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O Liberty, God-gifted— Young and immortal maid— In your high hand uplifted, The torch declares your trade. Its crimson menace, flaming Upon the sea and shore, Is, trumpet-like, proclaiming That Law shall be no more. Austere incendiary, We're blinking in the light; Where is your customary Grenade of dynamite? Where are your staves and switches For men of gentle birth? Your mask and dirk for riches? Your chains for wit and worth? Perhaps, you've brought the halters You used in the old days, When round religion's altars You stabled Cromwell's bays? Behind you, unsuspected, Have you the axe, fair wench, Wherewith you once collected A poll-tax for the French? America salutes you— Preparing to "disgorge." Take everything that suits you, And marry Henry George.

I Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, — And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy? II Thou chosen sister of the Spirit, That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...

Whether on Ida's shady brow, Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the sun, that now From ancient melody have ceas'd; Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air, Where the melodious winds have birth; Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea Wand'ring in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry! How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoy'd in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

(after Ehrich Weiss) I Geography matters. It is the plan, the arrangement of things that confuses our enemies, the difference between what they expect and what they get; as simple as bobbing for apples becomes difficult, deception is an achievement in ordering the obvious. II Let us make a song for our confusion: Call it “Red Skies over Gary” or “Red Skies in the Sunset” or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.” Red Skies over Gary, you are my sunset, my only home. Let us make ourselves invisible, not make songs, or even disappear suddenly from the sidewalks of Calumet. III Cobalt and carborundum are refinements of the art. So it’s true, you held the razor in your teeth, or was it pure magic, a miracle of place? One makes for workability, the other for hardness, and chromium bright, the stainless achievement. IV I came from Calumet to Gary, and it was early evening; south of the mills, poppy fields toxic red above the car lots, have a Coke on Texaco ’til the mercury arcs devour us and it is purple night.

One day, chasing my tail here and there, I stopped to catch my breath On some corner in New York, While people hurried past me, All determined to get somewhere, Save a few adrift like lost children. What ever became of my youth? I wanted to stop a stranger and ask. "It went into hiding," said an old woman Who'd read my mind. "Swimming with sharks," a drunk concurred, Fixing me with one bloody eye. It was summer, and then as quietly as  a bird lands, The sidewalks were dusted with snow And I was shivering without a coat. I had hopes we'd meet again, I told myself, Have a drink and recall the nights When we used to paint this town red. I thought you'd be in a straightjacket by now, You'd say to me, Making funny faces at doctors and nurses. Instead, here you are full of fleas, Dodging cars and buses To follow a pair of good-looking legs home. "And you, Judas," I summed the strength to shout, "Will you be coming to my funeral?" But he was gone already. It had gotten late in the day, Very late—and since there was nothing That could be done about it— I thought I'd better toddle along myself.

Some places you could die in, if you could just go on living there. The boy, his legs bare and small, swinging in the stroller, sockless, suede-shoed feet touching the runner. He can walk, but the woman keeps him from running into the street. He won’t obey but listens to everything we say. Head tilted, face changing with the conversation. Green leaves leap through fences. Cars wait while we cross. And each bird the boy greets with its name, “Bird,” flies away. The sky holds everything. The woman pushes her son’s son along. Her arms strong enough to hold nine strong horses prancing. She’s given her money away because someone had to bury a child. That is the worst thing. A mother burying her child. I would never do that to her, even though it means what it means. A thousand years from now when I am only a dream I will dream this dream of strolling. Perhaps I am doing so now.

“That God is colouring Newton doth shew” — William Blake Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence.  I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence  as if there could stand some solidity  most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space.  The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne. It is an angel then, weeping and yet ever attending the betrayal of the Word I mean to come to in the end.  For my sake, the blood must be somewhere in time and in its own naming of place actual, and death must be  as my own awaits me  immediate to undo from its reality the physical body, all there is of the matter of me that is mine from me.  The would-be dialecticians—Inquisitors of the New Dispensation in Poetry and Historians of Opprobrium, the Realists and Materialists—come forward to hold the party line against his ideality.  There are too many listeners.  There are too many voices in the one line.  They must enter the Ideal to do so, for he has changed his mind, as if the Eternal existed only momentarily and went out with him.  The Chairman of the Politbureau gets his number  and moves to isolate his heresy.  The number is no longer the same.  He has gone back into the exchange of numbers.  The phone continues ringing in the pattern of the message they strive to listen  to report to the Bureau of Poetic Numbers and Approved Measures. This is to say to the month of April and the rainbow dancer, I am with you.  I belong to the company without number.  I shall live one hundred years and then be gone.  Here and now  only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here.  His, the horizon.  His, the perspectives and outlines.  His, the regulation of the relevant.  I will willingly assume his numbers among my own. The rest is all Asia, the astral miasma, the Undoing we came from, my version of Who-He-Is-In-Reality, the domain of colouring invading the Responsible.

I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene, but I was still surprised when I found the painting of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes of the French Impressionists. And I was surprised to notice after a few minutes of benign staring, how that woman, stark in profile and fixed forever in her chair, began to resemble my own ancient mother who was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth. You can understand why he titled the painting "Arrangement in Gray and Black" instead of what everyone naturally calls it, but afterward, as I walked along the river bank, I imagined how it might have broken the woman's heart to be demoted from mother to a mere composition, a study in colorlessness. As the summer couples leaned into each other along the quay and the wide, low-slung boats full of spectators slid up and down the Seine between the carved stone bridges and their watery reflections, I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base. It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus" "Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink," or the other way around like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color "Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn." Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafe where I now had come to rest, it would be like painting something laughable, like a chef turning on a spit over a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducks and calling it "Study in Orange and White." But by that time, a waiter had appeared with my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water, and I sat there thinking of nothing but the women and men passing by— mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs— and about myself, a kind of composition in blue and khaki, and, now that I had poured some water into the glass, milky-green.

She couldn't help but sting my finger, clinging a moment before I flung her to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick evening light plays on my roses. She curls into herself, stinger twitching, gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks, and my pain subsided in a moment. In the cold, she hardly had her wits to buzz. No warning from either of us: she sleeping in the richness of those petals, then the hand, my hand, cupping the bloom in devastating force, crushing the petals for the scent. And she mortally threatened, wholly unaware that I do this daily, alone with the gold last light, in what seems to me an act of love.

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way? hid away in the heat like wrath conceald in Love’s face, or the seed, Eris in Eros, key and lock of what I was?      I could not speak the releasing word.      For into a dark matter he came and askt me to say what I could not say.      “I ..” All the flame in me stopt against my tongue. My heart was a stone, a dumb unmanageable thing in me, a darkness that stood athwart his need for the enlightening, the “I love you” that has only this one quick in time, this one start when its moment is true. Such is the sickness of many a good thing that now into my life from long ago this refusing to say I love you has bound the weeping, the yielding, the yearning to be taken again, into a knot, a waiting, a string so taut it taunts the song, it resists the touch. It grows dark to draw down the lover’s hand from its lightness to what’s underground.