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(A fortune cookie) Ominous inscrutable Chinese news to get just before Christmas, considering my reasonable health, marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan, career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet. Not bad, considering what can go wrong: the bony finger of Uncle Sam might point out my husband, my own national guard, and set him in Afghanistan; my boss could take a personal interest; the pain in my left knee could spread to my right. Still, as the old year tips into the new, I insist on the infant hope, gooing and kicking his legs in the air. I won't give in to the dark, the sub-zero weather, the fog, or even the neighbors' Nativity. Their four-year-old has arranged his whole legion of dinosaurs so they, too, worship the child, joining the cow and sheep. Or else, ultimate mortals, they've come to eat ox and camel, Mary and Joseph, then savor the newborn babe.

1 Our last night in the house was not our last. With two cats in the yard. Our movers took the furniture in the morning.A country where they turned back time.

If your house is a dress it’ll fit like Los Angeles red sun burning west, deserts, fields, for certain it will drape even a boy no less boy in disrepair wandering from shore to crest, others mistake his searching for despair, no, never, but for thirst, cloaked as he is, warm, radiant in a house dress.

Everything that was young went quickly, the way his eyes met mine as soon as we woke together in a room outside Nanjing, feeling as if all the things that were falling would fall and make their thunder, leave us with the challenge of being happy, all the things that felt given when gifts were not just surprises, but what we knew, what we hoped to take with us to heaven, unbound by faults and sins, not deceived the way we were when the end came to what we knew of China, landing me here. I am a wish in the skies spun out from celestial space to be poor, to be covered with black skin, a felt quilt of a map with only one way to China — through pain as big as hogs squealing at killing time on black farms in Alabama — the noise of death, the shrill needle that turns clouds over to rip the air above the cities where people are young and all that is given is never taken away.

No day is right for the apocalypse, if you ask a housewife in Talking Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River, Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag. A grotesque parody of the primeval muck starts oozing out. And behold, the plastic bag is magic; there is no closing it. Soap in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings, a liquefied lifetime subscription to The New York Times delivered all at once. Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn, like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur of face creams, an army of photocopies travelling on its stomach of acronyms, tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry. Also, two hundred and one tons of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings, industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning our gifts. At first she thought she had won something. Now it slithers through the house, out windows, down the street, spreading everywhere but heading, mostly, west. Maybe heading is the wrong word, implying shape and choice. It took the shape of the landscape it rippled across like the last blanket. And it went west because the way lay open once again: not the same fecund rug the earth grew when white people scraped their first paths to the Pacific across the waves of the inland grasses. Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia, abandoned cars shine in the sun like beetlebacks. The ore it took to make the iron it took to make the steel it took to make the cars, that ore would remember the glaciers if it could. Now comes another grinding, but not— thanks to our new techniques—so slow. The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture. Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner like bishops of a ruined church. There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow, a choir of silenced Chevrolets. And, showing their lapsed trademarks and proud grilles to a new westward expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle and a DeSoto. I was hoping to describe the colors of this industrial autumn— rust, a faded purple like the dusty skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss- green paint with primer peeking blandly through, the garish macho reds insurance companies punish, the greys (opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors (e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone combinations time will spurn like roadkill (1957: pink and grey), cornflower blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true blue, the blacker blue the diver sees beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet— but now they are all covered, rolling and churning in the last accident, like bubbles in lava. And now my Cincinnati—the hills above the river, the lawn that drained toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles, the sultry river musk that slid like a compromising note through my bedroom window— and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick congealing, and my beloved birthplace is but another whorl of dirt. Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood, the corn I skulked in as a boy lays back its ears like a shamed dog. Hair along the sow’s spine rises. The Holstein pivots his massive head toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain he sees is his new owner. What we imagined was the fire-storm, or, failing that, the glacier. Or we hoped we’d get off easy, losing only California. With the seismologists and mystics we say the last California ridge crumble into the ocean. And we were read with elegies: O California, sportswear and defense contracts, gasses that induce deference, high school girls with their own cars, we wanted to love you without pain. O California, when you were moored to us like a vast splinter of melon, like a huge and garish gondola, then we were happier, although we showed it by easy contempt. But now you are lost at sea, your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays lost, the prints of the old movies lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor they lie like hands of a broken clock. O California, here we come, quoting Ecclesiastes, ruinous with self-knowledge. Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop for lamentation, Kansas succumbs. Drawn down by anklets of DDT, the jayhawk circles lower and lower while the sludge moils and crests. Now we are about to lose our voices we remember that tomorrow is our echo. O the old songs, the good days: bad faith and civil disobedience, sloppy scholarship and tooth decay. Now the age of footnotes is ours. Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid. While the rivers thickened and fish rose like vomit, the students of water stamped each fish with its death date. Don’t let a chance like this go by, they thought, though it went by as everything went by—towers of water flecked by a confetti of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug prayers. What we paid too much for and too little attention to, our very lives, all jumbled now and far too big in aggregate to understand or mourn, goes by, and all our eloquence places its weight on the spare word goodbye.

