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1 In prologue let me plainly say I shall not ever come to that discretion where I do not rage to think I grow decrepit, bursten-bellied, bald and toothless, thick of hearing, tremulous of leg, dry and rough-barked as a hemlock slab, the soft rot setting in and all my wheezy dreams the tunnelling of beetles in a raspy bark. For now I am fleshed at smaller sports, and grow in time into the mineral thick fell of earth; Vermont hairy with violets, roses, lilies and like minions and darlings of the spring, meantime working wonders, rousing astonishments. And being a humble man, I at the same time acknowledge my miscreate: the nightshades, cabbages and fleaworts of my plot, though always I try to turn my back and scorn upon the inkhorn term and speak as is most commonly received with smile and wink and approbative nod, not overfine nor at the same time reckless of the phrase, nor ever ugly, turdy, tut-mouthed, but always joyous at the goosey brain, the woolpack of the solid cloud, a crowd, a heap, a troop, a plume of trees, grass, gulls and rabbits, in the end, no doubt, a vulgar prattle: but the planet swells and bulges and protrudes beyond my eyes’ aversions, and tottery, fuddled, always I give up, I am not understood, or wrongly, out of some general assumption of my innocence. 2 This much I wish to say, my nonesuch, nosegay native sweet, in someway plainer, this is my letter to you, and out of most severe purpose: the bee, the honey stalk, the whole keep of the house endanger me: the perspectives of the clapboard, the steep falls of the lawn, the razory apices of ridges, and the abdominous curves of the meadow into the far trees. There are ponds below the house, and water runs. The road crosses the water, and the road diminishes to the reach of the next farm, and the farm beyond that, and two miles bearing right or left somewhere runs Highway 25. I have found my way with difficulty, I am confused, halfway I have suffered a failure of vital powers, a swoon, have been smirked at by the natives, and misdirected. Fitting, for I always dream of the painless redemption, the return from fiasco and tumultuous journey to the transcendentally serene lawns of a transcendentally white house with columns of oak trees and iron deer and the affectionate greeting of One who has these many years waited in full patience, without complaint, for me to come in bleeding, dusty and deliquescent from the fields, the blade in my thigh, or blinded, the victim of fire or ravenous birds, the lovely blood on my cheek like tears, one-limbed, a bullet in my heart, my hands, my head cut off and the dark pulses of my blood diminishing. Yet never a reproach for my criminal self-negligence, my careless japeries and clumsy flounderings: instead, my brow is wiped, my wounds attended to, blood let, leeches applied: I heal, I grow strong, I can set forth again renewed, valiant, sturdy, full of high spirits, lively, gay, spruce in looks, a reveler, a merry prankster, dimpled in the cheek from smiling, perfect Pilgrim, fit for the chemistry of the Resurrection. Yet I am of wild and changeful moods. I am perhaps worthy of being stoned, sometimes. I lie hid and lurk in wait for the giggling girleries and leap out and shout and scatter them like chickens from the boot to the safe and flying four winds. I am easy and fluent in the telling of lies, and let it be said that I roar and sing scurrilous songs in base places, and shall no doubt for this little vain merriment find a sorrowful reckoning in the end. Still, my noises please me, and what this wretched poet overmuch desires, he easily believes. It is his conventional cowardice, it makes him immortally glad. But then he always grows morose (that is in his favor), he repents, lances his soul, thinks of the willows and the columned porch and the wind melliloquent about the chimneys, and you from where he sits now at the far end of this small porch of a Federal farmhouse in this very and summery Vermont. 3 I look down the pitches of the lawn: fireflies make small explosions among the grass stems, and I think that to walk down that slant of lawn to the black waters of the brook at the dark join of the cleft would be like dying, and that if I die I will never pardon time. I think my words will echo only in my own mind forever, to what purpose I do not know I see a firefly trapped inside the screen. I have no name for any of this; I know it clearly in the same way I know the dead cry of the starlings in the eaves, the smell of after rain, the warm air holding in the hollows of the roads. For this there is no name. The holding mind is likewise without name. That is the final thought, it is the disorder, the reason for all this. The clouds begin to reach up Blood Mountain, and I am sitting on a farmhouse porch, and there are trees, and it is late and I am dreaming that I dream I stare down into a fouled well and see the white legbones of a deer and the water’s surface matte with loose hair, the green stink welling and bellying from the fertile sump up and flowing outwards in a fountaining current of vines and melons and leaves and the knotgrass lawns blossoming with gilliflowers, shoulder-high, cloud-high, the sun finally smothering in grass, and then in the entire silence of this growth the grasses thickening, darkening, becoming clouds, reaching up from the ridges. And all night there is rain. I dream that when I awaken it is a shining milky day, four roosters are crowing in the yard and geese dabble in the green soft muds of the ditches. This is the literal surface, and for all the extravagance of what has gone before I now repent, and make an image: All of Vermont each night blazes with fireflies, the comet is a faint green phosphorescence to the North, the catalpas blossom and each noon the sunlight hardens, and the sky is a clear ground, and I can look from my open doorway into dry and fiery yards. You see, I draw back always, I cannot be understood.O I wud slepe all the swete darkemans, nor ever speke!

