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From the guts of the house, I hear my mother crying for her mother and wish I understood the principles of tranquility. How to rest the mind on a likeness of a blast furnace framed in formica by anon. A photo of lounge chairs with folded tartan lap robes. An untitled typology of industrial parks. The gentle interface of yawn and nature. It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow under the smartificial xmas tree. After studying Comparative Reality I began Die Polyvinylchloride Tannenbaumserie. Turn off that tiny tasteful star, I commanded. While you’re alive there’s no time for minor amazements. Turn off the sallow pages of your paralegal pad. I don’t need a light to think of you. I don’t need a god to pray. Some things are glow alone. I said one thing you said you remembered I said. Was it will you be my trophy friend? Or are you someone else’s difficult person? I mean the more myself I become the less intelligible I seem to otters. I know what you mean you said. It’s like the time I was compelled to speak on hedonism to the monks and nuns. Did I say most religion is devotional expediency? Or religion doesn’t worry about being religious, its wisdom corrupted by its brilliance as light passing near the sun is deflected in its path. Deep in its caprices, the whole body thinks it’s understood. To think otterwise is isolating. When I said hedonism stressed cheerfulness, there were disappointed groans. Look, I’m sorry I gave you an ornament shaped like a hollow look. I liked its trinket brightness. Just don’t give me a water tower dressed up as a church steeple or one of those silly thunderstorms that hang around volcanoes. See how those teardrop lights make every object jump? The memory does. You made me love. Was it exile in honey is still exile? Am I the fire or just another flame? Please sell me an indulgence, I begged a monk. And tell me what creature, what peril, could craft that sound that night dropped like a nubile sliver in my ear. There is no freedom of silence when morture forces us to speak from organs other than the heart. It was something about love. A far cry. It was come to me unmediated, go to god lengths. In great things, the attempt alone is sufficient. I think this ’cause I’m finite. That’s an understanding to which reason can only aspire though an entire speech community labored for generations to say it in a fair hand clearly dated and scented with lavender. My one and only only a crass color orgy will see us through the dusk ahead, the months gray as donkey. See how it grows its own cross of fur and bears it on its back? I showed you that.

My soul is not itself, A loud jargogle invades the plague of contingency. Of course, I often delicate in a state of confusion, Especially when I wildly corrade detritus with illusion. Many collages create mayhem, but these days folks Giggle and kench, hosting bitter tears in their eyes. No one seeks the mockery or scorn of ludibrious games. Our ailing world is dedicated to erase sanguinolency. Hence the decline of bloodshed in our current wars. Drones, our best-to-date grade A, silent, unmanned aerial vehicles, our sleek UAVs, aces of launch and leave, Save lives. SAVE LIVES. Hip, hip, hooray, yippee!? Remote control: surf the Web, site define In its prime: eye on the screen, eye in the sky. Get it down cold in comfy seats at safe old Creech. Skill the scan, learn the drill and clinch their cease. The shift is done, a setting sun, and home To ground round patties on the grill, a jog with the dog, A kiss for kids, drowsy, and wiped, hitting the sheets, Plus shades down for a fuck, a hug, and a good night's sleep. We've navigated a boundless longinquity. Life is luculent. War is kind.

