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Far down, down through the city’s great gaunt gut The gray train rushing bears the weary wind; In the packed cars the fans the crowd’s breath cut, Leaving the sick and heavy air behind. And pale-cheeked children seek the upper door To give their summer jackets to the breeze; Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas; Seas cooling warm where native schooners drift Through sleepy waters, while gulls wheel and sweep, Waiting for windy waves the keels to lift Lightly among the islands of the deep; Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white That led their perfume to the tropic sea, Where fields lie idle in the dew-drenched night, And the Trades float above them fresh and free.

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of victory As he defeated – dying – On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear!

Or how, when last sun,

All night long I hear the sleepers toss Between the darkened window and the wall. The madman’s whimper and the lover’s voice, The worker’s whisper and the sick child’s call— Knowing them all I’d walk a mile, maybe, hearing some cat Crying its guts out, to throttle it by hand, Such simple love I had. I wished I might— Or God might—answer each call in person and Each poor demand. Well, I’d have been better off sleeping myself. These fancies had some sentimental charm, But love without direction is a cheap blanket And even if it did no one any harm, No one is warm.

I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. You have been mine before,— How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow's soar Your neck turn'd so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore. Has this been thus before? And shall not thus time's eddying flight Still with our lives our love restore In death's despite, And day and night yield one delight once more?

The visionary moment comes just as it is raining , just as bombs are falling,  just as atoms burst like a sneeze in a city park and enter the dark as if  it were the waiting ark. You open your hand and blow the dust. You pick and throw the stone. You make the round  O of  your mouth perfect as light and the tree bends and stands upright in the stolid night.

A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet. Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses. A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise. A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea. A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it is so kept well and sectionally. Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace. The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful. The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best cold. A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday. Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little green, any little green is ordinary. One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and that. A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet place, only this tune. Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much. A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease. A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog. Cuddling comes in continuing a change. A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind with open delicacy. A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted. A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their color is a diabolic dye.” Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train. Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” The mother bending over a baby named Shug chuckles, “Gimme some sugar,” just to preface a flurry of kisses sweet as sugar cane. Later, when she stirs a spoonful of Domino into her coffee, who’s to tell the story how a ten-foot-tall reed from the Old World, on being brought to the New, was raised and cropped so cooks could sweeten whatever tasted bitter? Or how grade-A granulated began as a thick black syrup boiled for hours in an iron vat until it was refined to pure, white crystal. When I was a child whose payoff for obeying orders was red-and-white-striped candy canes, I knew that sugar was love. The first time someone called me “sweetheart,” I knew sugar was love. And when I tasted my slice of the wedding cake, iced white and washed down with sweet champagne, don’t you know sugar was love. One day Evelina who worked for us showed up with her son Bubba and laughed, “Now y’all can play together.” He had a sweet nature, but even so we raised a little Cain, and Daddy told her not to bring him back. He thought I’d begun to sound like colored people. She smiled, dropped her eyes, kept working. And kept putting on weight. She later died of stroke. Daddy developed diabetes by age fifty-five, insulin burned what his blood couldn’t handle. Chronic depressions I have, a nutritionist gently termed “the sugar blues,” but damned if any lyrics come out of them, baby. Black-and-white negatives from a picture history of the sugar trade develop in my dreams, a dozen able-bodied slaves hacking forward through a field of cane. Sweat trickles down from forehead into eye as they sheave up stalks and cart them to the mill where grinding iron rollers will express a thin sucrose solution that, when not refined, goes from blackstrap molasses on into rum, a demon conveniently negotiable for slaves. The master under the impression he owned these useful properties naturally never thought of offering them a piece of the wedding cake, the big white house that bubbling brown sugar built and paid for, unnaturally processed by Domino. Phillis Wheatley said the sweet Christ was brought here from Asia Minor to redeem an African child and maybe her master’s soul as well. She wrote as she lived, a model of refinement, yes, but black as Abel racing through the canebrake, demon bloodhounds baying in pursuit, until at last his brother caught him, expressed his rage, and rode back home to dinner. Tell it to Fats Domino, to those who live on Sugar Hill, tell it to unsuspecting Shug as soon as she is old enough to hear it. One day Evelina’s son waved goodbye and climbed on board a northbound train, black angels guiding him invisibly. In class he quoted a sentence from Jean Toomer: “Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.” My father died last fall at eighty-one. Love’s bitter, child, as often as it’s sweet. Mm-mm, I sure do have the blues today: Baby, will you give me some sugar?

Go home. It's never what you think it is, The kiss, the diamond, the slamdance pulse in the wrist. Nothing is true, my dear, not even this Rumor of passion you'll doubtless insist On perceiving in my glance. Please just Go. Home is never what you think it is. Meaning lies in meaning's absence. The mist Is always almost just about to lift. Nothing is truer. Dear, not even this Candle can explain its searing twist Of flame mounted on cool amethyst. Go on home—not where you think it is, But where you would expect its comfort least, In still-black stars our century will miss Seeing. Nothingness is not as true as this Faith we grind up with denial: grist To the midnight mill; morning's catalyst. Come, let's go home, wherever you think it is. Nothing is true, my dear. Not even this.

If it was free, you taught, I ought to grab it as you did: McDonald’s napkins, pens, and from the school where you were once employed as one of two night shift custodians, the metal imitation wood wastebasket still under my desk. But it was sugar that you took most often as, annoyed on leaving Dunkin’ Donuts, pancake house, and countless diners, I felt implicated in your pleasure, crime, and poverty. I have them still, your Ziploc bags of plunder, yet I find today, among the loose change in my pockets, packets crushed or faded— more proof of your lasting legacy.