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When you are not surprised, not surprised, nor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow or from shadow into sunlight suiting the color of fright or delight to the bewildering circumstance when you are no longer surprised by the quiet or fury of daybreak the stormy uprush of the sun’s rage over the edges of torn trees torrents of living and dying flung upward and outward inward and downward to space or else peace peace peace peace the wood-thrush speaking his holy holy far hidden in the forest of the mind while slowly the limbs of light unwind and the world’s surface dreams again of night as the center dreams of light when you are not surprised by breath and breath and breath the first unconscious morning breath the tap of the bird’s beak on the pane and do not cry out come again blest blest that you are come again o light o sound o voice of bird o light and memory too o memory blest and curst with the debts of yesterday that would not stay, or stay when you are not surprised by death and death and death death of the bee in the daffodil death of color in the child’s cheek on the young mother’s breast death of sense of touch of sight death of delight and the inward death the inward turning night when the heart hardens itself with hate and indifference for hated self and beloved not-self when you are not surprised by wheel’s turn or turn of season the winged and orbed chariot tilt of time the halcyon pause, the blue caesura of spring and solar rhyme woven into the divinely remembered nest by the dark-eyed love in the oriole’s breast and the tides of space that ring the heart while still, while still, the wave of the invisible world breaks into consciousness in the mind of god then welcome death and be by death benignly welcomed and join again in the ceaseless know-nothing from which you awoke to the first surprise.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

—And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday, And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday— When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed, Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon Looking off down the long street To nowhere, Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why? And if-Monday-never-had-to-come— When you have forgotten that, I say, And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell, And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang; And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner, That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles Or chicken and rice And salad and rye bread and tea And chocolate chip cookies— I say, when you have forgotten that, When you have forgotten my little presentiment That the war would be over before they got to you; And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed, And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end Bright bedclothes, Then gently folded into each other— When you have, I say, forgotten all that, Then you may tell, Then I may believe You have forgotten me well.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you'll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto, “Yet many a better one has died before.” Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore.

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air — so what is there to be afraid of? A cage of air. Baudelaire said Poe thought America was one giant cage. To the poet, a nation is one big cage? And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air? Try to put a cage around your dream. The cage escapes the dream. I see it streak and stream.

what about those nosegays?! If you were to return I would give you more, for all you have given us, for your going first. Those posies might have a peony, a freesia, a tulip — an eye snack and nostril snack, I could not get enough of giving you coronation bundles, handing them and almost bowing, tongue-tied with respectful adoring, with gobbling the sight of you the sound, the bouquets saying mother- — we would not be here, without your song, your eye.

Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling. — Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Stephen Mitchell The fresco cracks cooperatively over time. Not to give a secret away but gradually to break off keeping it. In the sky you make birds like this, one wing longer than the other, an asymmetrical v wedged against wind, one stroke longer than another, never the bodies turned the same direction, each finding its own angle, and one, in the distance, a dot. These are the Deadly Birds of the Soul Rilke was forced to call terrifying. Migratory, weighing no more than a pencil. Because every flying thing is passionate, and every flight a posture torn from stone. There was a time it was a theme parents would pay an artist to realize — the face of a beloved son, a Luca or Piero, painted onto the shoulders of Tobias, painted into the company of Raphael. You tell yourselves and your quiet house no harm will come to the boy as he goes out. A guardian, though, is not a guard. To keep safe is subtly different from confining. Radiance can strategically direct itself to seem like us, ready, as it were, to walk. As a mirror goes through the appearance of requiring subsistence, goes through the motions of a meal whose food appears to be food. Radiance, we know, is never quite as warm as light. Who has not tasted the silver in sea mist? Whosever they are, angels are the first to surface there. You know a guardian by the silver of a river-crossing, of a father’s filmy eyes, in gall, heart, fire, and mostly smoke. In smoke and mostly mirror. As, wedged between forward and backward being, rehashing and planning ahead, presence will be specked again with being erased, a reusable writing surface calling down to the life without rest, the self-propelled surveillances of sharks.

Everyone's spending Christmas Eve adrift in the corporal skirmish, mixing up the darks with the lights, fending with elbows and dirty looks. Wet wool and down crowd the air. Where are the stars, pristine as great ideas? Behind clouds the heavens saturate with luminous dust, shuttles wearing halos of earthdirt, light pollution from jets fired to keep things on course. Boys rickrack a ball off floor and ceiling past the table tree bubbling with giveaway ornaments from Burger King and lights that manage an occasional lackadaisical flash. Showstoppers: everyone looks every time and keeps looking to make sure it happened. The double frontloaders are going like abstract TVs. And the program is important: all about the boggling sullied lives we'd like to hide. But this is no place to do so, where known and unknown perverts come to pirate underpants and the innocent clutch their Cheer and Shout. The rules are posted: only the toughest habiliments, the superego of raiment can take such agitation. And only the poor are invited to endure the sneezy powders and clean resentment. Imagine a museum installation— 200 hypnotic washers stuffed with somersaulting cloth. Critics could rise to the challenge, their statements settling like coats of gold and silver chain mail over each machine: "These Speed Queen pieces thrust ahead of art- for-art's sake to confront us with a realism of socio-political magnitude. The vortex-like movement of pattern, color, and texture infuses these works with an abundance of unconscious bliss. The soft forms circulate with vigor across the screens. The viewer is not privy to the cause of dirt though one is witness to the dirt's ablutions. The point is we are not impeccable." Everyone would be happy to know that! And so we're forced to scoop and pour a fine white empathy over the hairy flannels, snaggy nylons, the glass front that gives forth this light industry, the silly tree and jingles about blue and white Christmases, chestnuts, sleighbells, just as snow settles on every unsequestered thing: from blistered gum - ball machines, clumsy bumpers, crepuscular theaters with sticky floors, to ramshackle mansions choked with smiling china animals where light shakes itself out from TVs and old women frail as walking sticks sweep their stoops at eight a.m. Just as snow makes the less than impeccable classical, stroking the merely drab or passing, quickly or slowly, so we can count only on its leaving, teaching liquidity to what seems solid.

I come from the nether regions They serve me pomegranate seeds with morsels of flying fish From time to time I wear a crown of blood streaked grass. Mama beat me when I was a child for stealing honey from a honey pot It swung from the rafters of the kitchen. Why I stuffed my mouth with golden stuff, no one could tell. King Midas wore a skin that killed him. My nails are patterned ebony, Doxil will do that They made a port under my collar bone with a plastic tube that runs into a blood vessel. I set out with mama from Bombay harbor. Our steamer was SS Jehangir, in honor of the World Conqueror — They say he knelt on the battle field to stroke the Beloved’s shadow. The waves were dark in Bombay harbor, Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography Writing too is an experiment with truth. No one knows my name in Arabic means port. On board white people would not come near us Were they scared our brown skin would sully them? Mama tried to teach me English in a sing song voice. So you can swim into your life she said. Wee child, my language tutor muttered ruler in hand, ready to strike, Just pronounce the words right: Pluck, pluck             Suck, suck Duck, duck Stuck, stuck. May 12 - July 4, 2018, NYC

Where does such tenderness come from? These aren’t the first curls I’ve wound around my finger— I’ve kissed lips darker than yours. The sky is washed and dark (Where does such tenderness come from?) Other eyes have known and shifted away from my eyes. But I’ve never heard words like this in the night (Where does such tenderness come from?) with my head on your chest, rest. Where does this tenderness come from? And what will I do with it? Young stranger, poet, wandering through town, you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s. 1916