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For Carolina Ebeid We enrolled at barbizon Knowing full well We’d never look like What was promised Cue carol of the bells Cue a demo on the casio And the security of two-way Escalators setting the speed Those early mornings In our mall school The store’s silver grills Some mannequins left Half-clothed We’d taunt them With our imagined summers In london paris rome We weren’t please and thank you Walking with books on our heads No we were going to devastate Greek shipping heirs At every port of call Yet when our bus broke down And we trudged the shoulder Of highways Single file Dodging cigarette butt and horn We shook off those mornings Studied Their defenseless Indifference The blinding surface The quality of electric Without being alive We knew that there In only hot pants The ideal form Plastic Most would take a bullet for While at 16 We were already trash-talking Our prayers never went beyond The second floor Light-years away From the last word That distant somewhere Where a boat loses course The north star forsaking Its name to another

When the fog burns off and the air's pulverized diamonds and you can see beyond the islands of forever!—far too dramatic for me. It hurts something behind my eyes near the sphenoid, not good. I prefer fog with fog behind it, uninflammable fog. Then there's no competition for brightness, no Byron for your Shelley, no Juno eclisping your Athena, no big bridge statement about bringing unity to landmasses. All the thought balloons are blank. The marching band can't practice, even a bird's got to get within five feet before it can start an argument. Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle of mortality. A foglike baby god picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely then goes back to playing with her feet. I have felt awful cold and lonely and fog has been blotting paper to my tears. My dog is fog and I don't have to scoop its poop with my hand in a plastic bag. There are sensations that begin in the world, the mind responding with ideas but then those ideas cause other sensations. What a mess. We stand at the edge of a drop that doesn't answer back, fog our only friend although it's hell on shrimpboats. There, there, says the fog. Where, where? You can't see a thing.

Up from Msippi I grew. (Bare walk and cane stalk make a hungry belly talk.) Up from the river of death. (Walk bare and stalk cane make a hungry belly talk.) Up from Msippi I grew. Up from the river of pain. Out of the long red earth dipping, rising, spreading out in deltas and plains, out of the strong black earth turning over by the iron plough, out of the swamp green earth dripping with moss and snakes, out of the loins of the leveed lands muscling its American vein: the great Father of Waters, I grew up, beside the prickly boll of white, beside the bone-filled Mississippi rolling on and on, breaking over, cutting off, ignoring my bleeding fingers. Bare stalk and sun walk I hear a boll-weevil talk cause I grew up beside the ox and the bow, beside the rock church and the shack row, beside the fox and the crow, beside the melons and maize, beside the hound dog, beside the pink hog, flea-hunting, mud-grunting, cat-fishing, dog pissing in the Mississippi rolling on and on, ignoring the colored coat I spun of cotton fibers. Cane-sweat river-boat nigger-bone floating. Up from Msippi I grew, wailing a song with every strain. Woman gone woe man too baby cry rent-pause daddy flew.

The Christian cannot be the pitying one because he is the one pitied. From a dusty road in a straight line from przedmiescie to Krasnystaw at the entrance to town at Zhitkovski's in his house we lived, he makes coffins with crosses. On the threshold I sat as a boy opposite a building held together by nails facing the church the cloister the impurity, my mother says, I sat as a boy. On the wall Jesus and Mary. Jesus and his mother were never parted. My mother's son left her not to be on the wall. Mary's son never left, and he paid the price. —October 26-29, 1989

When he was four years old, he stood at the window during a thunderstorm. His father, a tailor, sat on the table sewing. He came up to his father and said, “I know what makes thunder: two clouds knock together.” When he was older, he recited well-known rants at parties. They all said that he would be a lawyer. At law school he won a prize for an essay. Afterwards, he became the chum of an only son of rich people. They were said to think the world of the young lawyer. The Appellate Division considered the matter of his disbarment. His relatives heard rumours of embezzlement. When a boy, to keep himself at school, he had worked in a drug store. Now he turned to this half-forgotten work, among perfumes and pungent drugs, quiet after the hubble-bubble of the courts and the search in law books. He had just enough money to buy a drug store in a side street. Influenza broke out. The old tailor was still keeping his shop and sitting cross-legged on the table sewing, but he was half-blind. He, too, was taken sick. As he lay in bed he thought, “What a lot of money doctors and druggists must be making; now is my son’s chance.” They did not tell him that his son was dead of influenza.