‘Aber die Thronen, wo? Die Tempel, und wo die Gefäße, Wo mit Nektar gefüllt, Göttern zu Lust der Gesang? ‘Someone’s got it in for me’ for Jack Spicer the fabber craftsman I. THE FUNERAL MARCH (CHICAGO AND ORLEANS) Once more in the city I cannot name, the boat city, the city of light, the city that endures its fall, the city of pleasures and vicissitudes, the skier’s city, Fun City, the city under the sky, city of crime and vegetables, Pornograph City, the city governed by the Lost and Found Department, cabinet city, city of the bends, the opium city, Swing City, Archetype City, city of dust, city that eludes the seven ages, muskrat city, the island city of daughters and wives, Sin City, city of sincerity, the cavernous city, the city of conventions, hatmaker city, Alphabet City, city of the last and first, the city called Marrakesh (I know it is not Marrkesh), industrial city, the city of airplane booze, center city, the city without shoulders, the city that forgot, the trampoline city, Abacus City, the city of tears, the real city (or the city of the desert), the unreal city (or the city of good will), the city of rust, of showers, of late blooming aster, Hygiene City, the city of logistics— once more in the city called Halloween (I know it is not Halloween), I gathered the five true ingredients of gunpowder and arranged to meet my younger brother Stetson next noon at the Heartland Cafe. Why do you walk with your face turned from me? All you do is complain and complain. What is this thing called love? It is nothing reliable, not like this silk cravat on which tiny turtles hover suspended against an amber background. The knot needs to be loosened. Night has come. I walk in the garden amid the late-blooming roses and guard my glass from the moon. This morning the police came for me. They brought a letter covered with signs I could not decipher. They demanded I register my address properly, because they are sorely tested by the time’s demands and cannot function as my delivery service. I met their angry gazes with a sigh, and I proclaimed: “April is the coolest month, which brings happy policeman the pleasant dreams of spring.” They still refused to answer my questions. I know my life is in terrible danger. What is this thing called love? II. DON’T LOOK BACK A degree or two to the right of an imagined meridian marking time’s monotonous ecliptic tracing and retracing the animal steps that bring the man down narrow hallways, a painting hangs, depicting an almond tree in blossom, unfurling white petals against a deepening green, brown brushstrokes scarring the field, and in the center of the decentered vista, a fleck of canvas erupts through the paint, as when air thrusts itself to fill a vacuum, or after galactic gyrations the light of a now-cold star reveals itself to us and breaks the settled pattern of the sky. For if the tree implies a quiet place where pendulums might rest, the heart decline to beat, a place of time disclosing the lattice of time, each node identical, complete within itself, its infinite simplicity sufficient to lure the mind out of its droning dream of traffic, footstools, marzipan, and clouds back to itself, if the tree must be a sign of the viewer’s hunger to escape from signs and thereby lose the world, the tiny scar unmakes the fiction that sustains the tree, the way a cashier’s knowing jibe at the record you had waited weeks to buy, recommended to you by a woman you barely know who mentioned it in passing, then returned to her diatribe against the host who failed to invite her boyfriend or her companion’s boyfriend— you had only half been listening until she said, “It sounds like nothing else, not like the wind or ocean, not even like the early Pixies, though it has that effect on you, something like getting a letter addressed to someone else that ends up addressed to you, in that reading it with a proper sense of shame throws your devotion to formalities completely out the window. I think they’re from New York,” and meant to ask her how the band was spelled, but the moment had passed, your cigarettes were out, and the birdless night grew colder. You returned to people you felt more familiar with, the oddly Teutonic name in the back of your mind, and only later came across it in the discount bin of the Princeton Record Exchange, whose clerks everyone knows are assholes, so the sneer on the Tom Verlaine guy’s lips was no surprise, though it gripped you with a sense as far from panic as it resembled exile. No song can bear the weight we need to place upon it; nothing returns as we ask it to return. O O that T.S. Eliot he’s such a shrinking violet and if you think I sigh a lot try life with T.S. Eliot Sam’s problem was he would always compare himself to other