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When the townspeople gave the teenaged Buddha a glass of wine so delicious he grew to an unthinkable size and froze into a blue statue that shielded the town from a wave that broke upon his back and would have swept away the town if he’d not tasted the wine and afterward the people were overjoyed and said they would do good deeds like carpool their children to school more often and plant lettuce everywhere while the Buddha melted into water and receded into the calm sane sea.

Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under culverts Shallow and clear. They wait, when they should turn to journeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. They use against themselves that benevolence To which no man is friend. They cannot think of so many crops to a field Or of clean wood cleft by an axe. Their love is an eager meaninglessness Too tense, or too lax. They hear in every whisper that speaks to them A shout and a cry. As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills They should let it go by.

Ye old mule that think yourself so fair, Leave off with craft your beauty to repair, For it is true, without any fable, No man setteth more by riding in your saddle. Too much travail so do your train appair. Ye old mule With false savour though you deceive th'air, Whoso taste you shall well perceive your lair Savoureth somewhat of a Kappurs stable. Ye old mule Ye must now serve to market and to fair, All for the burden, for panniers a pair. For since gray hairs been powdered in your sable, The thing ye seek for, you must yourself enable To purchase it by payment and by prayer, Ye old mule.

Where did the handsome beloved go? I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go? He spread his light among us like a candle. Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me? All day long my heart trembles like a leaf. All alone at midnight, where did that beloved go? Go to the road, and ask any passing traveler — That soul-stirring companion, where did he go? Go to the garden, and ask the gardener — That tall, shapely rose stem, where did he go? Go to the rooftop, and ask the watchman — That unique sultan, where did he go? Like a madman, I search in the meadows! That deer in the meadows, where did he go? My tearful eyes overflow like a river — That pearl in the vast sea, where did he go? All night long, I implore both moon and Venus — That lovely face, like a moon, where did he go? If he is mine, why is he with others? Since he’s not here, to what “there” did he go? If his heart and soul are joined with God, And he left this realm of earth and water, where did he go? Tell me clearly, Shams of Tabriz, Of whom it is said, “The sun never dies” — where did he go? Translated from the Persian

sometimes you know things: once at a birthday party a little girl looked at her new party gloves and said she liked me, making suddenly the light much brighter so that the very small hairs shone above her lip. i felt stuffed, like a swimming pool, with words, like i knew something that was in a great tangled knot. and when we sat down i saw there were tiny glistenings on her legs, too. i knew something for sure then. but it was too big, or like the outside too everywhere, or maybe hiding inside, behind the bicycles where i later kissed her, not using my tongue. it was too giant and thin to squirm into, and be so well inside of, or too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few days later on the asphalt playground i tackled her. she skinned her elbow, and i even punched her and felt her, felt how soft the hairs were. i thought that i would make a fine football-playing poet, but now i know it is better to be an old, breathing man wrapped in a great coat in the stands, who remains standing after each play, who knows something, who rotates in his place rasping over and over the thing he knows: “whydidnhe pass? the other end was wide open! the end was wide open! the end was wide open . . .”

Slight whiff of toner, or is it White-Out? Brief heat of manuscript lifted from the printer, against my face. What is it about the new hire that has everybody talking? Her newness, perhaps, her éclat cutting through each of us, like a sword through wet bamboo; it’s a graceful violation. And then the water breaks, and then a darkening sky rolls over the lake, and then a meeting is called to introduce her, to make her understand, to allow her to share in our delights! Here is the coffee machine, there are the filters. You may store your lunch in the communal refrigerator, but please remember to empty yourself, all of you. Feel free to decorate your cubicle with pictures, tack up a view of the lake behind you to remind you of the lake behind you. Don’t listen to those of us who are certain of the small death each photo you tack up represents. Familiarity breeds intent, intent signals purpose, purpose is a proposition you make to those who observe, quantify and assess you; and use as many legal pads as you like. And the retractable pencils, they’re all yours. Marigolds. Sunflowers. Black-Eyed Susans. Just keep it yellow. Paper cuts will happen. Band-Aids are in the top left drawer in the kitchen, next to the cake-cutting knife we pull out for anniversaries, birthdays, retirements, record days, or the first time you see all of us converge on the conference room, leaving you alone in your cube.

