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When we arrive at the lounge of everything with our bags handfuls of earth     the lives of our grandparents in our memory devices we expect an exchange of sorts     that is what we expect and I think everyone deep down expects that we will not turn back Through a high window we will connect stars like line drawings translate the sparkles of the poet we will sign the fascinating mouth of the speaker we will sing lyrics that someone thought were pretty good we will sing them and we will not turn back     we will not When our footsteps awaken fresh from a long complicated journey during which the planet slid otherwise we will likely remember a dream we had once and tell a version of it to the next person and the next and realize hopefully they also have a dream to tell and we will not do that thing where we won’t listen to anyone else’s dream we will listen and interpret     signing     singing     saying even though we have been instructed not to use ings we will use the wisdom disseminated by our devices we will not turn back we will not If on arrival there is wringing of hands we will shake hands and in the eye of a storm we will make tea with our brilliant fading bodies we will do a variety of things while we can we will bed down on the steps of the assembly if we have to we will bed down in a court of law and all beds anyway are temporary and when we see that and realize we have traveled through the night we have traveled and are not turning back     that will be the point at which we will arrive

I have been known to birth a mountain whole, a range of them in my belly, I popped them out one by one. The blood-cut son born black, I could not believe the wholeness of him, the crushed diamond of his face. And then the other, who flew from me, a shooting star; a twin mirror girl, whose orchid face opened and opened and opened. There were more of them, one born of water, one of fire, one for every element. But now my mountain days are done. The red night clouds, the afterbirth, the snail shell whorls of them. The unborns we named: Beinn Narnain, Ben Vane, Beinn Ime, Ben Vorlich, and Beinn Bhuidhe

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

While lovers sleep, I dig my nails into the earth, holding up traffic. Just now a cloud has pulled up while I was talking to the Emptiness of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves at the bottom of the ocean. My heart is taped up like a child’s drawing of the moon over the broken window of the sky where the wind always comes back to fill my lungs. I will dance on my shadow. I will open my mouth with the air inside my mother’s coffin. I will be the arrow breaking apart in the body of the blackbird, which appears at my window, singing.

Where two streams joined, we met By accident, sitting upon an outcropping of rock With only the intent of watching Water flow beneath unwinding water. Facing up-stream, she held a flower To the sun as I leaned back and found An arrowhead inside a crevice, which lay there As if someone had left it by intent As an excuse for me to speak above the whirl of water Swirling upon stone and thus Transform the accident of meeting her— Ablaze in sunlight with a flower in her hand— Into stark fact as obdurate as rock. Could I have called, "Look at this arrowhead I just found here!" Would she have thought "An accident, that's credible," Or feared that my intent was sinister, And that the implication of the arrowhead, Unlike the radiant white flower or The two streams merging into faster water, Casting up colored spume, Had been contrived by me, certain as rock That forms by geologic laws? She had to know an arrowhead Is humanly designed with the intent to kill, Though now it's harmless as a flower Decorating someone's hair, Or water organized into a garden fountain. An arrowhead can now be used As an adornment for a necklace Like a flower in a painting where a stream Leaps past a light-reflecting rock With nothing in a brush-stroke left to accident. And so our accidental meeting on the rock Flowed by, a flower cast upon the water With intent unknown, and all That's left now is the arrowhead.

The land is full of what was lost. What's hidden Rises to the surface after rain In new-ploughed fields, and fields stubbled again: The clay shards, foot and lip, that heaped the midden, And here and there a blade or flakes of blade, A patient art, knapped from a core of flint, Most broken, few as coins new from the mint, Perfect, shot through time as through a glade. You cannot help but think how they were lost: The quarry, fletched shaft in its flank, the blood Whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood, Not just the meat, but what the weapon cost— O hapless hunter, though your aim was true— The wounded hart, spooked, fleeting in its fear— And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

When a beautiful woman wakes up, she checks to see if her beauty is still there. When a sick person wakes up, he checks to see if he continues to be sick. He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day, looks out the window at a sky where a time-release sun is crawling through the milky X ray of a cloud. * * * * * I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box, the wires crossed, the panel lit by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing out of sequence, the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls, and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam, the message doesn’t reach its destination, the angel falls down into the body of a dog and is speechless, tearing at itself with fast white teeth; and the consciousness twists evasively, like a sheet of paper, traveled by blue tongues of flame. * * * * * In the famous painting, the saint looks steadfastly heavenward, away from the physical indignity below, the fascinating spectacle of his own body bristling with arrows; he looks up as if he were already adamantly elsewhere, exerting that power of denial the soul is famous for, that ability to say, “None of this is real: Nothing that happened here on earth and who I thought I was, and nothing that I did or that was done to me, was ever real.”

Speak to her heart! That manic force When wits depart Forbids remorse. Dream with her dreaming Until her lust Seems to her seeming An act of trust! Do without doing! Love’s wilful potion Veils the ensuing, And brief, commotion.

A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown— A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. * A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind— A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs. * A poem should be equal to: Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be.

To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire — without the power to give it away ... — Betty Adcock At first a silhouette on the horizon, then turning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meet the adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch, their hearts, all the time, pounding, driven by the same spring force (that would tear them apart), the same force that drives the salmon upriver, against the current, the odds, back to the home pool, even as the autumn mind, in spite of itself, turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn gives to the summer’s leaves, a deceptive glamour, warming the past with an amber light, like brandy held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk into the water, into the Baltic Sea each night, where, in the mythical depths of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castle of the female sun, burning in the dark water, a globe the color of harvest, aglow there in the depths of the past, though the amber, congealed sap of a once living force, is broken into bits, and the mythic castle with it — strung now as beads, and hung, a charm, around the neck of a daughter, like the one in a Greek dream, picking flowers when the earth opened, and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs, the dark god broke out of the earth driven by the same spring force, consequential and mortal, and up there, hanging over the mythic fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same, and never to be reconciled) — what is that? A hot air balloon filled with passengers who paid to be raised in a basket, to be up there looking down on the ground where they live, a place shrunken now beneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below, the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished air from the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory. Useless to warn the girl, whose hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, or the sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolor dream of a world he could never inhabit ... useless to comfort the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible was wisdom when it knew itself useless, and useless to read the names on the shining black wall of the Vietnam Memorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene, not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats saw carved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing high above Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky: a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes, it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly wounded centaur for whom immortality was a curse, and he gave it away to Prometheus, who stole the god’s fire and gave it away, as art gives the power to give it away, for that fire is the gift that cannot be held, for it will burn to an ash those (born and born again, war without end) who would hold it.