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The room I entered was a dream of   this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of   a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment. I am making use of the one thing I learned of all the things my father tried to teach me: the art of memory. I am letting this room and everything in it stand for my ideas about love and its difficulties. I’ll let your love-cries, those spacious notes of a moment ago, stand for distance. Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound, I’ll let stand for mystery. Your sunken belly is the daily cup of milk I drank as a boy before morning prayer. The sun on the face of the wall is God, the face I can’t see, my soul, and so on, each thing standing for a separate idea, and those ideas forming the constellation of my greater idea. And one day, when I need to tell myself something intelligent about love, I’ll close my eyes and recall this room and everything in it: My body is estrangement. This desire, perfection. Your closed eyes my extinction. Now I’ve forgotten my idea. The book on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . . the even-numbered pages are the past, the odd- numbered pages, the future. The sun is God, your body is milk . . . useless, useless . . . your cries are song, my body’s not me . . . no good . . . my idea has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . . it had something to do with death . . . it had something to do with love.

When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave. —John Keats 1. You are here on the underside of the page, writing in water, anachronist, showing your head with its delicate fuses, its fatal telemetry, a moundful of triggers and gunpowder like a field-mine, your sixty-one inches and your gem-cutter’s fingers, anonymous, taking the weight of a “roomful of people” but making no mark, pressing the page as I write, while the traffic in Rome, demotic with engines and klaxons, circles the Pyramid of Cestius, crosses a graveyard, and submerges again like the fin of a shark. 2. I write, in the posthumous way, on the flat of a headstone with a quarrier’s ink, like yourself: an anthologist’s date and an asterisk, a parenthetical mark in the gas of the pyramid-builders, an obelisk whirling with Vespas in a poisonous motorcade. I make your surgeon’s incision for solitude—one living hand, two poets strangled in seawater and phlegm, an incestuous ego to reach for the heart in the funeral ashes, a deathbed with friends. 3. Something murderous flows from the page to my hand— a silence that wars with the letters, a fist that closes on paper: a blow with the straight edge of a razor that falls with a madman’s monotony; or the adze of a sleepwalking Sumerian nicking the wet of the clay, hacking a wedge in a tablet in the blood and the mica, till all glistens with language. The criminal folds up his claspknife. The shutters slam down on the streets.Nobody listens. 4. Out of breath with the climb, and tasting a hashish of blood, what did he see on the brink of the Piazza di Spagna? A hand in the frame of a cithara where beggars and sunbathers clotted the levels like musical signatures, a Wordsworthian dream of “degree,” “unimaginable time” touched by an axe blade—or a pram on the Steps of Odessa torn from the hands of its mother, gathering speed for the plunge and rocking its tires in the rifling, like a gun barrel, smashing its way through the Tzar’s executioners, to a scream at the bottom? 5. A failed solitude... The bees in the Protestant grass speak of it delicately in the sweat of a Palatine summer, guiding my hand through the Braille of the letters. Violet, bluet, or squill— what was it I picked under the epitaph, what rose to my touch in the thirst of the marble, a cup from the well of your grave in the noonday miasma, a hieroglyph in the water, saying: solitude, solitude, solitude: you have it at last—your solitude writing on water, alone with its failure. 6. You are there on the underside of the page, a blue flower in my Baedeker, writing on water. I know it. The paper pulls under my pen peaks into waves running strongly into the horizon. The emptiness hardens with balustrades, risers, and levels, a staircase of Roman azaleas. I slip on the blood and the ink toward the exigent bed of a poet. All is precarious. A maniac waits on the streets. Nobody listens. What must I do? I am writing on water, blazing with failures, ascending, descending among lovers and trippers. You are pressing me hard under the paper. At Santa Trinità dei Monti the stairway parts like an estuary, rises and falls like a fountain. There is nothing to see but a death-mask, your room in an island of risers and treads, oddly gregarious, an invisible hand in the granite. 7. The tidal salts drain on a living horizon, leaving a glare on the blemishing paper. The silence is mortal. Nobody answers. for Joan Hutton Landis

After Nadia Reid This spirit she came upon me as I slept — in such a way my life or yours could come to be so thoroughly owned — she was reckless — I knew she would make me run away with her — I said spirit, slow down — but the spirit wanted to ride — but I am so afraid, I said — I have all this tenderness to impart — but the tenderness is not mine to give away — but all your tenderness is your own tenderness, said the spirit — it is not, I said — why then did you give it all away? — I did not give it away — then it is yours to give away — the spirit riddled like this — if in her arms I read a story — if out of her arms I had the choice to write one but I chose not — chose not because I did not know where I was going — because my path broke down & I had this choice — stay or split — if I knew that were I to split one part of me would become a ghost — if I did not know yet which part — if the voice calling me out asked me to describe the splitting & I did — if I said it was like smoke spiraling outwards — it was like smoke lifting off me taking on form & leaving me — if  it was like a delicate girl I never met but dreamed of — if it was like the flags of my youth fluttering, far out at sea — like breathing out a breath you will never take back in — but you know you can never take any breath back in — if I saw her outside of myself & mourned her like I have mourned no other loss — if I knew it was both a miracle & the most terrible tragedy — to open up — release a flame — watch the flame go — have you seen it? A flame that can ride water — she was my daughter & if I could I would send her to you, if I sent her to you would you take her? Listen, I ran this out of me because I knew it would burn me down — my trainers press the ground & lift up again — I saw myself on my back in high grass in high summer with everything coming to me — how this ghost left me & printed a new person all over me — I could peel her off or live like this — I cried —one or both will destroy me!— the spirit called it fate but I knew it was just drama —I will never know why a good person must die — fate does not exist I said, but every door I opened showed yes yes yes — I shut each one & locked it — checked the locks three times — went back & checked them again — shook them to be sure — drew hearts round the keyholes so the spirit would know I loved her — it wasn’t — it was never — that I didn’t love her —

