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The water was rising, I got up on the bed Still wearing the Hawaiian shirt he had on yesterday He used his thoughts to draw a rudimentary circle on the wall Hitting Beirut and killing 22 civilians But now go the bells, and we are ready Novelty is no better than repetition That graces the walls of toilet stalls with hooey And comparison with the dead—their slimy cruelty—and meatballs Perched like ghostly birds Believing in old men’s lies, then too late unbelieving There’s rough life in the rust Long-buried whore’s eggs, razor-clams with shells Pirates dressed in pink and pit-bulls on parade With power to extend the longevity of learned fear in the mouse And a heron on the horizon many sewing-days ago Jane, Jane, ascend the stairs Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn Thus predicting the shock to the tale that so entertains grown children Of the animals that have nearly all forsaken us

for New Orleans and the people of the Gulf Coast water water water wind water across the land shape of a torn heart new orleans waves come louisiana the waves come alabama wind calls alabama and the roofs blow across red clouds inside the divine spiral there is a voice inside the voice there is light water wind fire smoke the bodies float and rise kind flames bow down and move across the skies never seen blackish red bluish bruised water rises houses fall the child the elders the mothers underwater who will live who will rise the windows fill with the howling where is the transfusion where is the lamp who who in the wet night jagged in the oil waves come the lakes loosen their sultry shape it is the shape of a lost hand a wing broken casinos in biloxi become carnations across the sands and the woman in the wheelchair descends her last breath a rose in the razor rain uptown on mansion hill even the million dollar house bows in the negative shade someone is afloat a family dissolves the nation disappears neighborhoods fade across lost streets the police dressed in newspapers flutter toward nothingness moons who goes there under our floors filtered wooden stars towels and glass gasoline coffins the skin of trees and jalopy tires fish bebop dead from the zoo the dogs half drag ward number nine miss Symphony Spikes and mrs. Hardy Johnson the new plankton new algae of the nameless stroll in the dark ask the next question about kindness then there is a bus a taxi a hearse a helicopter a rescue team a tiny tribe of nine year olds separating the waters the oils and ashes hear the song of splinters and blood tree sap machine oil and old jazz trumpeters z's and x's raffia skirts and jujube hats and a father man holds the hand of his lover saying take care of the children let me go now let me stumble stumble nowhere drink this earth liquor going in petals stadiums and looters celebrities cameras cases more water cases again and again a new land edge emerges a new people emerges where race and class and death and life and water and tears and loss and life and death destruction and life and tears compassion and loss and a fire stolen bus rumbles toward you all directions wherever you are alive still

Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding; An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose That nicht—an’ nane i’ mine; But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht Ever sin’ syne; An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.

