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As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear; Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed. “Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals, The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls, For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good, So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.” With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away, And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

The anthology of love poems I bought for a quarter is brittle, anyway, and comes apart when I read it. One at a time, I throw pages on the fire and watch smoke make its way up and out. I’m almost to the index when I hear a murmuring in the street. My neighbors are watching it snow. I put on my blue jacket and join them. The children stand with their mouths open. I can see nouns — longing, rapture, bliss —

2001 Sadness of just-painted rooms. We clean our tools meticulously, as if currying horses: the little nervous sash brush to be combed and primped, the fat old four-inchers that lap up space to be wrapped and groomed, the ceiling rollers, the little pencils that cover nailheads with oak gloss, to be counted and packed: camped on our dropsheets we stare across gleaming floors at the door and beyond it the old city full of old rumors of conspiracies, gunshots, market crashes: with a little mallet we tap our lids closed, holding our breath, holding our lives in suspension for a moment: an extra drop will ruin everything.

For a birth The fact of the harp swells into the air, Alien and familiar and entirely too large, An elephant lost in the suburbs, And opens with its cry a strange passage Between the harp itself, the fragile harp, And the almost guilty knowledge Of   the stroke of   luck that brought it here And the care with which it must depart.

He couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, likely even fifteen. Skinny black teenager, loose sweater. When I got on Bus #6 at Prince and 1st Avenue, he got on too and took a seat across from me. A kid I didn’t notice too much because two older guys, street pros reeking with wine, started talking to me. They were going to California, get their welfare checks, then come back to Arizona in time for food stamps. When the bus pulled into Ronstadt Transit Center, the kid was the last to get off the bus right behind me. I started to cross the street to wait for Bus #8 when two burly men, one in a neat leather jacket and the other in a sweat shirt, both cool yet stern, smoothly grabbed the kid and backed him against a streetlight pole and quickly cuffed him to the pole. Plastic handcuffs. Practiced manner. Efficiently done. Along with another Indian, I watch what’s happening. Nobody seems to notice or they don’t really want to see. Everything is quiet and normal, nothing’s disturbed. The other Indian and I exchange glances, nod, turn away. Busted boy. Busted Indians. Busted lives. Busted again. I look around for the street guys going to California. But they’re already gone, headed for the railroad tracks. I’m new in Tucson but I’m not a stranger to this scene. Waiting for the bus, I don’t look around for plainclothes. I know they’re there, in this America, waiting. There; here. Waiting for busted boys, busted Indians, busted lives.

Butter, like love, seems common enough yet has so many imitators. I held a brick of it, heavy and cool, and glimpsed what seemed like skin beneath a corner of its wrap; the décolletage revealed a most attractive fat! And most refined. Not milk, not cream, not even crème de la crème . It was a delicacy which assured me that bliss follows agitation, that even pasture daisies through the alchemy of four stomachs may grace a king's table. We have a yellow bowl near the toaster where summer's butter grows soft and sentimental. We love it better for its weeping, its nostalgia for buckets and churns and deep stone wells, for the press of a wooden butter mold shaped like a swollen heart.

A tulip, just opened, had offered to hold A butterfly, gaudy and gay; And, rocked in a cradle of crimson and gold, The careless young slumberer lay. For the butterfly slept, as such thoughtless ones will, At ease, and reclining on flowers, If ever they study, ’t is how they may kill The best of their mid-summer hours. And the butterfly dreamed, as is often the case With indolent lovers of change, Who, keeping the body at ease in its place, Give fancy permission to range. He dreamed that he saw, what he could but despise, The swarm from a neighbouring hive; Which, having come out for their winter supplies, Had made the whole garden alive. He looked with disgust, as the proud often do, On the diligent movements of those, Who, keeping both present and future in view, Improve every hour as it goes. As the brisk little alchymists passed to and fro, With anger the butterfly swelled; And called them mechanics – a rabble too low To come near the station he held. ‘Away from my presence!’ said he, in his sleep, ‘Ye humbled plebeians! nor dare Come here with your colorless winglets to sweep The king of this brilliant parterre!’ He thought, at these words, that together they flew, And, facing about, made a stand; And then, to a terrible army they grew, And fenced him on every hand. Like hosts of huge giants, his numberless foes Seemed spreading to measureless size: Their wings with a mighty expansion arose, And stretched like a veil o’er the skies. Their eyes seemed like little volcanoes, for fire,— Their hum, to a cannon-peal grown,— Farina to bullets was rolled in their ire, And, he thought, hurled at him and his throne. He tried to cry quarter! his voice would not sound, His head ached – his throne reeled and fell; His enemy cheered, as he came to the ground, And cried, ‘King Papilio, farewell!’ His fall chased the vision – the sleeper awoke, The wonderful dream to expound; The lightning’s bright flash from the thunder-cloud broke, And hail-stones were rattling around. He’d slumbered so long, that now, over his head, The tempest’s artillery rolled; The tulip was shattered – the whirl-blast had fled, And borne off its crimson and gold. ’T is said, for the fall and the pelting, combined With suppressed ebullitions of pride, This vain son of summer no balsam could find, But he crept under covert and died.

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn and he names the sky his own But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.

Herodotus says the king made a bowl to leave behind the memory of a number. We don’t know the number. We don’t know if it was divisible by two or three. I want, at the moment, the number to indicate a ratio, part of a proportion, because the measurement of the earth depends on this, the balance among things, the snow at the bottom of the hill, the gold garage light caged in a tree, my love for my friend and the distance between us, which I can’t bear. I made a pinhole camera to demonstrate proportion, and everything bright hovers on its milky eye, and here is the catalogue of what hovers there smaller than itself: the blue horizon and the dash at the stoplight, a shell night-light, the gazing ball of the sun going down against the white back fence, which made it look like night in the woods lit from underneath on the wax. I held these things yesterday, along with two pearls that are spheres hanging from my living room ceiling. My friend is smaller now, and if I held my camera up to her, she would give off enough light to hover pocket-sized in my hand, and grand in the world.

We tied branches to our helmets. We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank, blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target. We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off the river, slow-dragging with ghosts from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America. We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds. In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal, till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk wrestling iron through grass. We weren’t there. The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath, ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each man’s eyelid.