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Two women on the lone wet strand (The wind's out with a will to roam) The waves wage war on rocks and sand, (And a ship is long due home.) The sea sprays in the women's eyes— (Hearts can writhe like the sea's wild foam) Lower descend the tempestuous skies, (For the wind's out with a will to roam.) "O daughter, thine eyes be better than mine," (The waves ascend high as yonder dome) "North or south is there never a sign?" (And a ship is long due home.) They watched there all the long night through— (The wind's out with a will to roam) Wind and rain and sorrow for two— (And heaven on the long reach home.)

Ten thousand women and I the only one in boots Life’s dance: they meet he holds her leg up

To Men You put on an ornate ballgown You say “someone has to do it” You take me to where you work, The inside of a pyramid with chasms, Watching the complex train-track changes Products and objects make love to my father Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely You get on the plane, both clown & wizard And then get off in a comedy of manners Our dates become a comedy of dinners Your name rhymes with clothes Your plane folds & flies away Without us, I’ll make the next one We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks & still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep. A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what And you in the train’s opulent rooms Switch your cock to a baby and then say “Must there (not) be a law against this?” You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head” You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods We go down in the car through threatening snows To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director Holds up each actor & describes his physical being I talk to your father but only by telephone You have the royal blue 8 � x 11 notebook with the lock on it I want one but you say you cant get them anymore I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons

The parrot, Einstein of birds, who can count and reason calmly in our tongue while outliving us, disdains the ostrich. For all its sprint records, the ostrich will be remembered for hiding from the truth. You can’t outrun stupid. We the people hold some truths to be self-evident: our magnificent brain in a body that can’t flee, can’t smell fear, can’t hear death, can’t see straight. Even so, our retinas, with rods and cones as intricate as any telescope array, evolved to see a predator slide out of oblique shadow and give us time to bolt. We survey our closed dominion until we look up in August to find comet dust flaring in the night. This vastness, this vertiginous awareness mocking gravity on our speck of now, wakes us with a recalibrating jolt. But soon our familiar star will claw toward us in seven-league boots from the east, drawing its Valium thread across our planet as if to cloak a birdcage to muffle questions that blink through dark matter and would pour over us until we drowned, dreaming of amnesia.

Thirty seconds of yellow lichen. Thirty seconds of coil and surge, fern and froth, thirty seconds of salt, rock, fog, spray. Clouds moving slowly to the left— A door in a rock through which you could see __ another rock, laved by the weedy tide. Like filming breathing—thirty seconds of tidal drag, fingering the smaller stones down the black beach—what color was that, aquamarine? Starfish spread their salmon-colored hands. __ I stood and I shot them. I stood and I watched them right after I shot them: thirty seconds of smashed sea while the real sea thrashed and heaved— They were the most boring movies ever made. I wanted to mount them together and press Play. __ Thirty seconds of waves colliding. Kelp with its open attitudes, seals riding the swells, curved in a row just under the water— the sea, over and over. Before it's over.

The workman made it; therefore it is not God —Hosea Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Pittsburgh, of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque, ye hierophants and wishbones, teraphim and household plants, for I am a jealous God betrayed. My lover, whom I uplifted, has fallen to other affections. Weep for her outcast state, for I rescind her corn and her fields, her appetites and her husbands, her loom and the cloth of her weaving; yea, as she sleeps in her bed, I will crumble her idols of clay. I will cause to burn in the night her barns filled with swallows, her caves of rodents and bats, her racks of sidereal dresses, her stacks of serpentine hats. The velvet of her touch, once royal, I will scarify with my wrath. for I am a god betrayed; my love has reached into my weakness and turned my heart like a fist. Therefore, I will strip her naked and drive her into the field. In her body of filth and feathers, her blood of beasts and men, she is my desolation and a forgotten name. For my cosmos is contracted. My first world slips from my hands. Tell the people, my prophet Hosea, that I loved her more than love, and she gave not love in return. My anger flattens and spreads along the walls and windows. It glances from my mirrors and breaks the east wind’s bones. I was a God of such strength they could not guess my name. And this woman of human warmth suckled me like a child. Now I dwell with the mole, blindly, and my voice is thin as a gnat’s. I grieve what grinds in me, heavily. I am but a half note, half sung.

The water understands Civilization well; It wets my foot, but prettily, It chills my life, but wittily, It is not disconcerted, It is not broken-hearted: Well used, it decketh joy, Adorneth, doubleth joy: Ill used, it will destroy, In perfect time and measure With a face of golden pleasure Elegantly destroy.

Not that I understand things. Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engraving where moon throws a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. A lot of space between them and what shines like waves. Which can’t be a choice, for angels or the engraver who was in fact Gustave Doré after sleeping off the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under guilt and regret and an albatross’s weight. Which isn’t much, but they are big animals, four feet across counting the wind involved and rain. Doré waking to a room not really of wings. I guess a stirring, something in the black expanse he hoped to razor into the copper plate — no, a graver, not a razor at all. Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing but stop. As in angels. Abrupt. Still, to cut them their flight on metal takes a while. His hands stiff, Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it’s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not even in the picture.

On hot days we would see them leaving the hive in swarms. June and I would watch them weave their way through the sugarberry trees toward the pond where they would stop to take a drink, then buzz their way back, plump and full of water, to drop it on the backs of the fanning bees. If you listened you could hear them, their tiny wings beating in unison as they cooled down the hive. My brother caught one once, its bulbous body bursting with water, beating itself against the smooth glass wall of the canning jar. He lit a match, dropped it in, but nothing happened. The match went out and the bee swam through the mix of sulfur and smoke until my brother let it out. It flew straight back to the hive. Later, we skinny-dipped in the pond, the three of us, the August sun melting the world around us as if it were wax. In the cool of the evening, we walked home, pond water still dripping from our skin, glistening and twinkling like starlight.

Spout of a leaf, listen out for the screams of your relentless audience: the applause of a waterfall in the distance, a hurricane looting a Miami shopping mall. How careful you are with the rain-cradling curve of your back. Near your forest, all are ready to swim and happy to drown in me: this lake of fire that moats the edges. From my mouth, they come to peel the flames and drink their slick throats into the most silent of ashes.