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You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within There you will find the clear mirror already waiting

You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight. Washington, D.C., 1950

You with the knees of a fish, You with the fish's ears, the tongue in your round Mouth that's nibbling the sweet air, You with a fish's patience, on your side Under the hot plank ot the keel, hook in your lip, And your tail twitching like a bothered lily, And the taste of your own bleeding on the air, salt on the sweetness, You with a fish's voice, singing and still Your aria, and the blue-silver flecks of light, The water's scales, breathing the breeze Abundant and not for you, you with a hook, Absurd, you with lidless mercuried eyes; And the reel whistles, the tall man's cast at you.

That you, Father, are “in my mind,” some will argue, who cherish the present but flee the past. They haven’t my need to ask, What was I? Asking instead, What am I?, they see themselves bejeweled and wingèd. Because they would fly and have value, their answers are pretty but false: the fixings of facile alchemists, preferring their stones to brains. The brain, remember, is not foolproof either, and does and does until it can’t. Sodden, quivering, crossed and recrossed, the mind can become a headstone or be malice stuffed with fish. Everything changes so quickly. You who were are no longer and what I was I’m not. Am I to know myself, except as I was? The rest is catchy, self-promising, false. Oh please write to me, and tell me. I just want to be happy again. That’s what I was, happy, maybe am, you would know.

of the furious Who take Today and jerk it out of joint have made new underpinnings and a Head. Blacktime is time for chimeful poemhood but they decree a jagged chiming now. If there are flowers flowers must come out to the road. Rowdy!— knowing where wheels and people are, knowing where whips and screams are, knowing where deaths are, where the kind kills are. As for that other kind of kindness, if there is milk it must be mindful. The milkofhumankindness must be mindful as wily wines. Must be fine fury. Must be mega, must be main. Taking Today (to jerk it out of joint) the hardheroic maim the leechlike-as-usual who use, adhere to, carp, and harm. And they await, across the Changes and the spiraling dead, our Black revival, our Black vinegar, our hands, and our hot blood.

sleeps into heaven with his lamps on, finishing explan- atory negotiations for a while.Desert the enemy. Star formations, sandstone understanding, rock time in gen- eral, whatever. Latching onto ecstasy, words that change on waking, clover as a syrup of spring mind. Working off a deficit of sleep or cash, you know who your friends are. Singled out in traffic, lurching into light, having lunch. You’re a little one with sand in your eyes, with green on your horn, with milk on your chin. With flow- ering ears and hearsay.

You carve and sculpt, the deft chisel in a soft shapely hand. I beat my head against the marble to knock it into shape, my hands work for a living. I am still a long way from myself, but I want to become Me! There is someone deep in my blood who cries out for homemade Olympuses and worlds for humans. My mother is such a poor wretch, you’d laugh if you saw her, we live in a tight annex, built onto the end of the village. My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me. I don’t need sleep, food just enough to keep from starving. An implacable struggle and the world bristling with sword points. Each one hungers for my heart. Each one, I, unarmed, must melt in my blood.

There was a young lady of Lynn, Who was so uncommonly thin That when she essayed To drink lemonade She slipped through the straw and fell in.

Come, little infant, love me now, While thine unsuspected years Clear thine agèd father’s brow From cold jealousy and fears. Pretty, surely, ’twere to see By young love old time beguiled, While our sportings are as free As the nurse’s with the child. Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for love. Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, does prize, As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice. Now then love me: time may take Thee before thy time away: Of this need we’ll virtue make, And learn love before we may. So we win of doubtful fate; And if good she to us meant, We that good shall antedate, Or, if ill, that ill prevent. Thus as kingdoms, frustrating Other titles to their crown, In the cradle crown their king, So all foreign claims to drown, So, to make all rivals vain, Now I crown thee with my love: Crown me with thy love again, And we both shall monarchs prove.

I seemed always standing before a door to which I had no key, although I knew it hid behind it a gift for me. Until one day I closed my eyes a moment, stretched then looked once more. And not surprised, I did not mind it when the hinges creaked and, smiling, Death held out his hands to me.