I’m not yet comfortable with the word, its short clean woosh that sounds like life. At dinner last night my single girls said in admonition, “It’s not wife-approved” about a friend’s upcoming trip. Their eyes rolled up and over and out their pretty young heads. Wife, why does it sound like a job? “I need a wife” the famous feminist wrote, “a wife that will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced if need be.” A word that could be made easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes soothes, honors, obeys, Housewife, fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s the word for someone who stares long into the morning, unable to even fix tea some days, the kettle steaming over loud like a train whistle, she who cries in the mornings, she who tears a hole in the earth and cannot stop grieving, the one who wants to love you, but often isn’t good at even that, the one who doesn’t want to be diminished by how much she wants to be yours.

Honored when the butterfly lights on my shoulder. Next stop: a rotting log.

i thought you had a summer home in barcelona       because i had seen pictures of you in front of la sagrada família        and knew your father had money. so maybe that’s why when i first met you i didn’t know what to say,    someone too worldly to have anything to learn from me. then there was your halloween party where i managed not to be in any of the photos.     perhaps it was for the best. upstairs,     on a couch i’ll never sit on again, an image of us has started to yellow:        me, blushing because    jamie lee curtis’s breasts are on screen, and you, nervous because all your other guests                            left us alone. nothing happened. at least for another year or so. sometimes it’s hard to guess how long film                 needs to be exposed. i wanted to get the colors right.

I He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’ speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman. My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies. We saw is so and it was not so, the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue. (—A blazing parchment, Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.) It was not so, scratched on black by God knows who, by God, by God knows who. In the dark in fetters on bended elbows I supported my weak back hulloing to muffled walls blank again unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent. My soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible I stammer to my ear: Naked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold! Wrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric, wrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair. What trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor with magic in darkness, I unforewained. The golden hands are not in Averrhoes, eyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water makes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me! To the right was darkness and to the left hardness below hardness darkness above at the feet darkness at the head partial hardness with equal intervals without to the left moaning and beyond a scurry. In those days rode the good Lorraine whom English burned at Rouen, the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust. Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands, the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate. White gobs spitten for mockery; and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me. Remember, imbeciles and wits, sots and ascetics, fair and foul, young girls with little tender tits, that DEATH is written over all. Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul they are so rotten, old and thin, or firm and soft and warm and full— fellmonger Death gets every skin. All that is piteous, all that’s fair, all that is fat and scant of breath, Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, is Death’s collateral: Three score and ten years after sight of this pay me your pulse and breath value received. And who dare cite, as we forgive our debtors, Death? Abelard and Eloise, Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne, Genée, Lopokova, all these die, die in pain. And General Grant and General Lee, Patti and Florence Nightingale, like Tyro and Antiope drift among ghosts in Hell, know nothing, are nothing, save a fume driving across a mind preoccupied with this: our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought. The Emperor with the Golden Hands is still a word, a tint, a tone, insubstantial-glorious, when we ourselves are dead and gone and the green grass growing over us. II Let his days be few and let his bishoprick pass to another, for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust, mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited, I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave, fettered to a post in the damp cellarage. Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor, there are no dancers, no somersaulters now, only bricks and bleak black cement and bricks, only the military tread and the snap of the locks. Mine was a threeplank bed whereon I lay and cursed the weary sun. They took away the prison clothes and on the frosty nights I froze. I had a Bible where I read that Jesus came to raise the dead— I kept myself from going mad by singing an old bawdy ballad and birds sang on my windowsill and tortured me till I was ill, but Archipiada came to me and comforted my cold body and Circe excellent utterer of her mind lay with me in that dungeon for a year making a silk purse from an old sow’s ear till Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue. Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars, trodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule, Joshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad. They have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds, hunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo, they have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada: What is your name? Your maiden name? Go in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name. Distinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!) Now the thumbprints for filing. Colour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon! How many golden prints on the smudgy page? Homer? Adest. Dante? Adest. Adsunt omnes, omnes et Villon. Villon? Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain, hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies. III Under the olive trees walking alone on the green terraces very seldom over the sea seldom where it ravelled and spun blue tapestries white and green gravecloths of men Romans and modern men and the men of the sea who have neither nation nor time on the mountains seldom the white mountains beyond or the brown mountains between and their drifting echoes in the clouds and over the sea in shrines on their ridges the goddess of the country silverplated in silk and embroidery with offerings of pictures little ships and arms below me the ports with naked breasts shipless spoiled sacked because of the beauty of Helen precision clarifying vagueness; boundary to a wilderness of detail; chisel voice smoothing the flanks of noise; catalytic making whisper and whisper run together like two drops of quicksilver; factor that resolves unnoted harmonies; name of the nameless; stuff that clings to frigid limbs more marble hard than girls imagined by Mantegna ... The sea has no renewal, no forgetting, no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note. How can I sing with my love in my bosom? Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.