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more than the black which it displaces— Upon any fine day I jump these traces

Prone on the northern water, That laps him about the breast, Like the Sphinx in the sand, forever The giant lies in rest. The sails drive swift before him, And the surf beats at his lip, But the gray eyes look out seaward Noting nor wave nor ship. The centuries drift over, He marks not with smile nor frown, Drift over him cloud and sea-gull, Swallow and thistledown. I, of the race that passes, Quick with its hope and its fear, Lean on his brow and question, Plead at his senseless ear: “What of thy past unmeasured? And what of the peoples gone? What of the sea’s first singing? What of the primal dawn? “What was the weird that bowed thee? How did the struggle cease? Out of what Titan anguish Issued thy hopeless peace?” Nothing the pale lips utter, What hath been, nor what shall be; Under the brow’s stern shadow, The gray eyes look to sea. The blue glows round and over, Thin-veiled, as it were God’s face; I feel the breath, the spirit, That knows nor time nor space. And my heart grieves for the giant In his pitiful repose, Mocked by the vagrant gladness Of a laggard brier-rose; Mocked to his face from seaward By the flash and whirl of wings; Mocked from the grass above him, By life that creeps and sings. I care not for his wisdom, His secret unconfessed; I yearn toward rose and cricket, Ephemeral and blest. Ah! if he might, how would he Quicken to love and to tears; For my immortal minute Barter his endless years! He rests on the restless water, And I on the grasses brown, Drift over us cloud and sea-gull, Swallow and thistledown.

The feverish room and that white bed, The tumbled skirts upon a chair, The novel flung half-open, where Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread; The mirror that has sucked your face Into its secret deep of deeps, And there mysteriously keeps Forgotten memories of grace; And you half dressed and half awake, Your slant eyes strangely watching me, And I, who watch you drowsily, With eyes that, having slept not, ache; This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) Will rise, a ghost of memory, if Ever again my handkerchief Is scented with White Heliotrope.

He knows how to do what he sets out to do with perfectly obvious procedure. The sea is dark and forbidding. The horizon is dark and forbidding. Even from a distance, the less said the better. The colors in some of these landscapes are perfectly desperate. In a portrait there is never anything wrong with the mouth. There is never anything wrong with anything. Machines are not choosers. The next best things are certain. Heaven knowing the next best things. The young can explain it, but who would they explain it to? More promise than performance as all sorts of things begin to interfere. An energetic hostess seated me at the counter next to a beautiful woman. It is possible the timid portion of the population unless held firmly in check will imitate the silliness of timid people of years ago. Supplication is valued. As soon as I learned the facts I gave up on the exchange. She wanted something mysterious, as if everything were the same. Life changes and so-called truth changes with it. The businesslike haste of the surgeon as he scolds the public. To look at him and the thing he can never look at shudderingly as the blood is drawn is the duty of every patriot. In a constructive age such as this I should have neglected everything for the supreme duty of aiding in the reconstruction. I took my courage, which starts everywhere and goes nowhere, and spoke to her. Here one can unquestionably infer the inside from the outside. The leaders of the free world, assembled as if by magic, seem to have the enemy at their mercy. It can be argued that Christ himself spoke to the mob. The crowd will stop to see almost anything. The crowd will stop to see something about almost everything.

A white hunter is nearly crazy.

In this world, the isle of dreams, While we sit by sorrow’s streams, Tears and terrors are our themes Reciting: But when once from hence we fly, More and more approaching nigh Unto young eternity, Uniting: In that whiter island, where Things are evermore sincere; Candor here and luster there Delighting: There no monstrous fancies shall Out of hell an horror call, To create, or cause at all, Affrighting. There, in calm and cooling sleep We our eyes shall never steep, But eternal watch shall keep, Attending Pleasures, such as shall pursue Me immortalized, and you; And fresh joys, as never too Have ending.

The lies I could tell, when I was growing up light-bright, near-white, high-yellow, red-boned in a black place, were just white lies. I could easily tell the white folks that we lived uptown, not in that pink and green shanty-fled shotgun section along the tracks. I could act like my homemade dresses came straight out the window of Maison Blanche. I could even keep quiet, quiet as kept, like the time a white girl said (squeezing my hand),Now we have three of us in this class. But I paid for it every time Mama found out. She laid her hands on me, then washed out my mouth with Ivory soap.This is to purify, she said, and cleanse your lying tongue. Believing her, I swallowed suds thinking they'd work from the inside out.

the white of your skin, for skin, except when truly albino, always has some other color sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf, a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting stream, a richness implied of its many layers, the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity that lies within and makes the skin shed, not like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid ease of being—one resting upon the other, the sliver of your shoulder against the black fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed (as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga whales came swimming toward me—how white they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent as white fire, gliding through the weight of water, and when they sang in that chamber as small as the chambers of the human heart, murky with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments of what they had consumed, I was almost in love with them; they seemed the lost children of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other of all the existences they had left behind, their fins like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling like canaries of the sea:there was no darkness in their bodies, like clouds drifting through unkempt skies, they illuminated the room). So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake for the place where the heart lies, but the exact location, a little to the left, just on the crescent where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing, the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin and night that opens in imagination and in feeling upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where angels were once believed to dance, and all that nakedness without could not have been except for all that burning deep within

A man walks beside them with a whip that he cracks. The cart they draw is painted with Saracens and Crusaders, fierce eyes and ranks of spears. They are on the steep road that goes up the mountain. Their neat-stepping hoofs appear to be flickering in the sun, raising dust. They are higher than the roofs on which striped gourds and melons lie ripening. They move among the dark green olives that grow on the rocks. they dwindle as they climb ... vanish around a corner and reappear walking on the edge of a precipice. They enter the region of mist and darkness. I think I can see them still: a pair of yoked oxen the color of ivory or smoke, with red tassels, in the gathering dusk.

Because my father said Yes but not in our lifetimes Because my mother said I know my daughter would never want to marry.