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875 I Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World's strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? I whirled out wings that spell And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host. My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast, To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace. I am soft sift In an hourglass—at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift. I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed; For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand. Not out of his bliss Springs the stress felt Nor first from heaven (and few know this) Swings the stroke dealt— Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt— But it rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss). It dates from day Of his going in Galilee; Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey; Manger, maiden's knee; The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat; Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be, Though felt before, though in high flood yet— What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay, Is out with it! Oh, We lash with the best or worst Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or first, To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s feet— Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go. Be adored among men, God, three-numberéd form; Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man's malice, with wrecking and storm. Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue, Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then. With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still: Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul, Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll, Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King. II "Some find me a sword; some The flange and the rail; flame, Fang, or flood" goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But wé dréam we are rooted in earth—Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come. On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, Take settler and seamen, tell men with women, Two hundred souls in the round— O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned; Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in? Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps. She drove in the dark to leeward, She struck—not a reef or a rock But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her Dead to the Kentish Knock; And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel: The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock; And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured. Hope had grown grey hairs, Hope had mourning on, Trenched with tears, carved with cares, Hope was twelve hours gone; And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone, And lives at last were washing away: To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs. One stirred from the rigging to save The wild woman-kind below, With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave— He was pitched to his death at a blow, For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave? They fought with God's cold— And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check— Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told. Ah, touched in your bower of bone Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone, Do you!—mother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own? Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine!— And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nun To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling. She was first of a five and came Of a coifèd sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood: From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.) Loathed for a love men knew in them, Banned by the land of their birth, Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them; Surf, snow, river and earth Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth, Thou martyr-master: in thy sight Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them. Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man's make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced— Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake. Joy fall to thee, father Francis, Drawn to the Life that died; With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucified And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride, Are sisterly sealed in wild waters, To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances. Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling "O Christ, Christ, come quickly": The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best. The majesty! what did she mean? Breathe, arch and original Breath. Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been? Breathe, body of lovely Death. They were else-minded then, altogether, the men Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth. Or ís it that she cried for the crown then, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen? For how to the heart's cheering The down-dugged ground-hugged grey Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing Of pied and peeled May! Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher, With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way, What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing? No, but it was not these. The jading and jar of the cart, Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart, Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart: Other, I gather, in measure her mind's Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragonèd seas. But how shall I . . . make me room there: Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster— Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she ... there then! the Master, Ipse , the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there. Ah! there was a heart right There was single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why; Wording it how but by him that present and past, Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?— The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light. Jesu, heart's light, Jesu, maid's son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun?— Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright. Well, she has thee for the pain, for the Patience; but pity of the rest of them! Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the Comfortless unconfessed of them— No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee? I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides; With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides. Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne! Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled. Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr, To bear him company. Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, That ope in the month of May. The skipper he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now West, now South. Then up and spake an old Sailòr, Had sailed to the Spanish Main, "I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane. "Last night, the moon had a golden ring, And to-night no moon we see!" The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, And a scornful laugh laughed he. Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast. Down came the storm, and smote amain The vessel in its strength; She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, Then leaped her cable's length. "Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr, And do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale That ever wind did blow." He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat Against the stinging blast; He cut a rope from a broken spar, And bound her to the mast. "O father! I hear the church-bells ring, Oh say, what may it be?" "'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" — And he steered for the open sea. "O father! I hear the sound of guns, Oh say, what may it be?" "Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!" "O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he. Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies, The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes. Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave On the Lake of Galilee. And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe. And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. The breakers were right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from her deck. She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull. Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board; Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank, Ho! ho! the breakers roared! At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast. The salt sea was frozen on her breast, The salt tears in her eyes; And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, On the billows fall and rise. Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!

(Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963) I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned. Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over, Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground. (But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea’s gray Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.) This crushing of people is something we live with. Daily, by unaccountable whim Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death, Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame, Men and women break the pledge of breath: And now under water, gone all jetsam and small In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull. (Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts? The only animal cursed with responsible sleep, We trace disaster always to our own acts. I met a monstrous self trapped in the black deep: All these years, he smiled, I’ve drilled at sea For this crush of water. Then he saved only me.) We invest ships with life. Look at a harbor At first light: with better grace than men In their movements the vessels run to their labors Working the fields that the tide has made green again; Their beauty is womanly, they are named for ladies and queens, Although by a wise superstition these are called After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine. The crushing of any ship has always been held In dread, like a house burned or a great tree felled. I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet And dark and lost were their private, funny derision And I can judge then what dark compression Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below. ( Sea-brothers, I lower to you the ingenuity of dreams, Strange lungs and bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last—