for Richard Griffith 1  THE BURNING Girl grown woman     fire     mother of fire I go to the stone street turning to fire.     Voices Go screaming     Fire     to the green glass wall. And there where my youth flies blazing into fire The     dance     of sane and insane images, noon Of seasons and days.     Noontime of my one hour. Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces Among the tall daylight in the city of change. The scene has walls     stone     glass     all my gone life One wall a web through which the moment walks And I am open, and the opened hour The world as water-garden     lying behind it. In a city of stone, necessity of fountains, Forces water fallen on glass, men with their axes. An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass, Behind the wall I know waterlilies Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers, Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon Who will not believe a waterlily fire. Whatever can happen in a city of stone, Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall. I walk in the river of crisis toward the real, I pass guards, finding the center of my fear And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm. The arm of flame striking through the wall of form. 2  THE ISLAND Born of this river and this rock island, I relate The changes : I born when the whirling snow Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood. General, gangster, child.     I know in myself the island. I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire Among the building of my young childhood, houses; I was those changes, the live darknesses Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields Over the river fronting red cliffs across— And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks— Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose From sleeping streams of change in the change city. The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness. Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water. Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring. Whatever can come to a city can come to this city. Under the tall compulsion of the past I see the city change like a man changing I love this man with my lifelong body of love I know you among your changes wherever I go Hearing the sounds of building the syllables of wrecking A young girl watching the man throwing red hot rivets Coals in a bucket of change How can you love a city that will not stay? I love you like a man of life in change. Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring Like today accepted and become one’s self I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels, Rock, cloud, ships, voices.     To the man where the river met The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red. Towers falling.     A dream of towers. Necessity of fountains.     And my poor, Stirring among our dreams, Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers And lives, looking out through my eyes. The city the growing body of our hate and love. The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways. A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare. Male flower heading upstream. Among a city of light, the stone that grows. Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered Monuments rivetted against flesh. Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I See stopped in time a crime behind green glass, Lilies of all my life on fire. Flash faith in a city building its fantasies. I walk past the guards into my city of change. 3  JOURNEY CHANGES Many of us     Each in his own life waiting Waiting to move     Beginning to move     Walking And early on the road of the hill of the world Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass The stages of the theatre of the journey I see the time of willingness between plays Waiting and walking and the play of the body Silver body with its bosses and places One by one touched awakened into into Touched and turned one by one into     flame The theatre of the advancing goddess     Blossoming Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go And far across a field over the jewel grass The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god A supple god of searching and reaching Who weaves his strength     Who dances her more alive The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses Always the journey     long     patient     many haltings Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing When the decision to go on is made Along the long slopes of choice and again the world The play of poetry approaching in its solving Solvings of relations in poems and silences For we were born to express     born for a journey Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way And then I came to the place of mournful labor A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away Repeated farther than sight.     The voice saying slowly But it is hell.     I heard my own voice in the words Or it could be a foundation     And after the words My chance came.     To enter.     The theatres of the world. 4  FRAGILE I think of the image brought into my room Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks. He is asking about the moment when the Buddha Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration. “Isn’t that fragile?” he asks.     The sage answers: “I speak to you.     You speak to me.     Is that fragile?” 5  THE LONG BODY This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood An island in a river of crisis, now The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies. We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes. Whatever can come to a woman can come to me. This is the long body : into life from the beginning, Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward, And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground, Going as we go in the changes of the body, As it is changes, in the long strip of our many Shapes, as we range shifting through time. The long body : a procession of images. This moment in a city, in its dream of war. We chose to be, Becoming the only ones under the trees when the harsh sound Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men, And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding Her baby. And threats, the ambulance with open doors. Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang. We are the living island, We the flesh of this island, being lived, Whoever knows us is part of us today. Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me. Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies Reaching from darkness upward to a sun Of rebirth, the implacable.     And in our myth The Changing Woman who is still and who offers. Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth. In ways of being, through silence, sources of light Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light. And everything a witness of the buried life. This moment flowing across the sun, this force Of flowers and voices body in body through space. The city of endless cycles of the sun. I speak to you     You speak to me

From a microlight, the Owens River, cut and siphoned to an aqueduct: a corridor through banks of trees, into scuffed desert dunes, mountains scaling to the right, to the left dry veins in the valley, saline and pink, the water channeled slowly through scatch grass, under dirt tracks and fences, twenty miles, thirty — black line turning silver in midday sun, dipping beneath the roar of Route 395 into the shade of the alkaline hills. It zigzags past farms, arcs around quarries, swipes the bar code of a glinting new town, the alien discs of pivot irrigation growing sunflowers, roses, and corn. Then follows the highway, just after Big Pine, rejoins the river north of Fish Springs, is diverted again, south of the reservoir — And does water care, if it’s river or aqueduct? Its vessel curved concrete, but the same constant flow, gunneling south, hugging the contours of eastern Sierra, past Independence, the airport, the golf course, along the right hand of Owens’ dry lake bed, red swirling dust clouds kept down by sprinklers. From up in the air the twin Haiwee Reservoir is knuckle and knee joint where the line disappears — becomes pipeline and conduit under the desert, punching for groundwater, surfacing riveted over Mojave, two hundred miles on from its native cradle, gray zombie spring tracing through forest to Santa Clarita, the treatment plant: the last reserve and loud cascades above the lights and life of Los Angeles.

The mornings are his, blue and white like the tablecloth at breakfast. He’s happy in the house, a sweep of the spoon brings the birds under his chair. He sings and the dishes disappear. Or holding a crayon like a candle, he draws a circle. It is his hundredth dragonfly. Calling for more paper, this one is red-winged and like the others, he wills it to fly, simply by the unformed curve of his signature. Waterwings he calls them, the floats I strap to his arms. I wear an apron of concern, sweep the morning of birds. To the water he returns, plunging where it’s cold, moving and squealing into sunlight. The water from here seems flecked with gold. I watch the circles his small body makes fan and ripple, disperse like an echo into the sum of water, light and air. His imprint on the water has but a brief lifespan, the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing. This is sadness, I tell myself, the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind, because he will not remember that he and beauty were aligned, skimming across the water, nearly airborne, on his first solo flight. I’ll write “how he could not contain his delight.” At the other end, in another time frame, he waits for me— having already outdistanced this body, the one that slipped from me like a fish, floating, free of itself.

