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My desk is cleared of the litter of ages; Before me glitter the fair white pages; My fountain pen is clean and filled, And the noise of the office has long been stilled. Roget’s Thesaurus is at my hand, And I’m ready to do some work that’s grand, Dignified, eminent, great, momentous, Memorable, worthy of note, portentous, Beautiful, paramount, vital, prime, Stirring, eventful, august, sublime. For this is the way, I have read and heard, That authors look for the fitting word. All of the proud ingredients mine To build, like Marlowe, the mighty line. But never a line from my new-filled pen That couldn’t be done by a child of ten. Oh, how did Shelley and how did Keats Weave magic words on the fair white sheets Under conditions that, were they mine, I couldn’t bear? And I’d just resign. Yet Milton wrote passable literature Under conditions I couldn’t endure. Coleridge and Chatterton did their stuff Over a road that I’d christen rough. Wordsworth and—soft!—could it be that they Waited until they had something to say?

An old man going a lone highway, Came, at the evening cold and gray, To a chasm vast and deep and wide. Through which was flowing a sullen tide The old man crossed in the twilight dim, The sullen stream had no fear for him; But he turned when safe on the other side And built a bridge to span the tide. “Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near, “You are wasting your strength with building here; Your journey will end with the ending day, You never again will pass this way; You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide, Why build this bridge at evening tide?” The builder lifted his old gray head; “Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said, “There followed after me to-day A youth whose feet must pass this way. This chasm that has been as naught to me To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be; He, too, must cross in the twilight dim; Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day ... I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced As though the sun took step of thee yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene; All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn ... Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry, Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City’s fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year ... O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

By the dry road the fathers cough and spit, This is their room. They are the ones who hung That bloody sun upon the southern wall And crushed the armored beetle to the floor. The father’s skin is seamed and dry, the map Of that wild region where they drained the swamp And set provision out that they might sit, Of history the cracked precipitate, Until the glass be shattered and the sun Descend to burn the prosperous flesh away Of the filthy world, so vilely fathered on The fathers, such black cinders, sitting there. Old pioneers, what lecheries remain? When schoolgirls pass, what whispers of their skirts, Cold gleams of flesh, solicit in your veined And gemlike eyes the custom of desire? None now. Their eyes are sunk in ancient flesh, And the sarcastic triumph of the mind They now enjoy, letting their lust alone Who may have kin but have no longer kind. Neither tomorrow’s monstrous tumor nor The reformation of the past they wish, Who hold in silent colloquy the world A shrivelled apple in the hand of God. They hang at night their somber flags aloft, And through the amorous dark pursue their theme Of common images, that sleep may show Them done with all disasters but the one.

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family, speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive, their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s, mercy shining from their comprehensive faces— this is one of my favorite things. I like it so much I sleep all the time. Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed deep in the dreams where they appear. In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids, before the empress with the melting face, under the towering plane tree, they just show up. “It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.” They are diffident and polite. (Who knew the dead were so polite?) They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes. They don’t want to steal my body and possess the earth and wreak vengeance. They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides, why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it. One of them shyly offers me a pencil. The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster. Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music, the right Reverend Al Green is singing, “I could never see tomorrow. I was never told about the sorrow.”

at my kitchen sink, the bathroom upstairs clogged with family from out of town spending the night after the wake and the after—wake—cold beverages have been consumed and comfort food, leftovers bulging both the fridge and the mini-fridge. In our fifties, both half-asleep half-awake, we face each other. My sister's smile foams white down her chin at the end of a day on which no one has smiled. We laugh. We may never brush our teeth together again. No mirror down here to see our haggard faces. We rinse, we spit. As we were taught.

September 11, 2001 They walk past you weeping for the leaves that burnt & fell, the wood exposed like bone, sculpture that suddenly emerges from white haze. You old fortune-teller, you could have told them in their vibrant grief whispering through the night wind your breath held in your heart like the trembling promise of tomorrow, just before dawn there was no pain you are the wood not the leaf, falling is not falling but offering.

On the Gilfillan burial day, In the Hill o’ Balgay, It was a most solemn sight to see, Not fewer than thirty thousand people assembled in Dundee, All watching the funeral procession of Gilfillan that day, That death had suddenly taken away, And was going to be buried in the Hill o’ Balgay. There were about three thousand people in the procession alone, And many were shedding tears, and several did moan, And their bosoms heaved with pain, Because they knew they would never look upon his like again. There could not be fewer than fifty carriages in the procession that day, And gentlemen in some of them that had come from far away, And in whispers some of them did say, As the hearse bore the precious corpse away, Along the Nethergate that day. I’m sure he will be greatly missed by the poor, For he never turned them empty-handed away from his door; And to assist them in distress it didn’t give him pain, And I’m sure the poor will never look upon his like again. On the Gilfillan burial day, in the Hill o’ Balgay, There was a body of policemen marshalled in grand array, And marched in front of the procession all the way; Also the relatives and friends of the deceas’d, Whom I hope from all sorrows has been releas’d, And whose soul I hope to heaven has fled away, To sing with saints above for ever and aye. The Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council were in the procession that day; Also Mrs Gilfillan, who cried and sobbed all the way For her kind husband, that was always affable and gay, Which she will remember until her dying day. When the procession arrived in the Hill o’ Balgay, The people were almost as hush as death, and many of them did say— As long as we live we’ll remember the day That the great Gilfillan was buried in the Hill o’Balgay. When the body of the great Gilfillan was lowered into the grave, ’Twas then the people’s hearts with sorrow did heave; And with tearful eyes and bated breath, Mrs Gilfillan lamented her loving husband’s death. Then she dropped a ringlet of immortelles into his grave, Then took one last fond look, and in sorrow did leave; And all the people left with sad hearts that day, And that ended the Gilfillan burial in the Hill o’ Balgay.

For Burn Construction Company When you were building the i -10 bypass, one of   your dozers, moving earth at the center of a great pit, slipped its thick blade beneath the water table, slicing into the earth’s wet palm, and the silt moistened beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew was sent home for the day. Next morning, water filled the pit. Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming. It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep green, there between the interstate and the sewage treatment plant. When nothing else worked, you called it a lake and opened it to the public. And we were the public.

He lives, who last night flopped from a log Into the creek, and all night by an ankle Lay pinned to the flood, dead as a nail But for the skin of the teeth of his dog. I brought him boiled eggs and broth. He coughed and waved his spoon And sat up saying he would dine alone, Being fatigue itself after that bath. I sat without in the sun with the dog. Wearing a stocking on the ailing foot, In monster crutches, he hobbled out, And addressed the dog in bitter rage. He told the yellow hound, his rescuer, Its heart was bad, and it ought Not wander by the creek at night; If all his dogs got drowned he would be poor. He stroked its head and disappeared in the shed And came out with a stone mallet in his hands And lifted that rocky weight of many pounds And let it lapse on top of the dog's head. I carted off the carcass, dug it deep. Then he came too with what a thing to lug, Or pour on a dog’s grave, his thundermug, And poured it out and went indoors to sleep. I saw him sleepless in the pane of glass Looking wild-eyed at sunset, then the glare Blinded the glass—only a red square Burning a house burning in the wilderness.