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Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing: “I don't wanna play at your house; I don't like you any more.” My house stands opposite, on the other hill, Among meadows, with the orchard fences down and falling; Deer come almost to the door. You cannot see it, even in this clearest morning. White birds hang in the air between Over the garbage landfill and those homes thereto adjacent, Hovering slowly, turning, settling down Like the flakes sifting imperceptibly onto the little town In a waterball of glass. And yet, this morning, beyond this quiet scene, The floating birds, the backyards of the poor, Beyond the shopping plaza, the dead canal, the hillside lying tilted in the air, Tomorrow has broken out today: Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. What shall I say to the young on such a morning?— Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?— No; my little ones lean not toward revolt. They Are the Whites, the vaguely furiously driven, who resist Their souls with such passivity As would make Quakers swear. All day, dear Lord, all day They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, “We have nowhere to go but down; The great destination is to stay.” Surely the nations will be reasonable; They look at the world—don't they?—the world's way? The clock just now has nothing more to say.

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim—Corse-Matin (6.8.94) Heureux ceux qui ont la clim Pendant la grande canicule. Heureux those whose culs are cool. Heureuse her and heureux him. C’est la canicule qui hurle, Ready to tear you limb from limb. Heureux ceux qui ont la clim, Cri-criant: ‘O turlútuturle!’ La situation est grim, The mise-en-scène a trifle burle. À chaleur disons donc: ‘Ta gueule!’ And keep ourselves amused and slim. Heureux qui par terre se roule: Lucky Luke and Lucky Jim, Edith Piaf, Tiger Tim, Et le plus divin Poupoule. Heureux Toccate, heureux Hymne, Heureux Mouvements Perpetuels, Heureuses Les Bîches immortelles, De tristesse sexuelle synonyme. Je ne regrette rien. I’m full Of love as are the seraphim, And plein de bonheur to the brim, Pendant cette grande canicule. La vie has satisfying sym: For every lui there lives an elle. Finding its level in her well, La source sauvage is in the swim. Ni ouragan ni canicule, Ni pretexte prompte ou assez flim, Can keep le coeur from feeling imm, Allègre in the planet’s pull. Let’s fly together in a bim, Au-dessus de la fou-foule Qui mange ses menus et ses moules, Impregné de sueur, et prim! For always I’ll have you, and you’ll Have me, and though desire grows dim, Heureux ceux qui ont la quim, Heureuses celles qui ont le tool. Forever through the sky will skim Le pé-pédalo de Dédale, Escaladant sans escale The blue horizon’s endless rim. En pénitence, le tournesol Beguiné, poudreuz, anonyme, Turns and turns, and at a whim Sonne, en sol, son son du sol. From Chatellerault to Arles and Nîmes Le visage bronze du tournesol S’incline comme un pa-parasol Trouve une épaule coquette, intime. Devisé dans le banderole: ‘Heureux ceux qui ont la clim.’ Across the fields the notes are dim: Son sol, son sol, son sol, son sol.

The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine, The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,— O, I am sick for home! The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air, And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,— When will the good ship come? The wretched stumps all charred and burned, And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,— Why is the world so old? The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly, Where are the dead untold? The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog, The huge stranded hulk and the floating log, Sorrow with life began! And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore, O the wind, and the wind, for evermore! What will become of man?

I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message? The message was there wasn’t one. This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in. Divorced dad Sundays at The Greenwich watching the British Secret Service save the world. I thought he sent the knife inadvertently, but now I see it was code— he was boxed in without a knife to cut himself out.

Carpenters whose wives have run off Are sometimes discovered weeping on the job. But even then they don’t complain of their work. Whitman’s father was a carpenter. He was so happy hammering houses That he jumped with a shout from the roof beam And rolled with a yawp in the timothy. This led his son to conclude wrongly That all workmen are singers. Whitman’s father was weak. He had trouble holding a job. He hoped that the house he was working on Would be lived in by a man more steady Than he was, who would earn his sleep, Dreaming easy under a sound roof With no rain in his face. Of course, there are bad carpenters everywhere. They don’t care if the walls don’t meet. “After all,” they argue, “We’re not building airplanes.” But Whitman’s father measured his nails. Many mornings, clacking his plane, He crooned a song to the corners, Urging them on to a snug fit. No needles of heat will escape through a crack If he can help it, no threads of light.

I can’t get rid of useful things and nobody wants to pick them up, I keep forgetting where I lay my umbrella. I don’t leave footprints in the snow anymore, we haven’t had a war on domestic soil in so long I wonder if I still got it. Because once I had it. I heard about a boy who once tied a string to his brother, he tied his brother to the ocean and the ocean to the blackbird— from the ground all the birds look like blackbirds from the ground a Stealth Bomber looks like a spaceship. The aliens are coming, they walk through birthday parties and basically go unnoticed. And this is kind of how I go through life, once I heated up a spoon in the microwave the fish have so much mercury in them they spark. I was handed a bayonet from the Civil War and a copper penny corroded with rust. When they take the Statue of Liberty apart to clean her her neck explodes with a million little spiders. Meanwhile in a forest somewhere someone cut open my grandmother’s belly and filled it with bricks something is coming soon I keep a bucket of lambs blood by the front door.

Children under, say,ten, shouldn't know that the universe is ever-expanding, inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies swallowed by galaxies, whole solar systems collapsing, all of it acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning the rules of cartoon animation, that if a man draws a door on a rock only he can pass through it. Anyone else who tries will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds should stick with burning houses, car wrecks, ships going down—earthbound, tangible disasters, arenas where they can be heroes. You can run back into a burning house, sinking ships have lifeboats, the trucks will come with their ladders, if you jump you will be saved. A child places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus, & drives across a city of sand. She knows the exact spot it will skid, at which point the bridge will give, who will swim to safety & who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff he will not fall until he notices his mistake.

The dance shoes, seduction and coercion, owned by male feet, roam floors that beg for chandeliers. In search of flat-footed beauty and a bed, where ever they might be, the handsome conversation attracts female followers trading on the smiles of curves. The next steps are dizzying and leave dresses dipped and hung over with a purse and heart opened at their tops. The wallflowers can't say when the tango with the rag doll began, but witnesses toasted a conga line of would-be brides that transcend a retirement community in Florida, each giving up their precious moments on Earth to fandango's flimflam.

A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play— For May is here once more, and so is he,— His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee, And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they: Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me Of woody pathways winding endlessly Along the creek, where even yesterday He plunged his shrinking body—gasped and shook— Yet called the water "warm," with never lack Of joy. And so, half enviously I look Upon this graceless barefoot and his track,— His toe stubbed—ay, his big toe-nail knocked back Like unto the clasp of an old pocketbook.

An old woodcut of the London Bridge and a colored lithograph of a barley field. There are no other pictures on Ward D. The London Bridge lifts sooty towers above the river. But it's the barley field I see. A golden ocean of barley. It's not like the other grain-fields. Maybe it's those inward-looking eyes gone into it so it becomes heaven? A fall-colored sky, mild, with no harvesters and no scythes.