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All cities are open in the hot season. Northward or southward the summer gives out Few telephone numbers but no one in our house sleeps. Southward that river carries its flood The dying winter, the spring’s nostalgia: Wisconsin’s dead grass beached at Baton Rouge. Carries the vegetable loves of the young blonde Going for water by the dikes of Winnetka or Louisville, Carries its obscure music and its strange humour, Its own disturbing life, its peculiar ideas of movement. Two thousand miles, moving from the secret north It crowds the country apart: at last reaching The lynch-dreaming, the demon-haunted, the murderous virgin South Makes its own bargains and says change in its own fashion. And where the Gulf choirs out its blue hosannas Carries the drowned men’s bones and its buried life: It is an enormous bell, rung through the country’s midnight. * * * Beyond the corrosive ironies of prairies, Midnight savannas, open vowels of the flat country, The moonstruck waters of the Kansas bays Where the Dakotas bell and nuzzle at the north coast, The nay-saying desolation where the mind is lost In the mean acres and the wind comes down for a thousand miles Smelling of the stars’ high pastures, and speaking a strange language— There is the direct action of mountains, a revolution, A revelation in stone, the solid decrees of past history, A soviet of language not yet cooled nor understood clearly: The voices from underground, the granite vocables. There shall that voice crying for justice be heard, But the local colorist, broken on cliffs of laughter, At the late dew point of pity collect only the irony of serene stars. * * * Here all questions are mooted. All battles joined. No one in our house sleeps. And the Idealist hunting in the high latitudes of unreason, By mummy rivers, on the open minds of curst lakes Mirrors his permanent address; yet suffers from visions Of spring break-up, the open river of history. On this the Dreamer sweats in his sound-proof tower: All towns are taken in the hot season. How shall that Sentimentalist love the Mississippi? His love is a trick of mirrors, his spit’s abstraction, Whose blood and guts are filing system for A single index of the head or heart’s statistics. Living in one time, he shall have no history. How shall he love change who lives in a static world? His love is lost tomorrow between Memphis and the narrows of Vicksburg. But kissed unconscious between Medicine Bow and Tombstone He shall love at the precipice brink who would love these mountains. Whom this land loves shall be a holy wanderer, The eyes burned slick with distances between Kennebunkport and Denver, minted of transcience. For him shall that river run in circles and The Tetons seismically skipping to their ancient compelling music Send embassies of young sierras to nibble from his hand. His leaves familiar with the constant wind, Give, then, the soils and waters to command. Latitudinal desires scatter his seed, And in political climates sprout new freedom. But curst is the water-wingless foreigner from Boston, Stumping the country as others no better have done, Frightened of earthquake, aware of the rising waters, Calling out “O Love, Love,” but finding none.

1 . MORNING The year and its as like as eggs, the days in their crates of season we break open and the yolk of fresh sun we scramble the runny light into a firm break of the night's winter helping of the fast. * Yellow dishes— forsythia set out for the early meal of season— sit the house    yards the town parks    down together to this spring as to a table all set in order    just So good to see you and your way found back.                      * The arriving coats of smell are hung in the air, butt-smacked and oiled babies of moment; and years of taste as touch hug    the senses to the living; sweet sour bitter salty some never experienced again, the gloved fingers of bananas    so briefly kissed with ripeness; fruit, grip-shaped thought brought to the tongue, the finished taste of words,    an aftertaste of silence,    the morning glories we haven't tasted yet                      * life, as lasting as any one sense, a taste a sight, an orange mix of kiss with sweetness for the moment it exists, finishes and is swallowed, is also those who finish hungry or starve to death    which swallows; the final stage of rattlesnake bite is yellow vision, light,    then you both go out. Fear, to the tongue, is metallic: I tasted a copper penny    it could have been a one-time and final, incomparable —How does life taste to one condemned in that cup    this morning?—

Offshore, the Apocalypse stays contained to one island and its church. Venice's ruler's out wedding himself to the ocean while I'm ankle deep in the Adriatic, eyes raised to a book unencumbered by words: A Bible that reads from East to West. Guidebooks want only to see it as ceiling—the Basilica San Marco, where Christ's hands open on wounds embedded with rubies, and priests hold back the sea with brooms. I'm taking on incense, bowing at altars dragged out of Constantinople, sloshing across marble sacked from Jerusalem. Offshore, the sea's a bride bought with a fist full of diamonds the Doge throws into the deep— a sign of his true and perpetual dominion. Then why does walking into this church mean stepping into the ocean? The sea is a dog— Priests throw in bones just to placate it. The year's nearly 2000, but the millennium already hit once on the island Torcello, a kind of plague the Venetians contained. 999 years, and the dead still crawl from dirt towards their radiant bodies, they still gather up missing limbs: arms, legs, hands sharks and beasts keep regurgitating. We do what we know— But Christ never wanted to manage resurrections in Venice. Underdressed in the flesh from dead civilizations, he moves among us in Byzantine skin. I'm getting close to this God worshiped only by tourists. He picks at the wounds on his crucified body, the injury scabbed over with jewels.

when I beheld a fire win out against a hemisphere of shadows. —Inferno, Dante (tr. by Allen Mandelbaum) If I could hold a fire against a hemisphere of shadows, hold it close, not so that damage finds my hands, but so fire scatters galvanizing strands, my pupils responsive to the flames’ unbridled tutelage as they tell me nothing but these little jumps out of your definitions, small or large or leaping, sinking, slumped

Anoint your dead poems. Put them in a little boat called She Who Must Be Obeyed — our little joke. Invite the Molotovs for cocktails on deck. Tell them to wear all their gold.

