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But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth. –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their only purpose was to grieve, & crossed the Transversales to Wilde’s grave. When lovers leave, they leave their kisses glistening on the gray slab, on impressions of lips themselves, a tissue of strangers’ cells the conservators cannot leave alone, & scrub the graffiti, as the plaque decrees by law, no one can deface this tomb, & still the images of lips remain, dark gray stains of animal fat imprisoned in limestone. Lips are pressed as high as lovers climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous headdress, on the carved trumpet of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight, that some farsighted lover tried to open with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty, while others kissed its sybaritic mouth to make a poem a prophecy. So here is love alive surviving the wreckage it survives, a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight to some other place, less aware, more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.

You are the man You are my other country and I find it hard going You are the prickly pear You are the sudden violent storm the torrent to raise the river to float the wounded doe

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross. There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

for Joseph Cady Camden, 1882 Is it raining, Mary, can you see? I hear rain. Is the road black, is it shining? Dark, I can see for myself. Put on my red tie, red has life in it—most men I know dress like undertakers making sure they look mournful enough to manage their own funerals No accounting for taste: we should be grateful for that. Help me get to the window, I want to see Mickle Street. Don’t you hear it now, something like rain, off in the distance? My ear, maybe, is playing me tricks again; there was a rushing, like rain when it moves closer and starts a millstream in the trees. No? I guess my senses must be losing their touch. It was nothing. then, nothing more than a tantrum of the boneyard: best for me to hold still in this chair and listen to my beard grow. Now if hair was poetry, then your Walt Whitman would be a great success. I wear out trying to come to terms with the wrong weather— what you might call speaking terms. I don’t want to talk to much else. You tell them to go home, Mary, no visitors today—or one, just one: what else is a red tie for? Some English poet, keeps me up, coming all the way here from California, Colorado—coming to ask the usual questions. I don’t like questions that require answers: English questions. That’s a country of things answered. London is a city of things done with. Brooklyn is different, New Orleans, Washington they’re my cities of romance, all the cities of things begun. I may have been deliberate, even laborious, but I never looked for finish. Here, where’s his name? Bucke wrote about him after hearing one of his lectures. I had it somewhere. You let him in, Mary: no one else, no one ... I’m slipping—here it is, here’s the name!— slowly, maybe, but slipping. Who can say he has hold of what might be called a standing? That’s what they do say, though, all these visitors— they write, they call, and they stay: it makes a problem Doctor says: bar them. I can’t. I won’t. Still, they bother me. One young fellow walks in, says, “Walt, I should like to read you my epic and have your opinion of its worth.” “Thank you,” say I, “but I’ve been paralyzed once already.” Suppose someone took it in his head to come and sit here and say nothing! someone who knows even the first syllables of the great speech of silence ... Today’s visitor, maybe, will mind his tongue, maybe spare you the trouble of putting his latest tribute on the shelf with all the rest. Give me enemies rather than these disciples of mine. Best thing I ever heard of Browning is how he disapproves of all those Societies. Not that I quote Browning, or care for him, or read him: I’ve tried Browning on every way, but he don’t fit. Tennyson— now he has his place, a local English place: I don’t see how the world could make much use of him elsewhere— but the others: I conclude most literature was written on all fours, and the rest on stilts! ... There, Mary, the bell. I did hear that! I know my own bell, don’t I? Go on, go on down, bring the man up ... In here, Mr. Wilde. This room is not such a ruin as it seems: I find most things I search for without much trouble— found Dr. Bucke’s letter with your name, for instance. Found my red necktie as well. Come in, you cast a shadow where you stand. Come in, the chaos is more suspected than real. I suspect no chaos: I am convinced of the cosmos in your company, Walt Whitman! I greet you, sir, as America’s great voice.

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page of them, all beginning with the letter b. Guidebooks preserve our knowledge of their hues and shapes, their breeding. Many poems have made delicate word-chimes— like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man— out of their lovely names. At the edge of the prairie in a cabin when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade— seem to blow with the announcing winds outside as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

All the trees kept their own counsel without any wind to speak of, until one lone limber pine began gesticulating wildly, as if it suffered from its own inner cyclone. It was like a lunatic in the courtroom of other trees. We forgot about the sunset and the dark coming on across the plain. Then the reason appeared: a mother antelope had twin newborns backed into the tree and fended off a pair of coyotes who darted in and feinted out, knowing she couldn't defend them both. The girl I was with shrieked, "Do something!" I thought of the rifle back at the house. I thought of a litter of coyote whelps in a den somewhere nearby. I thought of the three-hundred-yard sprint to the tree. The mother antelope would be first to bolt, and those coyotes would have the aplomb to make off with both twins. I said no. The antelope struck out with her forelegs, she butted the coyotes back, until one of them got the chance they had orchestrated and caught a twin and trotted off, dangling it by the nape as gently as if it were her own.

Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord, Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine, Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design, First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word, Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award, Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line, Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine, Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward. I can say almost anything about you, O Big Idea, and with each epithet, Create new reasons to believe or doubt you, Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet. But what’s the anything I must leave out? You Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

Half asleep in prayer I said the right thing And felt a sudden pleasure come into The room or my own body. In the dark, Charged with a change of atmosphere, at first I couldn’t tell my body from the room. And I was wide awake, full of this feeling, Alert as though I’d heard a doorknob twist, A drawer pulled, and instead of terror knew The intrusion of an overwhelming joy. I had said thanks and this was the response. But how I said it or what I said it for I still cannot recall and I have tried All sorts of ways all hours of the night. Once was enough to be dissatisfied.

Drunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk On one pink cloud that stood beside the moon, Drunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk, Two young Americans, on one another, Far from home and wanting this forever— Who needed God? We had our bodies, bread, And glasses of a raw, green, local wine, And watched our Godless perfect darkness breed Enormous softly burning ancient stars. Who needed God? And why do I ask now? Because I’m older and I think God stirs In details that keep bringing back that time, Details that are just as vivid now— Our bodies, bread, a sharp Umbrian wine.

But of course these poems are about men, which we become by defining how we are not women and so becoming a shadow devouring the light to find the limits which is what Richard Pryor would have told Joan of Arc in a joke funnier for being sexist “It’s a man thang.” And of course there is God and its problematic relationship to light not to mention the question of permission Who builds the box, the shape? It makes sense that Jesus, the new man 2,000 years ago was a carpenter. You need that craft, the precision of measurement angles of angels who incidentally are never women. Just ask the Romans, who called them Angelo, Angelus never Angela— that lie was coined by a dissident nun hiding her feminism under the cover of rapture but is it enough to announce yourself? To beat your chest in contrition calling Mea culpa! Mea culpa? Guilt can never be enough Mere intent—where is its purpose? Yet there are no answers there are only lines that disappear into horizons that girder us with safety just as there is no way to end this poem.