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After the Fourth of July On this night of the mid- summer festival of fire, where liquid explosives look like the arch and ache of the willow tree so near your grave, on this night of the awaiting mid- wife who lulled you in- to this world, the light all violet because the Earth and stars inclined toward each other, she also sleeps, she who was your first deliverer, guiding you out of your mother—her bluing skin no small sign of the future cyanosis of her spirit for no small journey was it to this country to bring you to birth in this torch song heat and an anthem of a free nation's conception of combustions: rosins, petroleum, tallow, arsenic and worse, as you, too, fell from the sky of her body with me a microscopic egg inside— half the composition that made up my own toss and tumble to this crash of ground I sit over and bless while you lie under, under the willow, under this world that no midwife nor wavelength can under- standably reach. So I stand in this over- determined fire forced out like bullets upon a target— the pulled trigger releasing the hammer that strikes the impacted mixture— hailstorm and hymn of memories. And the outstretched womb involutes and the abdominal wall tightens and inside all abandoned encasements the night over the day darkens.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? — Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

For this you may see no need, You may think my aim Dead set on something Devoid of conceivable value: An Anthology of  Rain, A collection of voices Telling someone somewhere What it means to follow a drop Traveling to its final place of rest. But do consider this request If you have pressed your nose Of any shape against a window, Odor of metal faint, persistent, While a storm cast its cloak Over the shoulder of every cloud In sight. You are free to say Whatever crosses your mind When you look at the face of time In the passing of one drop Gathering speed, one drop Chasing another, racing to reach A fork in the path, lingering Before making a detour to join Another, fattening on the way Until entering a rivulet Running to the sill. So please accept this invitation: You are welcome to submit, There is no limit to its limit, Even the instructions are a breeze As long as you include Nothing about yourself Except your name. Your address Remains unnecessary, for the rain Will find you — if you receive it It receives you (whether or not You contribute, a volume Is sent). And when you lift The collection you may hear, By opening anywhere, a drop And its story reappear As air turns to water, water to air.

What are they looking for running to the summit of lost time?

No tone of voice being sufficient to the occasion Flash that’s all, that we’re here. Are you ever sarcastic and unlikeable       Mentally we are the cast of one epic thought: You. How many of you sweep through me, as I ride the métro leading you, because I have to and not be poignant oh who’s written anything poignant since ... An old woman of indeterminate race, in white hat and scarf, no teeth staring back at me. He sounded brittle and superior last night, do the dead do that; Grandma had a plethora of tones of voice compared to anyone in this anthology. Our anthology, he says, being mental is complex as hell. How do you keep track of your poems? Any- one remembers what they like, but you have constantly to emit them ... Everyone’s at me, Drown it out, thinking of an icon emerald-throated. I see the alley house at night dark I’m trying to be pure again, but I want all the tones. When you’re dead you can have them ...  thick marine dark from the fencelike oleanders and a moon calling to white boards. Enter. Lie down in your own bed, in the room where Momma found a scorpion.

Remember the night you got drunk and shot the roses? You were a perfect stranger, Father, even my bad sister cried. Some other gravity, not death or luck, drew fish out of the sea and started them panting. The fish became a man. The archer’s bow became a violin. I remember the night you searched the sofa for change and wept on the telephone. Some other gravity, not time or entropy, pulled the knife down for centuries. The archers dropped their bows, harmless as pine needles in the snow. The knife became a plow and entered the earth, Father. Later it became a boat and some other things — It isn’t a dream but it takes a long time, for the archer’s bow to become a violin.

for TNH There are those who will never return to us as we knew them. Who if they return at all visit our sleep, or daydreams, or turn up in the features of total strangers. Or greet us face to face in the middle of some rush hour street, but from a great distance—and not in the full flush of bodies that once wanted nothing more from us than the laying of our hands upon them, as a healer lays hands upon the afflicted. There are those who by their absence are an affliction. I imagine that sometimes in your dark bed you still want to know why. Why the man you were just coming to love, who liked you close as he raced through the city at night, why he had to swerve suddenly. Why he had to end up on an operating table, dead. Why you of all people had to live, to repeat this unanswerable question. I could tell you about a woman good at ritual who, hardly believing in herself, was good at making vows the two of us could believe. Then one day I had to drive her to an early flight. The dawn was blinding. She was off to look for the soul no one else could provide. But was this the way to do it? She didn’t know. She wanted me to tell her. Tears down her face. And I kept driving. I can look back and say: on that day, that’s when I died. Since then, you and I have had a hard time believing anything could bring us back. And yet your brown body breathes new life into a cotton print from the fifties, and picks parsley from the garden for spaghetti carbonara, and cues up Mozart’s French horn solo, and fills up the kitchen with the aroma of sourdough, and gets my body to anticipate the taste of malt as the tops of American beer cans pop: good rituals all, because they waited out our every loss, patient with the slow coming back to our senses, undeterred by our neglect. As if they knew all along how much we would need them.

Day after day of rain. A ticket straight to the mild-mannered hell of rethinking whatever, the drive to EconoFoods: not a lot of grief in that. You need staples — bread, rice, eggs. Here’s a list: almonds, yogurt, all the little anti-griefs add up. Did I tell you? my grandfather sings from the grave. They have my old Philco here. I know all about your world of godawful and too bad. I keep driving. In rain. Some luck required. Stop light. Flashy cars on both sides playing radios too loud. Ear damage! I used to shout out the window, my boy in the front seat trying hard to shrink, not to know who is that crazy at the wheel. Grandfather likes saying: what? Half-deaf even now. Half a lot of things, anytime. Half, what gives? giving way. If there is a we or a you or an I finally. He’d cup an ear if he had an ear. So it is, the first anti-grief, a feather he picked up. My childhood, walking with the oldest man I ever, 1874 his start date. Alarm and Should Have, two roads he would not cross, and Consequence a street over, he ignored completely. Always an eye out for the great small peculiar. A feather. Sometimes handed to me. Or he’d oil a clock with it right off the curb. Into a pocket.

A girl is running.Don’t tell me “She’s running for her bus.” All that aside!

The princess in her world-old tower pined A prisoner, brazen-caged, without a gleam Of sunlight, or a windowful of wind; She lived but in a long lamp-lighted dream. They brought her forth at last when she was old; The sunlight on her blanched hair was shed Too late to turn its silver into gold. “Ah, shield me from this brazen glare!” she said.