people. I told him, Sam, you don’t need to be a hero. But now I can see I was wrong. I wanted him to be heroic, but not in that guerilla theater way. I told him, Sam, it’s time to take off the puppet head. You could give him a little credit, though, for standing up against corporate hegemony. He always buys his coffee from locally owned establishments, and he shoplifts all those books of poetry from Barnes and Noble. Oh, everyone deserves a little credit. All the angry little men in angry little rooms can write their diagnoses, xerox their zines, and dream that someday they’ll become the next Debord. In the meantime, how am I supposed to live? None of us is getting any younger. Power clutches THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS. WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. everyone with a velvet embrace. But isn’t a life deformed by constant struggle a life as much defined by power’s rule as one in which you carve space out for yourself? I want to find my happiness on my own terms. That’s what we all want—isn’t it? At least, THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS. WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. thank God, we live in a day and age where people aren’t afraid to talk about orgasms. Speaking of which, you’ve got to go see the Orphée that just opened at Performers’ Collective. Al the actors have been in car crashes, and they’ve added an orgy—it’s a little derivative, but what isn’t, these days? OK, got to run, ciao, I’ll see you later, love to all. THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS. WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS. WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. III. BALLAD OF THE POLICE DEPARTMENT “Loving a music man ain’t always what it’s supposed to be,” she thought as the fang pierced her heel and she sank. This is the song of love and the law, of what is enduring and what disappears. Dissolving, her eye met its twin in the water (or was it a glass in the guise of a stream?) In the cafe, the boys drank to Orpheus. Encircled by drafts on the tables and floor, he waved a half-wave and lit a Gitane. Sirens we were used to, but so early? Through a window specked by last night’s rain, I saw Wojohowicz give him the news, then returned to my book:The Invention of Chance. This is the song of atomic decay. Contemporary fascination with corporal preservation recapitulates the ancient ceremonies of atonement, or so, at least, it seems to me, as I lecture empty rooms on F.H. Bradley and the moon. Not the moon you lovers see, the moon as it appears to me and me alone, my eyes refined by distillation in the mind. My moon rains light through long night hours awake within the prison tower of internal experience, the tower holding thief and prince, stockbroker and the child of fame, identically, but not the same. One hears the scraping of the key. One wishes one were one, not me. Through darkness he descended to the platform. One quarter struck another. Buskers danced in supplication of the shadows, mirroring the disgraced King of Pop. White noise announced the train. Orpheus wept. After North and Clybourn comes Division, and after Division, the final law, whose lord sits anxiously beside his stolen bride. I will not pretend I know the song he sang before the dreadful pair. You know the stories as well as I: that from the gramophone a swell of scratch and hurl and gem-like glint, of vouchsafed soul and breakbeats reconciled, shattered the shale resolve of Death himself: edict turned to grace. But I can still remind you of the lesson coming up, paused as we are at the axis of our hope. Necessity may, for a moment, yield to love, but love explodes each moment in its drive to the next, and the next, and the next, like footsteps— With a sudden cry Sgt. Wojo averred: “The song of policemen has yet to be heard! You can call it ignoble, or even absurd, But my comrades have hung on each sibilant word, And we’ve waited and waited as locations blurred From subway to Hades: we’ve yet to be heard!” Amid shouts of sha-hoobla, tik-tak, and tra-lay, The song of policemen now carried the day. Brass buttons new polished, bright jackets fresh pressed, And riot protectors protecting their chests, From buses and wagons policemen erupted, From storefronts and stations, and uninterrupted They sang as they rounded up each interloper: Each anti-war chanter, each car window soaper. They sang like a city-sized 8-track recorder, And phalanxed, Miranda’ed, preserved the disorder That the bravest policeman felt clutch at his heart From the untamed community begging his art. “Hey-hey-o,” they sang, and such pleasant palaver, And then morning came. They were walking cadavers. They might tell funny stories, or wrestle, or shout, But something—divine spark? the soul?