“I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck, talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children, final semester college seniors, bloodshot, collars undone, gorgeously exhausted, return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky— the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet. “Something’s fucked with my tie.” He’s right. I see his future, the weight he’ll gain first in his face, then gut and ass, the look of bad luck he’ll haunt his bad jobs with. He tears off the tie. Elephants on it. Fatigue,swollen ankles, the midwife said. The worst discomforts of pregnancy. I wrote those down. But she’s wrong: self-pity.Strange dreams, she said. No dreams. Discarded newspapers— business section, money, real estate, auto— sift apart to quartos and folios underfoot. “Shut up, Justin,” says the girl across from him. I hardly recognize Brianna in her interview hair. She scratches her face, fingers trembling from the day’s aftershocks. “I wanted,” she counts on her fingers, performing the sitcom of her tragedy, “Tribeca loft, expense account, designer clothes so haute they don’t look it, my very own Tesla, summer home in the Hamptons I’m too busy to use.” “You wanted money,” says Justin. Brianna: “It went down with the towers.” I spent my lopsided day lifting my belly back towards center, interviewing for adjunct jobs. There’s a half-moon in half-clouds up over the tracks. Justin spreads over three seats, texts with his thumbs, talks: “The Lehman Brothers guy asks me, Did you ever sell anything?Sell me a bottle of water. I’m like fu-uck. To say something I say ‘Why do you like water?’ He says...” Justin fixes a diamond stud back in his ear. “They’ll let me know.” Fifteen responsible children sigh in disappointed relief. Somebody they know didn’t get the job they didn’t get. I sleep. Wake. Beautiful clothes spread bodiless before me! Tailored black suits and skirts, silk ties, ephemera of sheer and filmy stockings deflated over seat backs. Brianna looks around, no conductor coming, squats to peel off, in one motion, skirt, hose, underpants, step butt-naked into soft chino shorts I’ll never be able to afford. “Nervous crotch sweat,” she says. I keep trying to look not-quite-40 in a different way than I’m not-quite-40. The woman interviewer looked at my belly. “As a new mother would you have time to be literary mama to your students?” So I could sue when they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want. Justin looks up from his iPhone: “Soon-Ji got three offers. Fuck.” He flips the curl his mother’s fingers crimped, first day of pre- K into his four-year-old forelock. “He’s guessing he’ll go with Goldman Sachs.” Brianna grabs her neck in living garrote. She high-fives anybody she can reach in gloomy delight. She gobbles snack-pack popcorn, licks her fingers; bits drop yellow from her lips. “My mom will go crazy Deutsche Bank didn’t offer.” She sees me. “I didn’t realize that was you with your hair up. Look, Just.” She high-fives me. “It’s Professor.” Is Brianna crying? “Don’t call me Professor,” I say, dozens of times a semester. “I’m a writer, not a teacher.” Justin grabs a Norton Anthology out of his five-hundred-dollar briefcase. “Fuck. What are we supposed to read for tomorrow?” “Prufrock, dummy,” Brianna says. “You’re a good professor.” She condescends through tears. “Poor baby,” mocks Justin, slumping so low in the seat I only see his shoe soles on the arm rest. The train swooshes through suburban tracts. The moon gets smaller. Brianna arrives mornings to workshop in a fake hurry and the sweats she slept in, probably rolls back in bed after. She hands out slight, surprising poems, apologizes, sips cardboard-container coffee in a recyclable sleeve, turns her BlackBerry to vibrate. It moans like indigestion through class. I hand her one of my self-pity tissues. My ankles are slim. Brianna hates her name. “So tacky. I’d be a Kelly if I were twenty years older.” I’d like to be able to hate her. I’m turning into my Favorite Teachers—so kind, so industrious, so interested and interesting. “Sorry I’m late with my portfolio,” she says through sniffles. She dabs her lip. “I had to prepare for,” a breath, “interviews.” A few times a semester I say “It’s only poetry.”Gumbleeds! nosebleeds! the midwife predicted, and it’s true, my Kleenexes are measled with blood,weird hairs,stretch marks, frequent catnaps,hip joints so loose you must take care

Enormous solids were falling from who knows what heights, who knows what places. I trembled, and in my mouth an inky taste. Precise. Hail, maybe, enormous kernels of ice; coming down, with a scandalous impact, didn't bury me, terrorized, under the covers. It didn't happen, it wasn't that. A below zero temperature circulated through the soft center of my bones. A truly searing cold. Nothing having to do with monsters came to pass. Nothing to do with interminable distances. No brutal incidents. Only the agony of acorns. Only a cycle that completes itself every few years and transforms into a tropical forest a choiring oak grove. Which is the fear.

For Rosalie Richardson I am a tornado child. I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day; I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things, carry you to where you've never been, and maybe, if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared, heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight. I am a tornado child. I tremble at the elements. When thunder rolls my womb trembles, remembering the tweak of contractions that tightened to a wail when my mother pushed me out into the black of a tornado night. I am a tornado child, you can tell us from far, by the crazy of our hair; couldn't tame it if we tried. Even now I tie a bandanna to silence the din of anarchy in these coir-thick plaits. I am a tornado child born in the whirl of clouds; the center crumbled, then I came. My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; you cross me at your peril, I swallow light when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin, the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations. I am a tornado child. When the spirit takes my head, I hurtle into the vacuum of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color, streaked with my many songs.

Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency. Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed. Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her. Born to walk alone, Forerunner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within. Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless? The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end.

I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise in extremis . Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A pæan, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell — And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. So he tups, and screams Time after time that frail, torn scream After each jerk, the longish interval, The tortoise eternity, Agelong, reptilian persistence, Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm. I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips. And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life. The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence Tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.