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Next to the screen door work boots dry in the sun. Salt lines map the leather and laces droop like the arms of a new-hire waiting to punch out. The shoe hangs open like the sigh of someone too tired to speak a mouth that can almost breathe. A tear in the leather reveals a shiny steel toe a glimpse of the promise of safety the promise of steel and the years to come.

I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the expanding ring. No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark, But the tree is lifted by this inward work And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering. So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours And strikes its roots deep in the house alone: The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors, White curtains softly and continually blown As the free air moves quietly about the room; A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall— These are the dear familiar gods of home, And here the work of faith can best be done, The growing tree is green and musical. For what is happiness but growth in peace, The timeless sense of time when furniture Has stood a life's span in a single place, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless; Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

To be poor and raise skinny children. To own nothing but skinny clothing. Skinny food falls in between cracks. Friends cannot visit your skinny home. They cannot fit through the door. Your skinny thoughts evaporate into the day or the night that you cannot see with your tiny eyes. God sticks you with the smallest pins and your blood, the red is diluted. Imagine a tiny hole, the other side of which is a fat world and how lost you would feel. Of course, I’m speaking to myself. How lost I would feel, and how dangerous.

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving— this is our life. Whose life is it improving? It topples some. Some others it will toughen. Work is the safest way to fail, and often the simplest way to love a son or daughter. We come. We carp. We’re fired. We worry later. That man is strange. His calipers are shiny. His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney, and, offered coffee, answers, “Thank you, no.” That man, with nothing evil left to do and two small skills to stir some interest up, fits in the curtained corner of a shop. The best part of our life is disappearing into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused, or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest. Yet nothing you could do could break our silence. We are a check. Do not expect a balance. That is a wrathful man becoming older, a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder. We stay until the bell. That man will stay ten minutes more, so no one can complain. Each day, by then, he’s done exactly ten. Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.

for my father 1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding Back like a dam the flood overtops—but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ... And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted, He hears the Voices begin to die down The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling Sunup to sundown falls gradually still —Unappeasable, the silence that will follow When his every last drop has been poured out. 2. Countdown In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across Your face siphoning air into your lungs, You lie helpless as an astronaut Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious To ours, your body's fevered presence Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail Up the pipe of the crematory oven: How distant we will seem after Such intensity ... We drift in your stare Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility. Already you are space immeasurable By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted Payload, liftoff, escape velocity. 3. Prayer In the house of the dead I pace the halls: The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert Or flatten into horizonless ocean. I step outside, the door clicking shut Comforting in its finality ... Now I see the house as if I looked down From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused, Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits: I can't look you in the face, you see only The openness of sky rising above mountains. (Only after the world had emptied You and filled you with its openness Will I feel the love I pray to feel?) 4. The God a dream A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere. Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure, I cradle you, I sponge you clean As if you were my son, the emptiness you Drink like heavy black milk erasing Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain. The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven By the god, blinded by the god's Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads In this place the god commands: Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you are nothing in my hands but my hands moving. 5. His Stare Absently there in a moment of pure being He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring: The air's transparence gains solidity From his looking; while his emaciated features, The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones, Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green Of the trees he is too weak to prune. And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing And enters and becomes each spectral vibration; So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare. 6. The Current The numbing current of the Demorol Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night He lives in slowly begins to darken, His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness Blinding as an underwater cave. Already He filters the dark water through gills aligned To strain that element he more and more resembles: Like walls of water held in miraculous Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially Above him, my hands holding his tightening Its grip even as his hand loosens ... As if my hand could lead him past that undulating Weight towering above us out of sight. 7. The Rehearsal I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair, The rank rich air of breathing flesh— But like fumes rising from earth's molten core The voices of the dead reach out to you, Your whispering parents, dead for forty years, Entreating me to turn—and so I Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die, You dwindle, blur into unfillable Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ... But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus —Only this voice rehearsing breath By breath in words you'll never read these Lines stolen from your death.

A great light is the man who knows the woman he loves A great light is the woman who knows the man she loves And carries the light into room after room arousing The sleepers and looking hard into the face of each And then sends them asleep again with a kiss Or a whole night of love and goes on and on until The man and woman who carry the great lights of the Knowledge of the one lover enter the room toward which Their light is sent and fit the one and the other torch In a high candelabrum and there is such light That children leap up unless the sea swallow them In the crossing or hatred or war against which do not Pray only but be vigilant and set your hand to the work.

