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So many gods! They’re like books—you can’t read everything, you never know anything. Happy the man who knows but one god, and keeps him a secret. Every day I have different beliefs— Sometimes in the same day I have different beliefs— And I wish I were the child now crossing The view from my window of the street below. He’s eating a cheap pastry (he’s poor) without efficient or final cause, An animal uselessly raised above the other vertebrates, And through his teeth he sings a ribald show tune . . . Yes, there are many gods, But I’d give anything to the one who’d take that child out of my sight. March 9, 1930

So they stood Upon ladders With pruning hooks Backs to the king Who took his leave Of gardening This morning I am forlorn As he was then No one born After the war Remembers when

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop over the fields, the telephone lines streaming behind, its billow of dust full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds. On either side, those dear old ladies, the loosening barns, their little windows dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs hide broken tractors under their skirts. So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post. Behind a shelterbelt of cedars, top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees, a pickup kicks its fenders off and settles back to read the clouds. You feel like that; you feel like letting your tires go flat, like letting the mice build a nest in your muffler, like being no more than a truck in the weeds, clucking with chickens or sticky with honey or holding a skinny old man in your lap while he watches the road, waiting for someone to wave to. You feel like waving. You feel like stopping the car and dancing around on the road. You wave instead and leave your hand out gliding larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

So, we'll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we'll go no more a roving By the light of the moon.

Farewell to the starlight in whiskey, So long to the sunshine in beer. The booze made me cocky and frisky But worried the man in the mirror. Goodnight to the moonlight in brandy, Adieu to the warmth of the wine. I think I can finally stand me Without a glass or a stein. Bye-bye to the balm in the vodka, Ta-ta to the menthol in gin. I'm trying to do what I ought to, Rejecting that snake medicine. I won't miss the blackouts and vomit, The accidents and regret. If I can stay off the rotgut, There might be a chance for me yet. So so long to God in a bottle, To the lies of rum and vermouth. Let me slake my thirst with water And the sweet, transparent truth.

The students know the agenda. When I step inside our classroom, the PowerPoint is loaded, the student presenting her report stands poised to begin. And so she does. This day is her second try, the first a wash due to our failed technology. I ask,Do you think you will earn another chance each time error is out of your hands?

I have lived it, and lived it, My nervous, luxury civilisation, My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces. ... Their idea of literature is hopeless. Make them drink their own poetry! Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

In harmony with the rule of irony— which requires that we harbor the enemy on this side of the barricade—the shell of the unborn eagle or pelican, which is made to give protection till the great beaks can harden, is the first thing to take up poison. The mineral case is soft and gibbous as the moon in a lake—an elastic, rubbery, nightmare water that won't break. Elsewhere, also, I see the mockeries of struggle, a softness over people.

I Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur turns in the soft dusk, the lights of it blur, the delicate spires are unequal as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them... And the soft air-breathers, their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water responding to some impalpably soft pressure, turn with the city, too. The petals of tenderness in them, their tentative ways of feeling, not quite reaching out but ever so gently half reaching out and withdrawing, withdrawing to where their feminine star is withdrawing, the planet that turns with them, faithfully always and softly... II And if there is something which is not soft in the city, such as a cry too hard for the soft mouth to hold, God puts a soft stop to it. Bending invisibly down, He breathes a narcosis over the panicky face upturned to entreat Him: a word as soft as morphine is the word that God uses, placing His soft hand over the mouth of the cryer before it has time to gather the force of a cry. It is almost as if no cry had ever been thought of... And, yes, over all, soft canopy over soft canopy, web over soft, soft web, gauze hung over gauze, the mysteries of the tall heaven, the tall and very soft heaven, are softest of all!

Afterward, to tell how it was possible to identify absolute space, a matter of great difficulty, keeping in mind always that not all old music is beautiful and therefore it’s necessary to choose. Ice loading and unloading as the ice caps wax and wither. Brutal and uncouth from the beginning even unto time, space, place, motion. How are we to obtain true motion? I predict a fiasco—and a fiasco with catcalls. Wind circulation in the case of plants, predators in the case of animals, affecting their distribution on the ancient land masses. And who will conduct the chorus and orchestra? Many things exist at once. Predilection and preference. Begin with the storm. A very agile, beautiful voice. With tremendous temperament. The earth’s magnetic field weakening. Even the princess is drawn into the violence of the action, extremes of joy, mad ravings, almost requiring the conventions of opera. Thus, thus; we parted, thus to meet again. Thus in a ship, under sail, since the sun itself is moving, supposing Infinite Space to be (as it were) Sensorium of the Omnipresent. Reduced to a few feet of ground, we begin with great delight to plant a garden. The Czar is in that garden. Quiet eruptions, safe enough to attract tourists. We suppose other bodies annihilated. Upon any conditions supposed, taught to describe accurately, I detest everything that smells of theory. If we look at similar coral reefs, the past location of the same precise environment can be traced. But there the comparison breaks. And from these relative motions will arise the relative motion of a body on the earth.