You find yourself in a narrow bed you’ve never slept in, on a tree-lined grassy field you’ve never walked upon, on a cold toilet seat you have not sat on, in a place you now call your home, your learning, your future. Red stone pathways expose the buildings that will house the knowledge you seek, and the information you want to gather. You crane your neck to look up at the 13-story brick tower rising from the ground, looming over you as you walk past. The melodies and beats of different songs mix, create a sound of their own, flow from open windows. Crushed leeks Top Ramen noodles ground into a blue and speckled carpet attract armies of ants to the communal kitchen on the sixth floor. You pull your jacket tighter against your body, strong, salty wind whips off the Sound, and up the hill as you walk through Red Square toward the clatter of knives, forks and digesting bellies. Finally, you are released like a white dove from the hands of its owner, allowed to fly discovering your dreams, discovering what you are made of.

for William Kittredge 1. That woman still lives at her ranch. You can ask her. Maybe She knows. As near and far As the rest of us can tell The barn and sheds were built In the Great Depression. Someone Had money and a big idea. Far and away the biggest Idea I’ve ever seen. Pat says there must’ve been A hundred men, shepherds And shearers, working there. It’s one of those things That not only is, but seems, Larger inside than out, Like a planetarium or an orange, Even with Wyoming around it, And real stars flying away. Just stick your head in there; Its dark will make you dizzy. It has an underneath Too low to stand in unless You are a sheep. The loft Vaults like a dusky church. 2. All that summer I balanced water, Coaxing the desert Into pasture, With eight cubic feet Per second for two Thousand acres. Horseback, shovel On my shoulder along Miles of ditches: Stalling here, Releasing there, Water over The deepening green, Keeping it living: Herons and cranes Regal in meadows, Strings of ducklings Frothing the ditch To get away. 3. One day riding ditches I saw Clay. He was on the hill against the sky, Flapping his arms at me. They were going to bulldoze the corrals at the shearing sheds, Intricate maze of gates and pens Clay, as a kid, had built with his father, Before they lost their ranch, before Frank died, Before the family had to move away. The new owner was razing everything. I guess he had some kind of idea. Clay didn’t need any gates, but, as Pat said, That’s Clay. I met them at the shearing sheds. Pat held a wrecking bar like a steel snake. I just can’t stand tearin’ apart all them guys’s dreams, he said, looking shy. Hell is when you know where you are. 4. On the barn roof a loose piece of tin Flaps in the wind like a broken wing. Wyoming whirls in the sun. Up in the loft a pair of shears, Oh, fifty or sixty years forgotten there, Floats in noonlight, bearing up some dust, Just a pair of spring-steel scissors, Two knives joined at the hip, with smiling edges. An owl the color of things left alone Flaps out of the gable door. Hell is when you know where you are: Mazes of pens and gates dreaming sheep; Miles of ditches dreaming green. 5. No one living knows Who built the shearing sheds, Unless maybe that woman, And I’m not about to ask her, Ever since she tried To stab her husband with a pair of scissors. He was ninety-one And barely held her off. Later she claimed she was just Trying to cut his heart Medication out of his shirt Pocket — dope, she called it — And the old man had to leave The ranch, where he didn’t last long. They bulldozed the corrals. We got forty gates. We took them someplace safe. 6. Now the vast, dim barn floats like an ocean liner Whose doldrums are meadows spinning into brush, And everywhere you look Wyoming hurries off. All night the stars make their escape. In the loft a pair of shears cuts woolly moonlight. All day a piece of roofing slaps in the wind. A startled owl flaps out of the gable. Hell is when you know where you are and it’s beautiful. You saved the gates for nothing. You balanced the water to keep the green from spinning Away into sage, the same gray as the wing That just now shaded your eyes.