Overture More loudly to inveigh against your absence, Raising the volume by at least a third, Humbly I say I’ve written this immense Astonishing “Sonata” word by word, With leitmotivs you’ll wish you’d never heard, And a demented, shattering Cadenza. I’m pained to say that scholarship insists Cadenzas are conclusion to Concertos, Not Sonatas—true Sonatas close With what pedantic musicologists, Waving their Ph.D.s beneath my nose, Persist in calling Recapitulation. My double ending is a Variation: I couldn’t choose between them once I chose To write two endings, so, because I wrote a Recapitulation and Cadenza, My piece concludes two times—and then it ends Again because I’ve added on a Coda. To brush up on Sonata structure: first, The Exposition sounds two melodies, Deeply dissimilar, in different keys, Major and minor. Part Two is a burst Of brainstorms scholars call Development, In which the two themes of the Exposition Are changed and rearranged past recognition, Distorted, fragmented, dissolved, and blent Into chromatic superimposition, Till, imperceptibly, two themes unite. And then, if everything is going right, The piece concludes in Recapitulation. Exposition Theme One: My life lacks what, in lacking you? Theme Two: Does the material world exist? (Ideally your neurons should resist, As yet, connecting Numbers One and Two. But note the skill, the frightening mastery, The lunatic precision it entails To merge these separate themes, the way train rails Converge as they approach infinity.) Development I dreamed that an encyclopedia Opened before my eyes and there I found Analogies to sort of stack around My what-is-life-without-you-here idea: Like nous detached from Anaxagoras, Like cosmic fire glimmering without A Heraclitus there to find it out, Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras, Like One-ness riven from Parmenides, Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it, Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it, Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles, Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took The furniture’s Eternal Forms away, Objects abandoned by Reality Still look the same, but look the way things look When I behold my life without you in it: A screwy room where chairs and tables lack Dimension from the front, the side, the back, Like finity without the infinite, Where tea parties are held without the Hatter, It’s like a single point withdrawn from Space, It’s like a physicist who cannot trace The ultimate constituents of matter— There is no evidence Matter exists. Thus do I introduce Theme Number Two. And I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true: The physical eludes the physicists. They’ve chased down matter past atomic rings Into small shadows, and they’ve lost it there. It seems that they can’t find it anywhere. They stalk imaginary floating things Like amateurish lepidopterists Round babbling brooks and mossy fairy knolls. Their net strings map out squares of empty holes. Behold them snatching something in their fists: Their fingers uncurl, cautious, on the sight Of Nothing crushed against the sweaty hand. But then I’m prejudiced, you understand. Not everyone on earth believes I’m right. But lest you think I’m kidding, or perverse, I went to hear a Lecture just last year About some things which I hold very dear: The smallest pieces of the universe. The Lecturer referred to them as Quarks. He seemed impervious to the mystery Surrounding their invisibility. I asked, when he concluded his remarks, “But are Quarks physical?” You’d think that he Were someone nearly martyred and I’d said Our duty’s to die peacefully in bed. He took his glasses off and blinked at me. Were I John Milton, I would now destroy This moment of high drama and deploy A thirty-line Homeric simile. But I’m not Milton, nor was meant to be. He put his glasses on, and said, “Of course.” Now, I may be the south end of a horse, But logically and analogically, And physically, and metaphysically, And, if it gets to that, religiously, And absolutely scientifically, I don’t believe that Quarks can pass the test Of Being There, and since they’re fundamental, Why, then, the world’s a dream, and dreams are mental, And since in mental matters East or West I need you for this dream’s interpretation— Stop looking at your watch, for I’ve divined, With these two themes uncomfortably combined, It’s time now for the Recapitulation. Recapitulation Frankly, I’m disinclined to reassert The themes my Exposition indicated. Stuffed shirts there are, and hordes of overrated Experts who would slay or badly hurt With airy wave of hand my insights; no, I will not play to them, I’ll not rehash My song though they with hard and cold cash Should bribe me, or should tell me where to go. My complex principles are explicated Under “Development.” So let them laugh: I’ll not permit this section to be half So convoluted as anticipated. Cadenza Sing, Heav’nly Muse, and give me lyric flight, Give me special effects, give me defiance To challenge the Academy of Science On fundamental points, and get them right; Give me the strength to can the Latinisms, To forge analogies between the thing Nature abhors and my apartment; sing To vanquish literary criticisms If possible and literary sharks. And even if you feel submicroscopic Elements exceed me as a topic, Please try to back me up regarding Quarks, Thereby to advocate my metaphor (Absence the vehicle, physics the tenor) So that the Universal Void coincides With showing—I daresay, with showing off— The consequences of his going off; By showing everything, in fact, but slides. Coda Me heart detests, reviles, denounces, loathes Your absence with a passion like a furnace. The shirt of love, said Eliot, will burn us; And normally I’d add, “Love’s other clothes Burn just as badly”—but, because I’ve bent A rule or two, I won’t extend this figure; Good taste prevents this piece from getting bigger; Please see above for everything I meant.

