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He slid the stiff blade up to my ear: Oh, fear, this should have been thirst, a cheapening act. But I lacked, as usual, the crucial disbelief. Sticky, cold, a billfold wet in my mouth, wrists bound by his belt, I felt like the boy in a briny night pool, he who found the drowned body, yet still somehow swam with an unknown joy. That boy.

What came wafting down the ditch by the marsh grass waving opened a hole in the day through which, like a puff of breath, a ghost fountained up rising in soft slo-mo, lost, desolate, no place left to go. Dear bloody Beirut and its internet cafes were still smoking from last night's "little bombing." Such threads, tattered sleeves blown all over the street from Emporio Armani. Husband and wife shot dead at the airport checkpoint. Where else would this lead? The investiture of grieving takes all day to sweep up in the tidal spillage of plate glass. What ish my nation, asked Captain MacMorris between battles. But the ditch knows just who we are— and I see its only water on a stealth raid of the glimmer hidden in the reeds. And when I come close, little scavenger flashings and great claws held out rigidly scuttle back into mud holes drilling the bank. Bending down to look, I could smell the corruption's gathering, sweetish odor, its sonar gone haywire driving it to shore. What choices are you given, what makes you want to swim out of your own element? The demure little ear-holes and intelligent clear eyes, the fate from birth sealed inside its smile, spent flukes and tail being gnawed to bone. The curt unrevealing stare mirroring back my own.

I’d have you known! It puzzles me forever To hear, day in, day out, the words men use, But never a single word about you, never. Strange!—in your every gesture, worlds of news. On busses people talk. On curbs I hear them; In parks I listen, barbershop and bar. In banks they murmur, and I sidle near them; But none allude to you there. None so far. I read books too, and turn the pages, spying: You must be there, one beautiful as you! But never, not by name. No planes are flying Your name in lacy trailers past the blue Marquees of heaven. No trumpets cry your fame. Strange!—how no constellations spell your name!

When the strange girl skips rope her hair flies like a porpoise. She collects things that melt and things that tick, circles and cubes and checkerboards in a drawer she can pull out from her navel. Other children, alerted by the rumble of marbles in her chest, chase her across the field. She insists she is only hungry, but they pin her down and open her up. Cockroaches rush out and bullies run and squeal, crushing carapaces underfoot. She gathers as many as she can, tells them she’s sorry there is no lock. She’s sorry, but good children shouldn’t have secrets.

When is the smell of a blackberry tree a harbinger of  violent movement rather than simply the recollection of a childhood Sunday dress hem-dipped in mud, handprinted with juice and seeds? Hard to say. A mind, when playing tricks is at its most sincere — at home raking through the body’s history, repeating the strange and nostalgic. The taste of dirty copper, the imagined cockroach in the corner, the sluggish slow of  the clock — doctors call these strange little prophets warning signs of a seizure, synaptic misfires looming like a song discordant, until the body — an unplucked string — is finally strummed.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” “None,” said that other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .”

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads. —Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932) All night I am the doe, breathing his name in a frozen field, the small mist of the word drifting always before me. And again he has heard it and I have gone burning to meet him, the jacklight fills my eyes with blue fire; the heart in my chest explodes like a hot stone. Then slung like a sack in the back of his pickup, I wipe the death scum from my mouth, sit up laughing and shriek in my speeding grave. Safely shut in the garage, when he sharpens his knife and thinks to have me, like that, I come toward him, a lean gray witch through the bullets that enter and dissolve. I sit in his house drinking coffee till dawn and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps, crawling back into my shadowy body. All day, asleep in clean grasses, I dream of the one who could really wound me. Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look. Not even with his goodness. If a man was never to lie to me.Never lie me. I swear I would never leave him.

Implausible fish bloom in the depths, mercurial flowers light up the coast; I know red and yellow, the other colors,— but the sea,det granna granna havet, that’s most dangerous to look at. What name is there for the color that arouses this thirst, which says, the saga can happen, even to you— Translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy

Little did I dream, England, that you bore me Under the Cotswold hills beside the water meadows,

This is the village where the funeral Stilted its dusty march over deep ruts Up the hillside covered with queen’s lace To the patch of weeds known finally to all. Of her virtues large tongues were loud As I, a stranger, trudged the streets Gay with huckstering: loud whispers from a few Sly wags who squeezed a humor from the shroud. For this was death. I should never see these men again And yet, like the swiftness of remembered evil— An issue for conscience, say— The cold heart of death was beating in my brain: A new figuration of an old phenomenon. This is the village where women walk the streets Selling eggs, breasts ungathered, hands like rawhide; Of their virtues the symbol can be washtubs But when they die it is a time of singing, And then the symbol changes with change of place. Let the wags wag as the pall-bearers climb the hill. Let a new slab look off into the sunset: The night drops down with sullen grace.