—had gone out. And all of the people and all of the streets And all of the sweet shops where young lovers meet Invisibly withered, and no one could say Where deadness had come from, how long it might stay. But now Wojohowicz regrets his decision To insert himself. There will be no revision. So he takes off his hat and he gives up his gun And that’s how the song of the policemen is done. Where were you then? I was at North and Clybourn. No one was with you? I was alone. And Death’s dispensation? It came with conditions. Conditions you flouted? I slipped. The underworld does not forgive. When all aloud the wind is blowing, And coughing drowns the poet’s song, And terminals brood softly glowing, And Marian wears a blue sarong, When synthecrabs squirm in the beaker, Then nightly hums the opaque speaker Tu-who; Tu-whit, tu-who—a subtle note, While Joan stirs on in a distant plot. Arm. The words of Mercury are oddly muted after the studies of Jessie Weston. You, that way: we, this way. IV. GAZA STRIP A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. And this I know. Forgot the way of gulls. He rose and fell. His teeth as white as snow. A current under sea. O you Walk her every day into the deep sea swell. She passed the stages of her age and youth. Orpheus wept. A big big love. O you who turn the wheel, Consider how his bones were picked, A fortnight dead. And this I know. Gentile or Phoenician, dark Don Juan, A big big love. A big big love. As tall as you. V. DEATH TO POETRY Orpheus awoke in the poem of disguises, the poem once called “The Waste Land.” Friends, listen up. He gathered the remnants of the life he had dreamed. He renounced the burden of the name he bore. He began to walk. Orpheus walked down Milwaukee Avenue toward the Flatiron Building. He passed bodegas, taquerias, vintage stores. He met a hustler with a gas can. He walked past the anarchist kids. And he walked, and he walked, and he walked past the cabdrivers trading insults in Urdu, and he walked past convenience stores, and he walked past Latin Kings, and he walked past waitresses getting off night shifts, and he walked past jazz stars that nobody recognized, he walked past the students, the teachers, the cops. And the sky was the color of eggplant and tire fires, the sky was the field that resisted exhaustion. And he walked, and he walked past the puddles and gutters. And no one walked with him. And SUVs burned, and the asphalt ran liquid and Orpheus saw the dissolving sky and he knew that the name of the poem he had entered could not be “The Waste Land” or even “White Phosphorus,” or “The Song of Policemen.” In his pocket he fingered a tiny slip of paper. He opened and read it. It said, “This is the death of the poet.” And yes. And yes. This is the death of the poet. Shhhh. I am allergic to melodrama. Shhhh. The serpent encircles the world. Shhhh. There is plausible explanation. But watch it! the daughters of Ismara, Their heaving chests wrapped up in beastly fleece, From their hilltop perch, catch sight of Orpheus Smithing his voice to match plucked strings. Cunctaque tela forent cantu mollita, sed ingens Clamor et infracto Berecyntia tibia cornu Typanaque et plausus et Bacchei ululatus Obstrepuere sono citharae, tum denique saxa Non exauditi rubuerunt sanguine vatis. And the stones grew red with the blood of the poet. These footnotes have I shored against my ruins. These footnotes shhhh we set foot in a world ash-sick, a bad dream world no longer the mirror, no longer the poem the birdless night grew colder And once the poem ended, commentary began. I said, I, the author, said, “Orpheus is a mask in a poem infected with masks.” I said, “The importance of footnotes cannot be overestimated.” I said, “The essential problem of the poem is the essential problem of our time, of all time: how to love one another.” And I was not, readers, Orpheus, and I did not descend into the depths, and I have only these words to defend me, and the shadows, the shadows howl for my blood Once more in the city he refused to name a phenomenon that I have often noticed Once more in the city that endures its fall Well then Ile fix you. Mackie’s back in town Once more in the city called Barnes and Noble an elaborate deception, like a bird Once more in the city that everyone forgot and swerved to catch the sun on its wing cf. McGinty, Possum Among the Hoopoes a broken face, a city of dust and telescopy abandoned the ruse that had once been the poem and listened as the buildings lightly sang: Oh we’ll meet again When all the rained out faces And all the bomb-scarred places Kiss me kiss me kiss me Under the telegraphic moon And I won’t get up, I won’t Get up, I’ll never, never, never