Untitled, from the Silueta series, 1980, by Ana Mendieta For Ana Mendieta Mud learns to live with mites, worms, beetles, and ticks. And Lioness digs up the earth where a warthog cowers in his den. You know you are loved when she tears you to bits, brittle thing. The lioness tongue softens you up all the way to her bottom. Roots, straw, weeds, rain your crown,hija de Ochun. Even Earth’s suffering arises from pangs of  love. When Lioness fangs diffuse the blood we call it liberation. Wax hisses from the smoldering wick, curtains you draw go shoosh. The last earth imprint you ever left on asphalt from thirty floors up. A shoe curved from the work your instep leaves behind. The breath of the lioness heats up your shoulders and your neck. A genetic photograph of every cell that ever lives exists in a lioness mouth. She tears into the riverbed and root hairs clog her claws. Ancient bacteria get all up in you. Control the fire and it burns deeper, flashing life into sleeping embers.

(From Crossportion’s Pastoral) The bottom of the sea has come And builded in my noiseless room The fishes’ and the mermaids’ home, Whose it is most, most hell to be Out of the heavy-hanging sea And in the thin, thin changeable air Or unroom sleep some other where; But play their coral violins Where waters most lock music in: The bottom of my room, the sea. Full of voiceless curtaindeep There mermaid somnambules come sleep Where fluted half-lights show the way, And there, there lost orchestras play And down the many quarterlights come To the dim mirth of my aquadrome: The bottom of my sea, the room.

from “Elegy for the First Century” Bells on our eyelashes and the death throes of words, and I among fields of speech, a knight on a horse made of dirt. My lungs are my poetry, my eyes a book, and I, under the skin of words, on the beaming banks of foam, a poet who sang and died leaving this singed elegy before the faces of poets, for birds at the edge of sky.

Observe the cautious toadstools still on the lawn today though they grow over-evening; sun shrinks them away. Pale and proper and rootless, they righteously extort their living from the living. I have been their sort. See by our blocked foundation the cold, archaic clay, stiff and clinging and sterile as children mold at play or as the Lord God fashioned before He breathed it breath. The earth we dig and carry for flowers, is strong in death. Woman, we are the rich soil, friable and humble, where all our murders rot, where our old deaths crumble and fortify my reach far from you, wide and free, though I have set my root in you and am your tree.