An axe rang sharply ’mid those forest shades Which from creation toward the skies had tower’d In unshorn beauty. There, with vigorous arm Wrought a bold emigrant, and by his side His little son, with question and response, Beguiled the toil. ‘Boy, thou hast never seen Such glorious trees. Hark, when their giant trunks Fall, how the firm earth groans. Rememberest thou The mighty river, on whose breast we sail’d, So many days, on toward the setting sun? Our own Connecticut, compar’d to that, Was but a creeping stream.’ ‘Father, the brook That by our door went singing, where I launch’d My tiny boat, with my young playmates round, When school was o’er, is dearer far to me, Than all these bold, broad waters. To my eye They are as strangers. And those little trees My mother nutur’d in the garden bound, Of our first home, from whence the fragrant peach Hung in its ripening gold, were fairer sure, Than this dark forest, shutting out the day.’ —‘What, ho! – my little girl,’ and with light step A fairy creature hasted toward her sire, And setting down the basket that contain’d His noon-repast, look’d upward to his face With sweet, confiding smile. ‘See, dearest, see, That bright-wing’d paroquet, and hear the song Of yon gay red-bird, echoing through the trees, Making rich music. Didst thou ever hear, In far New England, such a mellow tone?’ —‘I had a robin that did take the crumbs Each night and morning, and his chirping voice Still made me joyful, as I went to tend My snow-drops. I was always laughing then In that first home. I should be happier now Methinks, if I could find among these dells The same fresh violets.’ Slow night drew on, And round the rude hut of the Emigrant The wrathful spirit of the rising storm Spake bitter things. His weary children slept, And he, with head declin’d, sat listening long To the swoln waters of the Illinois, Dashing against their shores. Starting he spake,— ‘Wife! did I see thee brush away a tear? ’Twas even so. Thy heard was with the halls Of thy nativity. Their sparkling lights, Carpets, and sofas, and admiring guests, Befit thee better than these rugged walls Of shapeless logs, and this lone, hermit home.’ ‘No – no. All was so still around, methought Upon mine ear that echoes hymn did steal, Which ’mid the Church where erst we paid our vows, So tuneful peal’d. But tenderly thy voice Dissolv’d the illusion.’ And the gentle smile Lighting her brow, the fond caress that sooth’d Her waking infant, reassur’d his soul That wheresoe’er our best affections dwell, And strike a healthful root, is happiness. Content, and placid, to his rest he sank, But dreams, those wild magicians, that do play Such pranks when reason slumbers, tireless wrought Their will with him. Up rose the thronging mart Of his own native city, – roof and spire, All glittering bright, in fancy’s frost-work ray. The steed his boyhood nurtur’d proudly neigh’d, The favorite dog came frisking round his feet, With shrill and joyous bark, – familiar doors Flew open, – greeting hands with his were link’d In friendship’s grasp, – he heard the keen debate From congregated haunts, where mind with mind Doth blend and brighten, – and till morning rov’d ’Mid the loved scenery of his native land.

finish, lie dead on the sorrow bed. stiff and related to your furrowed, underlined, intention . . . shit there, with the injected vellum that seeks your heart. from machine with this Wake, this egg frost beacon on the SHORE — you, Wane, U.S., Wane itches on piled money spent, tiny boil. Seem, THEN your crucified microscope, shimmering train railed on decided work. this is WAKE, this means BEGIN, your main() with her. peace, walking through city pulses, end their made up Western, singing its shore borrowed and stained with missiles. LOG warns this is magical rivers, NOT tongue to be salvaged or interred with any one place that has hers. win there — placed like dirt on the shoe place warns. all letters, all Eastern locks penciled in with dog interiors, let go the chain. Hopped up winds, and the granite falling through any retrial that was schooling-less . . . without Agamemnon warning in pushed hires and radio made PINS. on THEN to an eye full of tunnels, real I/O

