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Past fences the first sheepmen cast across the land, processions of cringing pitch or cedar posts pulling into the vanishing point like fretboards carrying barbed melodies, windharp narratives, songs of place, I’m thinking of the long cowboy ballads Ray taught me the beginnings of and would have taught me the ends if he could have remembered them. But remembering was years ago when Ray swamped for ranches at a dollar a day and found, and played guitar in a Saturday night band, and now he is dead and I’m remembering near the end when he just needed a drink before he could tie his shoes. We’d stay up all night playing the beginnings of songs like Falling Leaf, about a girl who died of grief, and Zebra Dun, about a horse that pawed the light out of the moon. Sometimes Ray would break through and recall a few more verses before he’d drop a line or scramble a rhyme or just go blank, and his workfat hands would drop the chords and fall away in disbelief. Between songs he’d pull on the rum or unleash coughing fits that sounded like nails in a paper bag. Done, he’d straighten and say,My cough’s not just right, I need another cigarette, and light the Parliament he bit at an upward angle like Roosevelt and play the start of another song. Then, played out and drunk enough to go home, he’d pick up his hat and case and make it, usually on the second try, through the front gate and gently list out into the early morning dark, beginning again some song without end, yodeling his vote under spangles.

Will you read my little pome, O you girls returnèd home From a summertime of sport At the Jolliest Resort, From a Heated Term of joys Far from urban dust and noise? You I speak to in this rhyme, You have had a Glorious Time Swimming, golfing, bridging, dancing, Riding, tennising, romancing, On the springboard, on the raft— You’ve been often photographed. At the place you have forsaken, You have had some pictures taken, Pictures taken of you dancing, Riding, tennising, romancing, Swimming, golfing, and reclining; Snacking, luncheoning, and dining. Cometh now my brief advice; Ladies, be ye ne’er so nice, Be ye ne’er so fascinating, Luring, drawing, captivating, If with interest you’d imbue us, Do not show those pictures to us! Snapshots of the links and lawn Cause in many of us a yawn; (As for me myself, why, I’m Glad to see ’em any time) But—I give it to you square— Lots of people do not care.

Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn, Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn: The northern clime beneath her genial ray, Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway: Elate with hope her race no longer mourns, Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns, While in thine hand with pleasure we behold The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold. Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies She shines supreme, while hated faction dies: Soon as appear'd the Goddess long desir'd, Sick at the view, she languish'd and expir'd; Thus from the splendors of the morning light The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night. No more, America, in mournful strain Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain, No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land. Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent's breast? Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due, And thee we ask thy favours to renew, Since in thy pow'r, as in thy will before, To sooth the griefs, which thou did'st once deplore. May heav'nly grace the sacred sanction give To all thy works, and thou for ever live Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame, Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name, But to conduct to heav'ns refulgent fane, May fiery coursers sweep th' ethereal plain, And bear thee upwards to that blest abode, Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways: Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide; The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed, Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold; And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea, Sing in their high and lonely melody. Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way. Come near, come near, come near—Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Lest I no more hear common things that crave; The weak worm hiding down in its small cave, The field-mouse running by me in the grass, And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass; But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know. Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

To the same purpose: he, not long before Brought home from nurse, going to the door To do some little thing He must not do within, With wonder cries, As in the skies He saw the moon, “O yonder is the moon, Newly come after me to town, That shined at Lugwardin but yesternight, Where I enjoyed the self-same sight.” As if it had ev’n twenty thousand faces, It shines at once in many places; To all the earth so wide God doth the stars divide, With so much art The moon impart, They serve us all; serve wholly every one As if they servèd him alone. While every single person hath such store, ’Tis want of sense that makes us poor.