FOR EZRA POUND IL MIGLIOR FABBRO I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; “They called me the hyacinth girl.” —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” II. A Game of Chess The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, “Jug Jug” to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? “I never know what you are thinking. Think.” I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones. “What is that noise?” The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” Nothing again nothing. “Do “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember “Nothing?” I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street “With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? “What shall we ever do?” The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said— I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, H URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you. And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said. Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. H URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can’t. But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don’t want children? H URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— H URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME H URRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. III. The Fire Sermon The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck And on the king my father’s death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . . She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. “This music crept by me upon the waters” And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. The river sweats Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenwich reach Past the Isle of Dogs. Weialala leia Wallala leialala Elizabeth and Leicester Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers Weialala leia Wallala leialala “Trams and dusty trees. Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.” “My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’ I made no comment. What should I resent?” “On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.” la la To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning IV. Death by Water Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. V. What the Thunder Said After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you? What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder D A Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms D A Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus D A Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih     shantih     shantih

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills. She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass marks off the place where the memories are kept, like a library book named Dorothy. Some of the chapters might be:Dorothy: Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook; Dorothy, Wife and Atheist; Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not. In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass reminds you of persistence and the endless wind reminds you of indifference, Ruth brings batches of white roses, extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful because as soon as she is gone she knows the deer come out of the woods to eat them. What was made for the eye goes into the mouth, thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away, and in bed when she tries to remember her mother, she drifts instead to the roses, and when she thinks about the roses she sees instead the deer chewing them— pale petals of the roses in the dark warm bellies of the sleeping deer— that’s what going to sleep is like.

A small wheel Incandescent, Shivering like A pinned butterfly. Hands thrown up In all directions: The crossroads One arrives at In a nightmare. Higher than that Number 12 presides Like a beekeeper Over the swarming honeycomb Of the open watch. Other wheels That could fit Inside a raindrop. Tools That must be splinters Of arctic starlight. Tiny golden mills Grinding invisible Coffee beans. When the coffee’s boiling Cautiously, So it doesn’t burn us, We raise it To the lips Of the nearest Ear.

It's a bug's world of intrigue and mystery, with humans a blip in their history. So when insects flitter and scurry past us Take note, because they may outlast us!