The older we get the stranger my husband becomes, and the less certain I am that I know him. We used to lie eye to eye, breathing together in the immensity of each moment. Lithe and starry-eyed, we could leap fences even with babies on our backs. His eyes still dream off toward something in the distance I can't see; but now he gazes more zealously, and leaps into battle with a more certain voice over politics, religion, or art, and some old friends won't come to dinner. The molecules of our bodies spiral off into the stars on winds of change and chance, as we welcome the unknown, the incalculable, the spirit and heart of everything we named and knew so well— and never truly named, or knew, but only loved, at last.

This World is not Conclusion. A Species stands beyond - Invisible, as Music - But positive, as Sound - It beckons, and it baffles - Philosophy, dont know - And through a Riddle, at the last - Sagacity, must go - To guess it, puzzles scholars - To gain it, Men have borne Contempt of Generations And Crucifixion, shown - Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - Blushes, if any see - Plucks at a twig of Evidence - And asks a Vane, the way - Much Gesture, from the Pulpit - Strong Hallelujahs roll - Narcotics cannot still the Tooth That nibbles at the soul -

stand as clocks fully struck in fields of fading flowers— when the fires of summer come they will gather up the hours of rains past, frost endured and famished stalks in full gale that begin their telling once all forms of telling fail

Tho’ lack of laurels and of wreaths not one Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet Vaunt us our single aim, our hearts full set To win the guerdon which is never won. Witness, a purpose never is undone. And tho’ fate drain our seas of violet To gather round our lives her wide-hung net, Memories of hopes that are not shall atone. Not wholly starless is the ill-starred life, Not all is night in failure, and the shield Sometimes well grasped, tho’ shattered in the strife. And here while all the lowering heaven is ringed With our loud death-shouts echoed, on the field Stands forth our Nikè, proud, tho’ broken-winged.

I My wife is ill! And I sit waiting for a quorum II Fast ride his horse collapsed Now he saddled walked Borrowed a farmer’s unbroken colt To Richmond Richmond How stop— Arnold’s redcoats there III Elk Hill destroyed— Cornwallis carried off 30 slaves Jefferson: Were it to give them freedom he’d have done right IV Latin and Greek my tools to understand humanity I rode horse away from a monarch to an enchanting philosophy V The South of France Roman temple “simple and sublime” Maria Cosway harpist on his mind white column and arch VI To daughter Patsy: Read— read Livy No person full of work was ever hysterical Know music, history dancing (I calculate 14 to 1 in marriage she will draw a blockhead) Science also Patsy VII Agreed with Adams: send spermaceti oil to Portugal for their church candles (light enough to banish mysteries?: three are one and one is three and yet the one not three and the three not one) and send salt fish U.S. salt fish preferred above all other VIII Jefferson of Patrick Henry backwoods fiddler statesman: “He spoke as Homer wrote” Henry eyed our minister at Paris— the Bill of Rights hassle— “he remembers . . . in splendor and dissipation he thinks yet of bills of rights” IX True, French frills and lace for Jefferson, sword and belt but follow the Court to Fontainebleau he could not— house rent would have left him nothing to eat . . . He bowed to everyone he met and talked with arms folded He could be trimmed by a two-month migraine and yet stand up X Dear Polly: I said No—no frost in Virginia—the strawberries were safe I’d have heard—I’m in that kind of correspondence with a young daughter— if they were not Now I must retract I shrink from it XI Political honors “splendid torments” “If one could establish an absolute power of silence over oneself” When I set out for Monticello (my grandchildren will they know me?) How are my young chestnut trees— XII Hamilton and the bankers would make my country Carthage I am abandoning the rich— their dinner parties— I shall eat my simlins with the class of science or not at all Next year the last of labors among conflicting parties Then my family we shall sow our cabbages together XIII Delicious flower of the acacia or rather Mimosa Nilotica from Mr. Lomax XIV Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed to father and sister in Paris by way of London—Abigail embraced her—Adams said “in all my life I never saw more charming child” Death of Polly, 25, Monticello XV My harpsichord my alabaster vase and bridle bit bound for Alexandria Virginia The good sea weather of retirement The drift and suck and die-down of life but there is land XVI These were my passions: Monticello and the villa-temples I passed on to carpenters bricklayers what I knew and to an Italian sculptor how to turn a volute on a pillar You may approach the campus rotunda from lower to upper terrace Cicero had levels XVII John Adams’ eyes dimming Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism cantering XVIII Ah soon must Monticello be lost to debts and Jefferson himself to death XIX Mind leaving, let body leave Let dome live, spherical dome and colonnade Martha (Patsy) stay “The Committee of Safety must be warned” Stay youth—Anne and Ellen all my books, the bantams and the seeds of the senega root