Not fierce and tender but sweet. This is our impression of the soldiers. We call our machine Aunt Pauline. Fasten it fat, that is us, we say Aunt Pauline. When we left Paris we had rain. Not snow now nor that in between. We did have snow then. Now we are bold. We are accustomed to it. All the weights are measures. By this we mean we know how much oil we use for the machine. *          *          * Hurrah for America. Here we met a Captain and take him part way. A day's sun. Is this Miss. Yes indeed our mat. We meant by this that we were always meeting people and that it was pleasant. We can thank you. We thank you. Soldiers of course spoke to us. Come together. Come to me there now. They read on our van American Committee in aid of French wounded. All of it is bit. Bitter. This is the way they say we do help. In the meaning of bright. Bright not light. This comforts them when they speak to me. I often discuss America with them and what we hope to do. They listen well and say we hope so too. We all do. *          *          * This is apropros of the birthplace of Maréchal Joffre. We visited it and we have sent postal cards of it. The committee will be pleased. It is not a bother to be a soldier. I think kindly of that bother. Can you say lapse. Then think about it. Indeed it is yet. We are so pleased. With the flag. With the flag of sets. Sets of color. Do you like flags. Blue flags smell sweetly. Blue flags in a whirl. We did this we had ribbon of the American flag and we cut it up and we gave each soldier one with a pin and they pinned it on and we were pleased and we received a charming letter from a telephonist at the front who heard from a friend in Perpignan that we were giving this bit of ribbon and he asked for some and we sent them and we hope that they are all living. The wind blows. And the automobile goes. Can you guess boards. Wood. Naturally we think about wind because this country of Rousillon is the windiest corner in France. Also it is a great wine country. *          *          * This is apropos of the fact that I always ask where they come from and then I am ashamed to say I don't know all the Departments but I am learning them. In the meantime. In the meantime we are useful. That is what I mean to say. In the meantime can you have beds. This means that knowing the number of beds you begin to know the hospital. Kindly call a brother. What is a cure. I speak french. What one means. I can call it in time. By the way where are fish. They all love fishing. In that case are there any wonders. Many wonders are women. I could almost say that that was apropos of my cranking my machine. And men too. We smile. In the way sentences. He does not feel as we do. But he did have the coat. He blushed a little. This is sometimes when they can't quite help themselves and they want to help us. We do not understand the weather. That astonishes me. Camellias in Perpignan. Camellias finish when roses begin. Thank you in smiles. In this way we go on. So far we have had no troubles yet and yet we do need material. It is astonishing that those who have fought so hard and so well should pick yellow irises and fish in a stream. And then a pansy. I did not ask for it. It smells. A sweet smell. With acacia. Call it locusts. Call it me. I finish by saying that the french soldier is the person we should all help.

Lines Composed 21st February 1825 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair— The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing— And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live.

Do you have adequate oxen for the job? No, my oxen are inadequate. Well, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job? I would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately. I'll see if I can get them for you. I'd be obliged if you could do that for me. Certainly. And do you have sufficient fishcakes for the men? We have fifty fishcakes, which is less than sufficient. I'll have them delivered on the morrow. Do you need maps of the mountains and the underworld? We have maps of the mountains but we lack maps of the underworld. Of course you lack maps of the underworld, there are no maps of the underworld. And, besides, you don't want to go there, it's stuffy. I had no intention of going there, or anywhere for that matter. It's just that you asked me if I needed maps. . . . Yes, yes, it's my fault, I got carried away. What do you need, then, you tell me? We need seeds, we need plows, we need scythes, chickens, pigs, cows, buckets and women. Women? We have no women. You're a sorry lot, then. We are a sorry lot, sir. Well, I can't get you women. I assumed as much, sir. What are you going to do without women, then? We will suffer, sir. And then we'll die out one by one. Can any of you sing? Yes, sir, we have many fine singers among us. Order them to begin singing immediately. Either women will find you this way or you will die comforted. Meanwhile busy yourselves with the meaningful tasks you have set for yourselves. Sir, we will not rest until the babes arrive.

Federico Garcia Lorca used to uncork a bottle or two of wine whenever the duende dwindled for a line. James Joyce would have preferred a choice of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany’s, but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies. The Later Henry James bet shots of rum against himself in games of how much can we pyramid upon a given donné. Little Dylan Thomas didn’t keep his promise to stay out of Milk Wood. He tried to drown the fact as best he could. Anna Akhmatova Eyed the last shot of a Pre-war cognac de champagne. “So much for you, little brandy.Do svidanya.” T. S. Eliot used to belly it up to the nearest bar, then make for a correlative objective in his car. Proust used to too.