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Mid-morning Monday she is staring peaceful as the rain in that shallow back yard she wears flannel bedroom slippers she is sipping coffee she is thinking— —gazing at the weedy bumpy yard at the faces beginning to take shape in the wavy mud in the linoleum where floorboards assert themselves Women whose lives are food breaking eggs with care scraping garbage from the plates unpacking groceries hand over hand Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front tough plastic with detachable lids Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7 Friday the shopping mall open till 9 bags of groceries unpacked hand over certain hand Men whose lives are money time-and-a-half Saturdays the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home unfolded Monday morning Women whose lives are food because they are not punch-carded because they are unclocked sighing glad to be alone staring into the yard, mid-morning mid-week by mid-afternoon everything is forgotten There are long evenings panel discussions on abortions, fashions, meaningful work there are love scenes where people mouth passions sprightly, handsome, silly, manic in close-ups revealed ageless the women whose lives are food the men whose lives are money fidget as these strangers embrace and weep and mis- understand and forgive and die and weep and embrace and the viewers stare and fidget and sigh and begin yawning around 10:30 never made it past midnight, even on Saturdays, watching their braven selves perform Where are the promised revelations? Why have they been shown so many times? Long-limbed children a thousand miles to the west hitch-hiking in spring, burnt bronze in summer thumbs nagging eyes pleading Give us a ride, huh? Give us a ride? and when they return nothing is changed the linoleum looks older the Hawaiian Chicken is new the girls wash their hair more often the boys skip over the puddles in the GM parking lot no one eyes them with envy their mothers stoop the oven doors settle with a thump the dishes are rinsed and stacked and by mid-morning the house is quiet it is raining out back or not raining the relief of emptiness rains simple, terrible, routine at peace

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon babylon Once a great city in Biblical times, see Psalms 137. both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” starshine and clay, between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

How like an angel came I down! How bright are all things here! When first among his works I did appear O how their glory me did crown! The world resembled his eternity, In which my soul did walk; And ev’ry thing that I did see Did with me talk. The skies in their magnificence, The lively, lovely air; Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair! The stars did entertain my sense, And all the works of God, so bright and pure, So rich and great did seem, As if they ever must endure In my esteem. A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all his glories show, I felt a vigour in my sense That was all spirit. I within did flow With seas of life, like wine; I nothing in the world did know But ’twas divine. Harsh ragged objects were conceal’d, Oppressions tears and cries, Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes Were hid, and only things reveal’d Which heav’nly spirits, and the angels prize. The state of innocence And bliss, not trades and poverties, Did fill my sense. The streets were pav’d with golden stones, The boys and girls were mine, Oh how did all their lovely faces shine! The sons of men were holy ones, In joy and beauty they appear’d to me, And every thing which here I found, While like an angel I did see, Adorn’d the ground. Rich diamond and pearl and gold In ev’ry place was seen; Rare splendours, yellow, blue, red, white and green, Mine eyes did everywhere behold. Great wonders cloth’d with glory did appear, Amazement was my bliss, That and my wealth was ev’ry where: No joy to this! Curs’d and devis’d proprieties, With envy, avarice And fraud, those fiends that spoil even Paradise, Flew from the splendour of mine eyes, And so did hedges, ditches, limits, bounds, I dream’d not aught of those, But wander’d over all men’s grounds, And found repose. Proprieties themselves were mine, And hedges ornaments; Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents Did not divide my joys, but all combine. Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteem’d My joys by others worn: For me they all to wear them seem’d When I was born.

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out, my mother potters around her house. Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one there, no one to tell what to do, she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself, fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly throws out her arms and screams—high notes lying here and there on the carpets like bodies touched by a downed wire, she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she. I feel, now, that I do not know her, and for all my staring, I have not seen her —like the song she sang, when we were small, I wonder as I wander, out under the sky, how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die, for poor lonely people, like you, and like I

Loaf after loaf, in several sizes, and never does it not look fresh, as though its insides weren’t moist or warm crust not the kind that spices a room with the plump aroma of toast. Found on the table; among shadows next to the kitchen phone; dispatched FedEx (without return address, though). Someone, possibly more than one person, loves me. Well then, who? Amazing that bread should be so weightless, down-light when handled, as a me dying to taste it takes a slice. Which lasts just long enough to reach my mouth, but then, at the first bite, Nothing! Nothing but air, thin air .... Oh. One more loaf of wonderbread, only a pun for bread, seductive visually, but you could starve. Get rid of it, throw it in the river— Beyond which, grain fields. Future food for the just and the unjust, those who love, and do not love.

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children— a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them, in a chair near a window, their father thinks of his mother, her recent death and the grief he is trying to gather. It is late October. The hooplight spreads from the family, through the window, to the edge of a small orchard, where a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves and only apples hang, heavy and still on the branches. The man looks from the window, down to a scrapbook of facts he is reading. The spider is proven to have memory, he says, and his son, once again, cocks his small face to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if this is some riddle he is slowly approaching, as if this long hour, troubled with phrases and the queer turn in his father's voice, is offered as a riddle. There is the sound of marbles in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery jump of the girl's shoe as she waits, embarrassed, for her father to stop, to return to his known self, thick and consistent as a family bread. But still he continues, plucking scraps from his old book, old diary of wonders: the vanishing borders of mourning paper, the ghostly shape in the candled egg, beak and eye etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw. A little sleet scrapes at the window. The man blinks, sees his hand on the page as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over the playboard, with the careful pattern of their lives dropping softly away, like leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers, and after each phrase the guttural oh, and the left shoe jumping.

for Maxine Kumin A cylinder of maple set in place, feet spread apart— and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer but honed like an axe, draws a semicircle overhead and strikes through the two new halves to leave the steel head sunk a half-inch in the block and the ash handle rigid in the air. A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits the butt end, and the blade rolls out of the cut. The half-logs are still rocking on the flagstones. So much less than what we have been persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood might have sufficed, but it is what we have been taught to disown and forget. Yet just such hardship is what saves. For if the stacked cords speak of felled trees, of countless five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill till the blood is wrung from your back and snowbound warmth must seem so far off you would rather freeze, yet each thin tongue torn from the grain when log-halves were sundered at one stroke will sing in the stove. To remind you of hands. Of how mere touch is song in the silence where hands live—the song of muddy bark, the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down, and the song of one hand over another, two of us holding the last length of the log in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw keeps ripping through hickory.

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.' The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Little soul, do you remember? You once walked over wooden boards to a house that sat on stilts in the sea. It was early. The sun painted brightness onto the water, and wherever you sat that path led directly to you. Some mornings the sea-road was muted scratched tin, some mornings blinding. Then it would leave. Little soul, it is strange — even now it is early.

It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods. The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill. In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’s Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it. Comes now one who has been conquered By all he sees. And asks what—would have what— Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero? More than the hands on the lines and the back aching, The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty, More than this forever lonely round Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair: Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate More bankrupt than this godlike heresy Which asks of love more leave than extended credit, Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these Worn acres even if over them Those trained to it see signs of they say God.