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How can you go swimming in another human being? I am swimming and asking for light. Once I paddled into dust and fucking and the horsemen and ruin and the poisonous hollows of a projected blue eye and cracked my skull on all and caught more disease in my already dread mind and entered the medicines of no human power, the forests of disappearing moans, which were rich in sap but lacked dissolve fertilized against my own swimming nature, Aleph I am swimming for you now and I don’t care. When you leave the forest you do not become the ocean and I have become the desert trying to swim in the ocean and knowing this, carrying the forest floor in a sweet wood coffin and the blackbrush and rocks, the yucca and cacti of receded oceans, which were never oceans at all or there would have been shells on the sand, they only looked like oceans in my thirst, I cut the old horizon with a sword you have given and I gut the heavens and bleed their light and swim in that.

Here and there White hairs appear On my chest— Age seasons me Gives me zest— I am a sage In the making Sprinkled, shaking

I was born in a Tennessee sanatorium hours after my mother’s father died & I know how the womb becomes a salt-sea grave. I was born in the last seconds of small crops & small change rained down on the collection plate’s felt palate & I know the soul’s barn debt to past generations, too. Outside, ditchfuls of chicory flashed in the after-rain sun as melancholia’s purple scent rose & its steepled fog distilled in Tennessee hills. & I know I’m not supposed to be here on account of all those crazy aunts & I know great grandma was five when her Cherokee mother died & her daddy dumped her on the red clay curb of an Arkansas reservation then drove away in a wagon— how she just strode the fields of milkweed back to Tennessee & married her cousin. When I was five I drowned a fly in a piepan of water then spooned it out & heaped a hill of salt on its still body until I could hear a buzz again (as if within a belly) & I know the rush of the resurrected. I was born in the last decade of small town girls wearing white gloves to funerals. As an infant my boy quit suckling long enough to wave to my mother’s ghost— who used to drift in the doorway of the hours. & at three he told me at my age he had red hair & broke his neck falling off a runaway horse—I know the rocking chair’s set too close to the edge of the porch.

I have seen the legislators on their way, the jacketless men in mid-winter who will cast their votes like stones for this war. Men who have to cross the street through slush and over gutter, their cuffs now vaguely blued with a salt that dries in dots where it splashes, and mingles with the finely woven cloth of the chalk-stripe suits, the soi-disant practical men, you can see them now tiptoeing, now leaping, balletic, windsor-knotted, fragrant and shaved, they pass, they pass the window of the Capitol Deli wherein I am writing to my friend in Baghdad, he a “witness for peace,” a poet who for years has wondered what good poetry is or has been or does. I compose today’s answer from here, saying, I think of poetry as a salt dug from a foreign mine

I cannot hold such emptiness —the only meaning, the meaning we make & the way time tugs the body down, the body named bone, named brain, the color of dust & tremor, the soft meat & the bag it lives in. We beg from the body; it shivers & spits—we settle for desire, in- commensurate sorrow, for a life like too much water, shallow & wide, for enough salt to make a little sea.

There, in that lost corner of the ordnance survey. Drive through the vanity — two pubs and a garage — of Satley, then right, cross the A68 past down-at-heel farms and a quarry, you can't miss it, a 'T' instead of a 'plus' where the road meets a wall. If it's a usual day there'll be freezing wind, and you'll stumble climbing the stile (a ladder, really) as you pull your hat down and zip up your jacket. Out on the moor, thin air may be strong enough to knock you over, but if you head into it downhill, you can shelter in the wide, cindery trench of an old leadmine-to-Consett railway. You may have to share it with a crowd of dirty supercilious-looking ewes, who will baaa and cut jerkily away after posting you blank stares from their foreign eyes. One winter we came across five steaming, icicle-hung cows. But in summer, when the heather's full of nests, you'll hear curlews following you, raking your memory, maybe, with their cries; or, right under you nose, a grouse will whirr up surprised, like a poet startled by a line when it comes to her sideways. No protection is offered by trees — Hawthorn the English call May, a few struggling birches. But of wagtails and yellowhammers, plenty, and peewits who never say peewit, more a minor,go'way, go'way. Who was he, Salter? Why was this his gate? A pedlars' way, they carried salt to meat. The place gives tang to survival, its unstoppable view, a reservoir, ruins of the lead mines, new forestry pushing from the right, the curlew.

How well its square fit my palm, my mouth, a toasty wafer slipped onto the sick tongue or into chicken soup, each crisp saltine a tile pierced with 13 holes in rows of 3 and 2, its edges perforated like a postage stamp, one of a shifting stack sealed in wax paper whose noisy opening always signaled snack, peanut butter or cheese thick inside Premiums, the closest we ever got to serving hors d’oeuvres: the redneck’s hardtack, the cracker’s cracker.

High-hearted Surrey! I do love your ways, Venturous, frank, romantic, vehement, All with inviolate honor sealed and blent, To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier-bays: I love your youth, your friendships, whims, and frays; Your strict, sweet verse, with its imperious bent, Heard as in dreams from some old harper’s tent, And stirring in the listener’s brain for days. Good father-poet! if to-night there be At Framlingham none save the north-wind’s sighs, No guard but moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears, Smile yet upon the pilgrim named like me, Close at your gates, whose fond and weary eyes Sought not one other down three hundred years!

These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins, Where have ye been? behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long? Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue? When silent I So many thousand, thousand years Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears, Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? Welcome ye treasures which I now receive. I that so long Was nothing from eternity, Did little think such joys as ear or tongue To celebrate or see: Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet, Beneath the skies on such a ground to meet. New burnished joys, Which yellow gold and pearls excel! Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys, In which a soul doth dwell; Their organizèd joints and azure veins More wealth include than all the world contains. From dust I rise, And out of nothing now awake; These brighter regions which salute mine eyes, A gift from God I take. The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies, The sun and stars are mine if those I prize. Long time before I in my mother’s womb was born, A God, preparing, did this glorious store, The world, for me adorn. Into this Eden so divine and fair, So wide and bright, I come His son and heir. A stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear, Strange all and new to me; But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

The wreck is a fact. The worst has happened. The salvage trucks back in and the salvage men begin to sort and stack, whistling as they work. Thanks be to god—again— for extractable elements which are not carriers of pain, for this periodic table at which the self-taught salvagers disassemble the unthinkable to the unthought.