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Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c. Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Falling leaves and falling men! When the snows of winter fall, And the winds of winter blows, Will be woven Nature’s pall. Let us, then, forsake our dead; For the dead will surely wait While we rush upon the foe, Eager for the hero’s fate. Leaves will come upon the trees; Spring will show the happy race; Mothers will give birth to sons— Loyal souls to fill our place. Wherefore should we rest and rush? Soldiers, we must fight and save Freedom now, and give our foes All their country should—a grave!

(In Plaster, with a Bronze Wash) A person is very self-conscious about his head. It makes one nervous just to know it is cast In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last. We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is, Than to the interesting and involute interior: The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria. The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown To anyone not accompanied by an adult. The marquee out front maintains a superior tone: Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult. The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty. These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city. The female head is mounted on rococo props. Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning; This is the first place everybody comes With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning. This particular head, to my certain knowledge Has been taught to read and write, make love and money, Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college, And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny. It was further taught to know and to eschew Error and sin, which it does erratically. This is the place the soul calls home just now. One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.

Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues, bright hair blazing in the theater, red hair raving in the bar—as now the little leaves shoot veils of gold across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring, ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood- russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . . When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens, your ochres and your umbers have evolved nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness, when the woods are rife with soddenness (unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream, barberry by the trunks, and bitter watercress inside the druid pool) will your thin, still-glinting thread insist to catch the eye in filigreed titrations stitched along among beneath the branches, in the branches where it lives all winter, occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .

Three Kings came riding from far away, Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar; Three Wise Men out of the East were they, And they travelled by night and they slept by day, For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star. The star was so beautiful, large and clear, That all the other stars of the sky Became a white mist in the atmosphere, And by this they knew that the coming was near Of the Prince foretold in the prophecy. Three caskets they bore on their saddle-bows, Three caskets of gold with golden keys; Their robes were of crimson silk with rows Of bells and pomegranates and furbelows, Their turbans like blossoming almond-trees. And so the Three Kings rode into the West, Through the dusk of the night, over hill and dell, And sometimes they nodded with beard on breast, And sometimes talked, as they paused to rest, With the people they met at some wayside well. “Of the child that is born,” said Baltasar, “Good people, I pray you, tell us the news; For we in the East have seen his star, And have ridden fast, and have ridden far, To find and worship the King of the Jews.” And the people answered, “You ask in vain; We know of no King but Herod the Great!” They thought the Wise Men were men insane, As they spurred their horses across the plain, Like riders in haste, who cannot wait. And when they came to Jerusalem, Herod the Great, who had heard this thing, Sent for the Wise Men and questioned them; And said, “Go down unto Bethlehem, And bring me tidings of this new king.” So they rode away; and the star stood still, The only one in the grey of morn; Yes, it stopped—it stood still of its own free will, Right over Bethlehem on the hill, The city of David, where Christ was born. And the Three Kings rode through the gate and the guard, Through the silent street, till their horses turned And neighed as they entered the great inn-yard; But the windows were closed, and the doors were barred, And only a light in the stable burned. And cradled there in the scented hay, In the air made sweet by the breath of kine, The little child in the manger lay, The child, that would be king one day Of a kingdom not human, but divine. His mother Mary of Nazareth Sat watching beside his place of rest, Watching the even flow of his breath, For the joy of life and the terror of death Were mingled together in her breast. They laid their offerings at his feet: The gold was their tribute to a King, The frankincense, with its odor sweet, Was for the Priest, the Paraclete, The myrrh for the body’s burying. And the mother wondered and bowed her head, And sat as still as a statue of stone, Her heart was troubled yet comforted, Remembering what the Angel had said Of an endless reign and of David’s throne. Then the Kings rode out of the city gate, With a clatter of hoofs in proud array; But they went not back to Herod the Great, For they knew his malice and feared his hate, And returned to their homes by another way.

Where I live      distance is the primal fact The world is mostly      far away and small Drifting along through cause and effect      like sleep As when the distance      unlikeliest of stems Bears the unlikely      blossom of the wind Engendering our only weather      dry Except in winter      pine trees live on snow So greedy      pulling down these drifts that bury The fences snap      the trunks of smaller trees If the forest wants      to go somewhere it spreads Like a prophecy      its snow before it Technology      a distant windy cause There is no philosophy      of death where I live Only philosophies      of suffering

The aqua green goes with the pink in a way no one knows what will happen. Every step is a dangerous taking. Amazing the time span of a trunk (a door opens in it and suddenly, someone is asking how this came to be). The green curtain is a pressed chime which when rung rings in a dogwood white as if a storm were approaching its green extreme. Brick crumbles into living pond particle while a bent hook holds back the last dissolve. An uneasy leap over a sharky sea. Gravity plays its little emotive role. It’s Elm Street all over again, ragged walkways lead to Toon Town. Hello kids. Hello Jimmy Neutron. The blanket rises, and under it, a fetishistic pompadour green, greener and paler than bluebird. But hush, the nuclear power plant is about to blow unless Jimmy can locate the elusive button. A siren and standing-by fire truck. It looks like a lost cause until presto, a messenger. A racketing aside. The day is dragged here and there but still can’t be saved. BAM. Immediately the next second clicks into the skyscape apocalypse. In the dust, a celluloid woman mows a multilayered lawn. The arch overhead reads, O Art Still Has Truth Take Refuge. Where? There. There, there, says someone.

Three women survive. One hides in a bedroom of a house, sharpening blades in the bathroom, her night. Another disinfects the cloth her older sister contaminates. The third, more tender and insecure, proud and serene, takes her first steps, surrounded by palm trees, lemon trees, pomegranate trees, bougainvilleas, birds of paradise...

On the crown of his head where the fontanelle pulsed between spongy bones, a bald spot is forming, globed and sleek as a monk’s tonsure. I was the earliest pinch of civilization, the one who laced him into shoe leather when he stumbled into walking upright. “Shoes are unfair to children,” he’d grouse. Through a pane of glass that shivers when the wind kicks up I watch my son walk away. He’s out the door, up the street, around a couple of corners by now. I’m in for life. He trips; my hand flies out; I yank it back.

In the laboratory waiting room containing one television actor with a teary face trying a contact lens; two muscular victims of industrial accidents; several vain women—I was one of them— came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye. It was a long day: Deborah waiting for the blood vessels painted on her iris to dry. Her mother said that, holding Deborah when she was born, “First I inspected her, from toes to navel, then stopped at her head ...” We wondered why the inspection hadn’t gone the other way. “Looking into her eye was like looking into a volcano: “Her vacant pupil went whirling down, down to the foundation of the world ... When she was three months old they took it out. She giggled when she went under the anaesthetic. Forty-five minutes later she came back happy! ... The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face (you know, it never bled?), stayed happy, even when I went to pieces. She’s five, in June. “Deborah, you get right down from there, or I’ll have to slap!” Laughing, Deborah climbed into the lap of one vain lady, who had been discontented with her own beauty. Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily in the empty eye.