There are more things to love than we would dare to hope for. —Richard of St. Victor where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with blazons of fennel and umbels of dill fell through the spokes of a wheel on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle, sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider— and spied: “saw the very drops of sweat glittering frostily between the shoulder blades” of a lad …on and on he spied and bled from the blades of his cycle, small as a spider, hiding in the fireweed, getting wet from the skins of many human suns aground at the Kentish river near Tunbridge Wells, where the dill lulls, and all boys spoil…

But what lovers we were, what lovers, even when it was all over— the bull-black, deadweight wines that we swung towards each other rang and rang like bells of blood, our own great hearts. We slung the drunk boat out of port and watched our sober unreal life unmoor, a continent of grief; the candlelight strange on our faces like the tiny silent blazes and coruscations of its wars. We blew them out and took the stairs into the night for the night's work, stripped off in the timbered dark, gently hooked each other on like aqualungs, and thundered down to mine our lovely secret wreck. We surfaced later, breathless, back to back, and made our way alone up the mined beach of the dawn.

At the edge of the city the pickerel vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to the sea. My life lay crumpled like a smashed car. Windows barred, ivy, square stone. Lines gather at mouth and at eyes like cracks in a membrane. Eyeballs and tongue spill on the floor in a puddle of yolks and whites. The intact 707 under the clear wave, the sun shining. The playhouse of my grandfather’s mother stands north of the shed: spiders and the dolls’ teacups of dead women. In Ohio the K Mart shrugs; it knows it is going to die. A stone, the closed eye of the dirt. Outside before dawn houses sail up like wrecks from the bottom of the sea. A door clicks; a light opens. If the world is a dream, so is the puffed stomach of Juan, and the rich in Connecticut are dreamers. There are bachelors who live in shacks made of oil cans and broken doors, who stitch their shirts until the cloth disappears under stitches, who collect nails in Ball jars. A trolley car comes out of the elms, the tracks laid through an acre of wheat stubble, slanting downhill. I board it, and cross the field into the new pine.

Our oneness is the wrestlers’, fierce and close, Thrusting and thrust; One life in dual effort for one prize,— We fight, and must; For soul with soul does battle evermore Till love be trust. Our distance is love’s severance; sense divides, Each is but each; Never the very hidden spirit of thee My life doth reach; Twain! Since love athwart the gulf that needs Kisses and speech. Ah! wrestle closelier! we draw nearer so Than any bliss Can bring twain souls who would be whole and one, Too near to kiss: To be one thought, one voice before we die,— Wrestle for this.

a slow thoughtful spontaneous poem I am 32 years old and finally I look my age, if not more. Is it a good face what’s no more a boy’s face? It seems fatter. And my hair, it’s stopped being curly. Is my nose big? The lips are the same. And the eyes, ah the eyes get better all the time. 32 and no wife, no baby; no baby hurts, but there’s lots of time. I don’t act silly any more. And because of it I have to hear from so-called friends: “You’ve changed. You used to be so crazy so great.” They are not comfortable with me when I’m serious. Let them go to the Radio City Music Hall. 32; saw all of Europe, met millions of people; was great for some, terrible for others. I remember my 31st year when I cried: “To think I may have to go another 31 years!” I don’t feel that way this birthday. I feel I want to be wise with white hair in a tall library in a deep chair by a fireplace. Another year in which I stole nothing. 8 years now and haven’t stole a thing! I stopped stealing! But I still lie at times, and still am shameless yet ashamed when it comes to asking for money. 32 years old and four hard real funny sad bad wonderful books of poetry —the world owes me a million dollars. I think I had a pretty weird 32 years. And it weren’t up to me, none of it. No choice of two roads; if there were, I don’t doubt I’d have chosen both. I like to think chance had it I play the bell. The clue, perhaps, is in my unabashed declaration: “I’m good example there’s such a thing as called soul.” I love poetry because it makes me love and presents me life. And of all the fires that die in me, there’s one burns like the sun; it might not make day my personal life, my association with people, or my behavior toward society, but it does tell me my soul has a shadow.