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(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.

There’s a truth limits man A truth prevents his going any farther The world is changing The world knows it’s changing Heavy is the sorrow of the day The old have the look of doom The young mistake their fate in that look That is truth But it isn’t all truth Life has meaning And I do not know the meaning Even when I felt it were meaningless I hoped and prayed and sought a meaning It wasn’t all frolic poesy There were dues to pay Summoning Death and God I’d a wild dare to tackle Them Death proved meaningless without Life Yes the world is changing But Death remains the same It takes man away from Life The only meaning he knows And usually it is a sad business This Death I’d an innocence I’d a seriousness I’d a humor save me from amateur philosophy I am able to contradict my beliefs I am able able Because I want to know the meaning of everything Yet sit I like a brokenness Moaning: Oh what responsibility I put on thee Gregory Death and God Hard hard it’s hard I learned life were no dream I learned truth deceived Man is not God Life is a century Death an instant

But prayer was not enough, after all, for my father. His last two brothers died five weeks apart. He couldn’t get to sleep, had no appetite, sat staring. Though he prayed, he could find no peace until he tried to write about his brothers, tell a story for each one: Perry’s long travail with the steamfitters’ union, which he worked for; and Harvey—here the handwriting changes, he bears down—Harvey loved his children. I discovered those few sheets of paper as I looked through my father’s old Bible on the morning of his funeral. The others in the family had seen them long ago; they had all known the story, and they told me I had not, most probably, because I am a writer, and my father was embarrassed by his effort. Yet who has seen him as I can: risen in the middle of the night, bending over the paper, working close to the heart of all greatness, he is so lost.

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters these by themselves delight, even without a meaning, in a foreign language, in Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve all day across the lake, scoring their white records in ice. Being intelligible, these winding ways with their audacities and delicate hesitations, they become miraculous, so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist balance against great skeletons of stars exactly; the blind bat surveys his way by echo alone. Still, the point of style is character. The universe induces a different tremor in every hand, from the check-forger’s to that of the Emperor Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. Miraculous. It is as though the world were a great writing. Having said so much, let us allow there is more to the world than writing: continental faults are not bare convoluted fissures in the brain. Not only must the skaters soon go home; also the hard inscription of their skates is scored across the open water, which long remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

After the gossip one returns to grammar. Almost to say that speech compares us renting that   as a fact the case stands firm for what we own. Pragma by relations instance this as the index of my slab.  Your slap at it. The clouds pastiche aubade Sid’s bakery delivers                                symmetry inside an adult formula for Saturdays. Our poppies in history.