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In payment for those mornings at the mirror while, at her expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all the mornings afterward of Hush and Just stand still, to make some small amends for every reg- iment- ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss, I did as I was told for once, gave up my map, let Emma lead us through the woods “by instinct,” as the drunkard knew the natural prince. We had no towels, we had no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels call them here, and I am summer’s dullest hand at un- premeditated moves. But when the coppice of sheltering boxwood disclosed its path and posted rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed poor excuse. The ladies in their lumpy variety lay on their public half-acre of lawn, the water lay in dappled shade, while Emma in her underwear and I in an ill- fitting borrowed suit availed us of the breast stroke and a modified crawl. She’s eight now. She will rather die than do this in a year or two and lobbies, even as we swim, to be allowed to cut her hair. I do, dear girl, I will give up this honey-colored metric of augmented thirds, but not (shall we climb on the raft for a while?) not yet.

for Charles Simic Like a monstrous snail, a toilet slides into a living room on a track of wet, demanding to be loved. It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets. In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing. And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace ... The toilet slides away ...

With spring in our flesh the cranes come back, funneling into a north cold and black. And we go out to them, go out into the town, welcoming them with shouts, asking them down. The winter flies away when the cranes cross. It falls into the north, homeward and lost. Let no one call it back when the cranes fly, silver birds, red-capped, down the long sky.

I Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation in the wings, roles taking on flesh before a role begins… as light begins in the elm, pushing the long elm branches into night, a ghost light pressing sky… or actors, swollen with strange selves, distended to the edges of tight skin, a brightness under moth-wing fingertips. White arms stretch out toward truth. The stage is full of light. Your brightness gloves my skin. II Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels, tiny, unable to reach a gold key, knew what gardens were for— yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight to will flamboyance from green buds. The swollen poppy twists within its cap, a pink invention wrestling light. How often I think of tunneling roots, curtains of roots, white ropes that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels. Here, we are rubbed on gold. This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens. III A robin listens to darkness. I think of worms, grubs, moles, the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down, of cave fish, blacksnakes, and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls that thunder on dark walls. When we wear another self, do our souls darken? On a bright stage, do we enter darkest places? IV There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves. For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls, stumbling and skuffing fingertips. At Mycenae, it is a heavy must, a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern. They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn silence frayed under a blur of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands manipulate evasive cellar shadows. Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves. V Oh I think of Alice gone down, down under groundcover dreams, a man’s tunneled night. Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget lines. My tongue-tied silence foundering…     Stage props mumble rigidities.        The audience… I think of silences at Nieux, at Mycenae, the tourists gone, guides returned to wives, houses…. And those silences of capricious light. The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame. Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through arias of reddest blossom.

If you think you know enough to say this poem is about good hair, I'll correct you and tell you it's about history which is the blacksmith of our tongues. Our eyes. Where you see misunderstanding I see knuckles and teeth for sale in a storefront window. I see the waterlogged face of the fourteen-year-old boy. The bullet's imperceptible sizzle toward an unarmed man. And as you ask me to sign the book that is not mine, your gaze shifting between me and the author's photo, whispering, but that's not you? I do not feel sorry for you. No. I think only that when a man is a concept he will tell you about the smell of smoke. He will tell you the distance between heartbreak and rage.

Nights, by the light of whatever would burn: tallow, tinder and the silken rope of wick that burns slow, slow we wove the baskets from the long gold strands of wheat that were another silk: worm soul spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other. The fields lay fallow, swollen with frost, expectant winter. Mud clung to the edges of our gowns; we had hung back like shadows on the walls of trees and watched. In the little circles that our tapers threw, murdered men rose red in their clanging armor, muttered words that bled through the bars of iron masks:the lord who sold us to the glory fields, lied.

Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked, both fell to the floor. A gesture gone sadly awry. This was close to fact and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur in Florida, where she was surrounded by rotting abundance and greedy insects. One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand alighting on solid furniture, a casual shift of weight, the next, undignified splayed legs. The shell of the table proved to be stuffed with termite eggs. True, it was a fall from no great height— merely the height of herself, and although the hollowed-out table failed, at least the floor held, though probably infested by termites as well, and possibly built on a latent sinkhole, how can you tell? And how could she, smiling and easy, arm moving without forethought and permission, have forgotten fear, apparently let go of a hard-learned lesson? Enter a room as though it is strange. What you recognize may have changed, or may change without warning. Trees fall in hurricanes and on windless mornings, breaching houses where people you knew have vanished or died or stopped loving you.

Because the dark suit is worn it is worn warm with a black tie and a kiss at the head of the stairs When you hear the dark suit rip on the heart’s curb the hurt is big rose flesh caught on the orange woman’s buttons As you talk metropole monotone antique intelligence as you dress wounds by peyotl looming the boulevards women hunt their children from you who look out lit still inside of a dark suit

In Ocean's wide domains, Half buried in the sands, Lie skeletons in chains, With shackled feet and hands. Beyond the fall of dews, Deeper than plummet lies, Float ships, with all their crews, No more to sink nor rise. There the black Slave-ship swims, Freighted with human forms, Whose fettered, fleshless limbs Are not the sport of storms. These are the bones of Slaves; They gleam from the abyss; They cry, from yawning waves, "We are the Witnesses!" Within Earth's wide domains Are markets for men's lives; Their necks are galled with chains, Their wrists are cramped with gyves. Dead bodies, that the kite In deserts makes its prey; Murders, that with affright Scare school-boys from their play! All evil thoughts and deeds; Anger, and lust, and pride; The foulest, rankest weeds, That choke Life's groaning tide! These are the woes of Slaves; They glare from the abyss; They cry, from unknown graves, "We are the Witnesses!"

All this havoc just means I’m a poor wizard. Once, I lit three twigs and fanned the smoke, from miles away, into the girl who jumbled scales through my spine. As she vanished I clapped a delighted tune. But not without aches of my own. Did the sack of no echoes fail me? Now, on such a mild curse— boils, sewn eyes, a shrew in the loin my ankle reddens up and eyes me with disdain. Toenails fall off. How far will this go? Poor wizard. Poorly done in. These pangs are power are power as both knees lock up ashamed to move under me.