Then the day passed into the evening, a sovereign, darkening blue. And the twenty-six lost miners, if living at all, knew nothing of the hour: not the languid canter of light, or the wind curled through the hedgerows. Not pain. Not rage. If living at all then just this: a worm of black water at the lower back. At the lungs two tablets of air. What is it like there? the broadcaster asked, his voice and the slow reply cast down through the time zones of America. A stillness. All of the families asleep in the fire station. And the mineworks pale on the landscape. What else? Nothing. Blue lights of police cars. What else? Nothing. Nothing? ...The thrum of the crickets. A thousand files on a thousand scrapers. A thousand taut membranes called mirrors amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body, so in tune with the dusk's warmth it slows when a cloud passes over. Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness when the earth flared and collapsed. Before that May. After that darkness. On the larch bud. On the fire station. On shale and the grind-steps of magma. On the gold straining in its seam bed. On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud. On the leaves, on the meadow grass, on the wickerwork of shrubs: dark cape of desire.

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much. KAFKA, Wedding Preparations in the Country The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics, The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter) Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached, Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present Which would have its own opinions on these matters, Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed) Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in And out of it. I want that information very much today, Can't have it, and this makes me angry. I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge. I shall keep to myself. I shall not repeat others' comments about me.

It hain't no use to grumble and complane; It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice.— When God sorts out the weather and sends rain, W'y rain's my choice. Men ginerly, to all intents— Although they're apt to grumble some— Puts most theyr trust in Providence, And takes things as they come— That is, the commonality Of men that's lived as long as me Has watched the world enugh to learn They're not the boss of this concern. With some , of course, it's different— I've saw young men that knowed it all, And didn't like the way things went On this terrestchul ball;— But all the same, the rain, some way, Rained jest as hard on picnic day; Er, when they railly wanted it, It mayby wouldn't rain a bit! In this existunce, dry and wet Will overtake the best of men— Some little skift o' clouds'll shet The sun off now and then.— And mayby, whilse you're wundern who You've fool-like lent your umbrell' to, And want it—out'll pop the sun, And you'll be glad you hain't got none! It aggervates the farmers, too— They's too much wet, er too much sun, Er work, er waitin' round to do Before the plowin' 's done: And mayby, like as not, the wheat, Jest as it's lookin' hard to beat, Will ketch the storm—and jest about The time the corn's a-jintin' out. These-here cy-clones a-foolin' round— And back'ard crops!—and wind and rain!— And yit the corn that's wallerd down May elbow up again!— They hain't no sense, as I can see, Fer mortuls, sech as us, to be A-faultin' Natchur's wise intents, And lockin' horns with Providence! It hain't no use to grumble and complane; It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice.— When God sorts out the weather and sends rain, W'y, rain's my choice.

The Whale that wanders round the Pole Is not a table fish. You cannot bake or boil him whole, Nor serve him in a dish; But you may cut his blubber up And melt it down for oil, And so replace the colza bean (A product of the soil). These facts should all be noted down And ruminated on, By every boy in Oxford town Who wants to be a Don.

A guy comes walking out of the garden Playing Dark Eyes on the accordian. We’re sitting on the porch, Drinking and spitting, lying. We shut our eyes, snap our fingers. Dewhurst goes out to his truck Like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing And brings back three-half-pints. A little whirlwind occurs in the road, Carrying dust away like a pail of water. We’re drinking serious now, and O.Z. Wants to break in the store for some head cheese, But the others won’t let him. Everybody laughs, dances. The crossroads are all quiet Except for the little man on the accordian. Things are dying down, the moon spills its water. Dewhurst says he smells rain. O.Z. says if it rains he’ll still make a crop. We wait there all night, looking for rain. We haven’t been to sleep, so the blue lizards On the side of the white porch Lose their tails when we try to dream. The man playing the music looks at us, Noticing what we’re up to. He backs off, Holding up his hands in front, smiling, Shaking his head, but before he gets half way Down the road that O.Z. shoots him in the belly. All summer his accordian rotted in the ditch, Like an armadillo turning into a house payment.