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Long ago we quit lifting our heels like the others—horse, dog, and tiger— though we thrill to their speed as they flee. Even the mouse bearing the great weight of a nugget of dog food is enviably graceful. There is little spring to our walk, we are so burdened with responsibility, all of the disciplinary actions that have fallen to us, the punishments, the killings, and all with our feet bound stiff in the skins of the conquered. But sometimes, in the early hours, we can feel what it must have been like to be one of them, up on our toes, stealing past doors where others are sleeping, and suddenly able to see in the dark.

walking person who has sky flowing–by one who beside is as if being backward by walking in life of people? but of one being 'defense- less' by the huge–is elating which is time. 'I was by a bigger bird - inside' - walking walking by (someone with the sky flowing) disturbed by being– by it– (compared by being–to past event: man seeing red tail hawk sit- ting in the city beside smaller bird disturbed calling)–(one walking by someone)–beside is 'embarrassing as being action' in one– (from)(its)(in the) present. 'embarrassed' is being elated simply here (as:) with one.

In movies when the hero is about to die, He scatters a few phrases in a place like this, Hoping the words will come up again Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him As now they do for us. Someone has planted a row of little trees To stop the wind. Instead they’ve learned To bend like the elect In one direction only; they know The sea will shatter them. Isn’t it always like this? Something uncontrollable becomes the hero, Taking off its dress, the ice plants Sunburn from the center out So we can see that their deaths Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours, We are allowed again the glare Of the sand, the druid hills, The grasses brushing the legs, though Just to have felt it once would have been enough.

Blurring the window, the snowflakes' numb white lanterns. She's brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne And sets her lipstick upright on the sink. The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip, The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder. Then she's dressed—the pillbox hat and ersatz fur, And I'm dressed too, mummified in stocking cap And scarves, and I walk her to the bus stop Where she'll leave me for my own walk to school, Where she'll board the bus that zigzags to St. Paul As I watch her at the window, the paperback Romance already open on her lap, The bus laboring off into snow, her good-bye kiss Still startling my cheek with lipstick trace.

Anyone with quiet pace who walks a gray road in the West may hear a badger underground where in deep flint another time is Caught by flint and held forever, the quiet pace of God stopped still. Anyone who listens walks on time that dogs him single file, To mountains that are far from people, the face of the land gone gray like flint. Badgers dig their little lives there, quiet-paced the land lies gaunt, The railroad dies by a yellow depot, town falls away toward a muddy creek. Badger-gray the sod goes under a river of wind, a hawk on a stick.

Walking home I feel a presence following and realize he is always there that Native man with coal-black-hair who is my grandfather. In my first memories he is present, mostly wordless, resident in the house where I was born. My mother shows him the cleft in my chin identical to his. I am swaddled and blinking in the kitchen light. So we are introduced. We never part. Sometimes I forget he lodges in my house still the bone-house where my heart beats. I carry his mother’s framework a sturdy structure. I learn his birthright. I hear his mother’s teachings through what my mother said of her: She kept a pot of stew on the stove all day for anyone to eat. She never went to church but said you could be a good person anyway. She fed hoboes during the ‘30s, her back porch a regular stop-over. Every person has rights no matter what color. Be respectful. This son of hers, my grandfather, still walks the streets with me. Some twist of blood and heat still spark across the time bridge. Here, listen: Air draws through these lungs made from his. His blood still pulses through this hand.

In the dark evening, my father and I walk down the road to the old house where my grandmother lived, and we see through the door an old woman's feet lifted up, tired, on a footstool, still in her thick stockings, the feet with legs and stockings looking just like Grandma's after bearing nine children who lived, standing, working all day, the kind of woman who made stacks of toast, platters of eggs for all of us each hot morning, did laundry, then lunch, supper, and worked with the animals or cleaning fish the rest of the day. I want to go open that door as I did so many times in the past, remembering not to slam the screen, as everyone would yell although I am now also older and finite, the seams of myself coming apart. How I wish I could go to that woman with her legs up and rub her feet, put liniment on her legs. Years have passed through the doors of that house, of memory, doors of the past and my father's eyes are sad, looking in, his own memories, not mine, thinking maybe of his mother and some of his old belongings, the stolen Colt of his own father, the bracelet he gave me with his R.A. number. Her memories are unremembered, as my grandfather's, as those before them, I think of what this poem is about, only partly about memory, our many losses. And walking with my father I walk with my grandparents, among the first to be numbered: #1556, #1555.

Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask among the city’s spires and balustrades and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds. On Park the first reflecting pool dims with a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims, while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins resign the world with gestures of disdain. Now in the Cloister’s high parterres the rain floods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns and mottoes. “The weather turns.” Clamped to their pier, the smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire, and Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange their fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain.

In order to perfect all readers the statements should be carved on rock walls, on cave walls, and on the side of pillars so the charm of their instruction can affect the mountain climbers near the cliffs, the plainsmen near the pillars, and the city people near the caves they go to on vacations. The statements should, and in a fair script, spell out the right text and gloss of the Philosopher’s jocular remark. Text: “Honesty is the best policy.” Gloss: “He means not ‘best’ but ‘policy,’ (this is the joke of it) whereas in fact Honesty is Honesty, Best is Best, and Policy is Policy, the three terms being not related, but here loosely allied. What is more important is that ‘is’ is, but the rocklike truth of the text resides in the ‘the’. The ‘the’ is The. By this means the amusing sage has raised or caused to be raised the triple standard in stone: the single is too simple for life, the double is mere degrading hypocrisy, but the third combines the first two in a possible way, and contributes something unsayable of its own: this is the pit, nut, seed, or stone of the fruit when the fruit has been digested: It is good to do good for the wrong reason, better to do good for the good reason, and best of all to do good good: i.e. when the doer and doee and whatever passes between them are beyond all words like ‘grace’ or ‘anagogic insight,’ or definitions like ‘particular instance of a hoped-at-law,’ and which the rocks alone can convey. This is the real reason for the rock walls, the cave walls and pillars, and not the base desires for permanence and display that the teacher’s conceit suggests.” That is the end of the statements, but, in order to go on a way after the end so as to make up for having begun after the beginning, and thus to come around to it in order to include the whole thing, add: “In some places the poignant slogan, ‘Morality is a bad joke like everything else,’ may be written or not, granted that space exists for the vulgar remarks, the dates, initials and hearts of lovers, and all other graffiti of the prisoners of this world.”

One night from the other side of a motel wall made of nothing but sawdust and pink stuff, I listened as a man cried to someone on the telephone that all he wanted to do before he died was to come home. “I want to come home!” That night a man cried until I was ankle-deep in sleep, and then up to my neck, wading like a swimmer or like a suicide through the waves of him crying and into the deep as icebergs cracked into halves, as jellyfish, like thoughts, were passed secretly between people. And the seaweed, like the sinuous soft green hair of certain beauty queens, washed up by the sea. Except that we were in Utah, and one of us was weeping while the other one was sleeping, with nothing but a thin, dry wall between us.