Mariah Watkins, Neosho, Missuri Imagine a child at your door, offering to do your wash, clean your house, cook, to weed your kitchen garden or paint you a bunch of flowers in exchange for a meal. A spindly ten-year-old, alone and a stranger in town, here to go to our school for colored children. His high peep brought tears: sleeping in a barn and all that, nary mama nor kin, but only white folks he left with their blessing, his earthly belongings in a handkerchief tied to a stick. I've brought a houseful of children into this world, concentrating on that needle's eye into eternity. But ain't none of them children mine. Well, of course I moved him on in. He helped me with my washings, brought me roots from the woods that bleached them white folks' sheets brighter than sunshine. He could fill a canning jar with leaves and petals so when you lifted the lid a fine perfume flooded your senses. White bodices and pantalettes danced around George on my line. He was sweet with the neighbor children. Taught the girls to crochet. Showed the boys a seed he said held a worm cupped hands warmed so it wriggled and set the seed to twitching. Gave them skills and wonders. Knelt with me at bedtime. He was the child the good Lord gave and took away before I got more than the twinkle of a glimpse at the man he was going to be. It happened one Saturday afternoon. George was holding a black-eyed Susan, talking about how the seed this flower grew from carried a message from a flower that bloomed a million years ago, and how this flower would send the message on to a flower that was going to bloom in a million more years. Praise Jesus, I'll never forget it. He left to find a teach that knew more than he knew. I give him my Bible. I keep his letters in the bureau, tied with a bow. He always sends a dried flower.

Watts bleeds leaving stained reminders on dusty sidewalks. Here where I strut alone as glass lies broken by my feet and a blanket of darkness is slung across the wooden shacks of nuetsra colonia. Watts bleeds dripping from carcasses of dreams: Where despair is old people sitting on torn patio sofas with empty eyes and children running down alleys with big sticks. Watts bleeds on vacant lots and burned-out buildings– temples desolated by a people’s rage. Where fear is a deep river. Where hate is an overgrown weed. Watts bleeds even as we laugh, recall good times, drink and welcome daylight through the broken windshield of an old Impala. Here is the Watts of my youth, where teachers threw me from classroom to classroom, not knowing where I could fit in. Where I learned to fight or run, where I zigzagged down alleys, jumped over fences, and raced by graffiti on crumbling factory walls. Where we played between boxcars, bleeding from broken limbs and torn flesh, and where years later we shot up carga in the playground of our childhood. Watts bleeds as the shadow of the damned engulfs all the chinga of our lives. In the warmth of a summer night, gunshots echo their deadly song through the silence of fear; prelude to a heartbeat. Watts bleeds as I bled getting laid-off from work, standing by my baby’s crib, touching his soft check and fingering his small hand as dreams shatter again, dreams of fathers for little men. Watts bleeds and the city hemorrhages, unable to stop the flow from this swollen and festering sore. Oh bloom, you trampled flower! Come alive as once you tried to do from the ashes. Watts, bleeding and angry, you will be free.

Sets the folds in alignment; this a shallow, a constitution of drops that moves to displace itself and unconsciously reverts to image. In such a state, the wave has become a setting— a table across which cups with propositions rolled inside them are passed. The passage of cups does not limit the range of potential outcomes, and yet at no point does the wave dissolve into abstraction. The shades are drawn and we are overwhelmed by flags crossing the black divan. An axis of rotation, gliding a fraction of an inch and yet unveiling its total mass. Advancing, the disc of its body shimmers. Alighting on the sand, it reveals itself in a cluster of pulses. Dilated, it lifts from the sea floor: fine spokes radiating on a wheel. It passes between bands of bright water, a kiss or a plow.

They were sitting on the thin mattress He’d once rolled & carried up the four floors To his room only to find it covered nearly all Of the bare wood Leaving just a small path alongside the wall & between them was the sack Of oranges & pears she’d brought its neck Turned back to expose the colors of the fruit & as she opened a bottle of wine He reached over to a tall stack of books & pulled out The Tao& with a silly flourish Handed it across the bed to her   she looked up & simply poured the two squat water glasses Half-full with wine & then she Took the book   reading silently   not aloud As he’d assumed & suddenly he felt clearly She knew the way Two people must come upon such an understanding Together of course but separately As the moon & the wave remain individually one