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My copy of The Fireside Book of Verse is as the seller promised—the stapled spine, the paper aged to Army tan—no worse for wear, given the cost of its design, six cents to make and printed on a press once used for magazines and pulp. This book was never meant to last a war much less three quarters of a century. I look for evidence of all the men who scanned these lines, crouched down in holes or lying in their racks. I read the poems secondhand. Someone has creased the page. Did he begin then stop to sleep? to clean his gun perhaps? to listen to the bugler playing taps?

The water sings along our keel, The wind falls to a whispering breath; I look into your eyes and feel No fear of life or death; So near is love, so far away The losing strife of yesterday. We watch the swallow skim and dip; Some magic bids the world be still; Life stands with finger upon lip; Love hath his gentle will; Though hearts have bled, and tears have burned, The river floweth unconcerned. We pray the fickle flag of truce Still float deceitfully and fair; Our eyes must love its sweet abuse; This hour we will not care, Though just beyond to-morrow's gate, Arrayed and strong, the battle wait.

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads, Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple; And God will grow no talons at his heels, Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

At Arlington, 1866 The summer blew its little drifts of sound— Tangled with wet leaf-shadows and the light Small breath of scattered morning buds—around The yellow path through which our footsteps wound. Below, the Capitol rose glittering white. There stretched a sleeping army. One by one, They took their places until thousands met; No leader’s stars flashed on before, and none Leaned on his sword or stagger’d with his gun— I wonder if their feet have rested yet! They saw the dust, they joined the moving mass, They answer’d the fierce music’s cry for blood, Then straggled here and lay down in the grass:— Wear flowers for such, shores whence their feet did pass; Sing tenderly; O river’s haunted flood! They had been sick, and worn, and weary, when They stopp’d on this calm hill beneath the trees: Yet if, in some red-clouded dawn, again The country should be calling to her men, Shall the r[e]veill[e] not remember these? Around them underneath the mid-day skies The dreadful phantoms of the living walk, And by low moons and darkness with their cries— The mothers, sisters, wives with faded eyes, Who call still names amid their broken talk. And there is one who comes alone and stands At his dim fireless hearth—chill’d and oppress’d By Something he had summon’d to his lands, While the weird pallor of its many hands Points to his rusted sword in his own breast!

What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me, I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean all the grown-ups in the world, they’re just playing house, all poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strange- ness of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer, me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it. And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean God is the progenitor of religious impetuousity in the human beast. And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear, but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction between men and women is five million shits.

All day long I've been hidden, enmeshed, locked in the shadow of the holy mountain, my body covered with shame. I'd hoped there would be a dog barking furiously. Unable to go forward, unable to go back, at least with the sound of a dog barking I'd attain something. . . something. Instead of a dog barking there was silence, then the sound of a drum beaten loud & fast by a young nun. Into this temple come none of the grand sounds, none of the great thoughts. In the cabbage field, heads all the same size are profiles of young novice nuns & the priestesses sitting in Unmun Temple. Young faces like dew, like hoarfrost.

The heart of a bear is a cloud-shuttered mountain. The heart of a mountain’s a kiln. The white heart of a moth has nineteen white chambers. The heart of a swan is a swan. The heart of a wasp is a prick of plush. The heart of a skunk is a mink. The heart of an owl is part blood and part chalice. The fey mouse heart rides a dawdy dust-cart. The heart of a kestrel hides a house wren at nest. The heart of lark is a czar. The heart of a scorpion is swidden and spark. The heart of a shark is a gear. Listen and tell, thrums the grave heart of humans. Listen well love, for it’s pitch dark down here.

Midwinter, the crows take their darkness out on day. A thin rain falls and breaks. I wonder at the way the oaks unravel here (and travel word of mouth) another year. Not going, I go south.

Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery; impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming, a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag. So that's the flag. I never saw it before. I somehow never thought of there being a flag, but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume, and paper money; they remain to be seen. And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen, descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans. Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook! Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy, a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression. Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall s, New York. There. We are settled. The customs officials will speak English, we hope, and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes. Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impression they make, or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter, the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps— wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat, either because the glue here is very inferior or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior. January 1952

Luggage first, the lining of his suit jacket dangling As always, just when you’d given up hope Nimbly he backs out of the taxi Eyes nervously extending, like brave crabs Everywhere at once, keeping track of his papers He pilots himself into the home berth Like a small tug in a cloud of seagulls Worries flutter around him so thick It takes him some time to arrive And you wonder if he’s ever really been happy: When the blue eyes blur And stare out to sea Whether it’s only a daydream Or a long pain that silences him In such gray distances You’ll never know, but now Turning to you, the delicate mouth Like a magician Is curious, sensitive, playing tricks, Pouting like a wise turtle It seems he has a secret With the driver, With the stewardess on the airplane So that even when he opens his arms When the warm voice surrounds you, Wraps you in rough bliss, Just before you go under Suddenly you remember: The beloved does not come From nowhere: out of himself, alone Often he comes slowly, carefully After a long taxi ride Past many beautiful men and women And many dead bodies, Mysterious and important companions.