spools of white lace, glittering jacquard, gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust on my skin. Cornsilk hair in my hems. I have milked the stout beast of what you call America; and wear your men across my chest like furs. Stickpin fox and snow blue chinchilla: they too came to nibble at my door, the soft pink tangles I trap them in. Dear watchers in the shadows, dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease, please. Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes — I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here, some blood in the hunt. Now the center of the world: my incandescent cunt. All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis and the wild pink Damascus, my sweet Aphrodite unfolding in the kink. All hail hot jasmine in the night; thick syrup in your mouth, forked dagger on my tongue. Legions at my heel. Here at the world’s red mecca, kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem, here in the cradle of Thebes, a towering sphinx roams the garden, her wet dawn devouring.

Perhaps you can tell children that the world is always a more beautiful place than you can suppose, and then you release them into their future, the black row of trees in the distance. She died suddenly in midwinter, in the same bed in which her husband died years earlier; it still sagged on his side. Her second husband remained in Japan with his first family. She used to say, what my three girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me. My mother is the middle daughter, a garden of inaudible tunes. The four of them lived in a mean house in Seoul. One yellowing picture of my grandmother remains, and her face turns away from the camera, as the rabbit senses the hound; she was said to be a solitary eater, an inner thing. What did she promise the world that she wasn’t able to make good on? A child who abruptly feels the frontiers of experience assert themselves in her: at the funeral my mother cries so hard she can’t feel her hands for days, it explains how she scratches herself raw, meaningless. You have always believed these are your themes: fate, the negative pleasures of dipping oneself in acid. You think it will rescue you from your simplicity, remarks my mother from the doorway, but art is never the ace in the hole. I am not a stupid child. I am not even a child any longer, with her hesitant, then terrible certainty, that loss is tragic, not only pointless. When she is lonely, my mother cooks; and when she is happy, she knows to hide it.

This song is not a language, Not a thing to be remembered, The field-holler tradition of Teeth and knees Cursing wind, A concert hall of   bloody hands Spilling the earth, Strangling dirt, Sledgehammer curses Of  men busted open. On Parchman Farm You could hear it coming Up through the trees, The hammering pulpit of Crooning men and sweat, The tender meat of palms Pulped like plums. Them men gulped down the Dawn dew air, Let it catch in their throats, Broke the sunrise up and Sang hymns like hexes: Be my woman gal, I’ll beeee your maaaaaaan... And the killing fields of  Mississippi Fizzled down to juke joints and The hothouse music of illegal clubs With thick women they loved outright and Played cards with and Gave bourbon to when their hands Didn’t hold sorrow like Pickaxes and the railroad was Just a railroad, A way to ride north if  you could Get your money right. Redbone gals with rosewater sweat, When they lifted their knees Sunflower County was a heaven They believed in. Stick to the promise, gal, that you maaaaaade meeeeee... Steady now, They turned back the clock on Their hard, hard hands, Let the memory of fresh linen and Ladies’ slips like gossamer Wings, a parade of  plump thighs, The juju thrust of  furious bones Spread like grease Across starched-white sheets, Midwife them out of ol’ Parchman Farm And back to the cockfights and gambling, Back when they had ambition, Back when they had a sweet woman To hold, her fat wrists Soft as butter, Limp as rain. When she walk, she reel and rock beeeeeehind Ain’t that enough to make a convict smiiiiiiiiile.

And this is what is left of youth! . . . There were two boys, who were bred up together, Shared the same bed, and fed at the same board; Each tried the other’s sport, from their first chase, Young hunters of the butterfly and bee, To when they followed the fleet hare, and tried The swiftness of the bird. They lay beside The silver trout stream, watching as the sun Played on the bubbles: shared each in the store Of either’s garden: and together read Of him, the master of the desert isle, Till a low hut, a gun, and a canoe, Bounded their wishes. Or if ever came A thought of future days, ’twas but to say That they would share each other’s lot, and do Wonders, no doubt. But this was vain: they parted With promises of long remembrance, words Whose kindness was the heart’s, and those warm tears, Hidden like shame by the young eyes which shed them, But which are thought upon in after-years As what we would give worlds to shed once more. They met again, — but different from themselves, At least what each remembered of themselves: The one proud as a soldier of his rank, And of his many battles: and the other Proud of his Indian wealth, and of the skill And toil which gathered it; each with a brow And heart alike darkened by years and care. They met with cold words, and yet colder looks: Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought The other only changed, himself the same. And coldness bred dislike, and rivalry Came like the pestilence o’er some sweet thoughts That lingered yet, healthy and beautiful, Amid dark and unkindly ones. And they, Whose boyhood had not known one jarring word, Were strangers in their age: if their eyes met, ’Twas but to look contempt, and when they spoke, Their speech was wormwood! . . . . . . And this, this is life!