I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid whose verses like the Romanian coast roll along so wide and subdued: waves that wait for the ice to break. My poet, you that make what I sing to thousand years old, ancient boundary stone on the edge of the Romanian language, you the gulls have elected on to the governing board of our epics, of our song-grief you turned into Latin and gave to the wind to carry to Rome and there, chiselled into the column, await the Dacian prisoners. You the first whom nostalgia, our dor, ate up in those fields where the dust is sweet. You the first to put your trust like a child in poetry’s spellbinding power and in help from abroad. Sooner the Emperor would have sent experts to you at Tomi, to change the climate, than see you back home, your airy fame back in the purple of his retainers. Who, he has said himself, could be better suited to stand on the shore of the Pontus Euxinus, observing how gradually it becomes the Black Sea, than a poet, a good one, and one of repute—whom shall we send then, whom? And the choice fell on you, Ovid. You were the first to occur to him because you had just begun to be known, appreciated and talked about like a bitter-sweet herb—that was your predicament. Augustus liked your elegies, but only from a distance, where they had the remedial effect the physicians prescribed, an agreeable melancholy, after meals especially, when they repeated on him... The elegies were a medicine prescribed by the physicians to save the Empire. He even said: ‘Why hasn’t that boy sent us anything lately? Force him to work, pinch him a bit, so that he’ll grow sad and Pontic, this wind is troubling me again, I’m gulping air...’ ‘People are asking why you had to relegate him,’ a senator timidly interjected. ‘Suggest to them that he subverted the Empire,’ the Emperor cynically smiled. ‘Morally or materially?’—the exalted servant seemed hard of hearing. ‘What, are you trying to drive me into a quandary? Both, let’s say, a bit of each. Ovid has done immense material and moral harm to Latinity, and the citizens are indignant. Or perhaps,’ he considered, ‘moral would be better, after all we are an Imperium and don’t stint the expenses of a poet, but in moral matters we’re strict: so, he corrupted our youth.’ Next day Augustus had second thoughts: ‘No, for the time being no explanations, for anyone, till we’ve thought of something more plausible’; and, to change the subject, ‘What's Horace doing?’ ‘It's taken   hold of him too, he’s writing no more odes but only epodes, nothing but epodes, an obscure sort of gibberish, what shall we do about Horace, will he too become a case?’ ‘Let him be, let him be. Let’s wait and see how he develops, he may have talent. Maecenas and his house, after all, will take care of the cost and we shall send him the bill with a troop of a hundred men. But as for Ovid, he shall stay for a while yet at Tomi, and no one shall hurt a hair of his head. We shall think it over, mediate, consult the augurs too. No precipitous measures, where poets are concerned.’ Two thousand years have passed, and the Emperor has not hit on appropriate action, he’s thinking still. But you must not give up hope, Ovid, you will be pardoned. The matter was only provisional, an emergency, so be patient, the problem will be resolved, as I said, when circumstances permit. I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid, the poet whose lines of fortune and arteries my earth senses when he raises the Dobruja’s broad hand to his brow.

You who cannot hear or cannot know the terrible intricacies of our species, our minds, the extent to which we have done what we have done,& yet the depth to which we have loved what we have loved — the hillside at dawn, dark eyes outlined with the dark sentences of  kohl, the fūl we shared beneath the lime tree at the general’s house after visiting Goitom in prison for trying to leave the country (the first time), the apricot color of camels racing on the floor of  the world as the fires blazed in celebration of  Independence. How dare I move into the dark space of  your body carrying my dreams, without an invitation, my dreams wandering in ellipses, pet goats or chickens devouring your yard & shirts. Sea, my oblivious afterworld, grant us entry, please, when we knock, but do not keep us there, deliver our flowers & himbasha bread. Though we can’t imagine, now, what our dead might need, & above all can’t imagine it is over & that they are, in fact, askless, are needless, in fact, still hold somewhere the smell of coffee smoking in the house, please, the memory of joy fluttering like a curtain in an open window somewhere inside the brain’s secret luster where a woman, hands red with henna, beats the carpet clean with the stick of a broom & the children, in the distance, choose stones for the competition of stones,& the summer wears a crown of  beles in her green hair & the tigadelti’s white teeth & the beautiful bones of Massawa, the gaping eyes & mouths of its arches worn clean by the sea, your breath & your salt. Please, you, being water too, find a way into the air & then the river & the spring so that your waters can wash the elders, with the medicine of the dreaming of their children, cold & clean.

Mute is thy wild harp, now, O Bard sublime! Who, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude, Great Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,” And even beneath the daily pressure, rude, Of laboring Poverty, thy generous blood, Fired with the love of freedom—Not subdued Wert thou by thy low fortune: But a time Like this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved, Was not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved By all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled, Associate worthy of the illustrious dead, Enjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”

If thou dislik’st the piece thou light’st on first, Think that of all that I have writ the worst; But if thou read’st my book unto the end, And still dost this and that verse reprehend, O perverse man! If all disgustful be, The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me.

To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad. Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing? What deepening twilight—scum floating atop of the waters, Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol? What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!) Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President? Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons; (With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake, South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)