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Angered, may I be near a glass of water; May my first impulse be to think of Silence, Its deities (who are they? do, in fact, they Exist? etc.). May I recall what Aristotle says of The subject: to give vent to rage is not to Release it but to be increasingly prone To its incursions. May I imagine being in the Inferno, Hearing it asked: “Virgilio mio, who’s That sulking with Achilles there?” and hearing Virgil say: “Dante, That fellow, at the slightest provocation, Slammed phone receivers down, and waved his arms like A madman. What Attila did to Europe, What Genghis Khan did To Asia, that poor dope did to his marriage.” May I, that is, put learning to good purpose, Mindful that melancholy is a sin, though Stylish at present. Better than rage is the post-dinner quiet, The sink’s warm turbulence, the streaming platters, The suds rehearsing down the drain in spirals In the last rinsing. For what is, after all, the good life save that Conducted thoughtfully, and what is passion If not the holiest of powers, sustaining Only if mastered.

Ease is the pray’r of him who, in a whaleboat Crossing Lake Champlain, by a storm’s o’ertaken: Not struck his blanket, not a friendly island Near to receive him. Ease is the wish too of the sly Canadian; Ease the delight of bloody Caghnawagas; Ease, Richard, ease, not to be bought with wampum, Nor paper money. Nor colonel’s pay, nor yet a dapper sergeant, Orderly waiting with recovered halberd, Can chase the crowd of troubles still surrounding Laced regimentals. That sub lives best who, with a sash in tatters Worn by his grandsire at the fight of Blenheim, To fear a stranger, and to wild ambition, Snores on a bearskin. Why like fine-fellows are we ever scheming, We short-lived mortals? Why so fond of climates Warmed by new suns? O who, that runs from home, can Run from himself too? Care climbs radeaux with four-and-twenty pounders, Not quits our light troops, or our Indian warriors, Swifter than moose-deer, or the fleeter east wind, Pushing the clouds on. He, whose good humor can enjoy the present, Scorns to look forward; with a smile of patience Temp’ring the bitter. Bliss uninterrupted None can inherit. Death instantaneous hurried off Achilles; Age far-extended wore away Tithonus. Who will live longer, thou or I, Montgom’ry? Dicky or Tommy? Thee twenty messmates, full of noise and laughter, Cheer with their sallies; thee the merry damsels Please with their titt’ring; whilst thou sitt’st adorned with Boots, sash and gorget. Me to Fort Hendrick, midst a savage nation, Dull Connajohry, cruel fate has driven. O think on Morris, in a lonely chamber, Dabbling in Sapphic.

Ach, in den Armen hab ich sie alle verloren, du nur, du wirst immer wieder geboren .... —Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge The twilight falls; I soften the dusting feathers, And clean again. The house has lain and moldered for three days. The windows smeared with rain, the curtains torn, The mice come in, The kitchen blown with cold. I keep the house, and say no words. It is true I am as twisted as the cactus That gnarls and turns beside the milky light, That cuts the fingers easily and means nothing, For all the pain that shoots along the hand. I dust the feathers down the yellow thorns, I light the stove. The gas curls round the iron fretwork. the flame Floats above the lace, And bounces like a dancer stayed on air. Fire does not rest on iron, it drifts like a blue blossom And catches on my breath; Coiling, spinning, the blue foam of the gas fire Writhes like a naked girl; Turns up its face, like her. She came to me in rain. I did not know her, I did not know my name After she left to bed her children down, To phone her husband they were gone asleep. And she, lying, a pure fire, in the feathers, Dancing above the ironwork of her bed, Roaring, and singeing nothing. She had not wound her arms about me then, She had not dared. I only took her coat, and smiled to hear How she had left her purse and her umbrella In the theater, how she was sopping cold With the fall rain; and mine was the one light In the neighborhood. She came to my gas fire And lay before it, sprawled, her pure bare shoulders Folded in a doze, a clear, cold curve of stone. I only leaned above the hair, Turned back the quilt, arranged the feet, the arms, And kissed the sleeping shoulder, lightly, like the rain; And when she woke to wear her weathered clothes, I sent her home. She floated, a blue blossom, over the street. And when she came again, It was not long before she turned to me, And let her shawl slide down her neck and shoulder, Let her hair fall. And when she came again, It did not rain. Her husband came to pluck her like an apple, As the drunken farmer lurches against the tree, Grips the green globe not long beyond its bloom, And tears the skin, brutally, out of the bark, Leaves the whole bough broken, The orchard torn with many footprints, The fence swung wide On a raw hinge. And now it is said of me That my love is nothing because I have borne no children, Or because I have fathered none; That I twisted the twig in my hands And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed; That I lay across the fire, And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain. But I have turned away, and drawn myself Upright to walk along the room alone. Across the dark the spines of cactus plants Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure, Indifferent to the words the children chalk Against my house and down the garden walls. They cannot tear the garden out of me, Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again. I keep the house and say no words, the evening Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees. I light the fire and see the blossom dance On air alone; I will not douse that flame, That searing flower; I will burn in it. I will not banish love to empty rain. For I know that I am asked to hate myself For their sweet sake Who sow the world with child. I am given to burn on the dark fire they make With their sly voices. But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.

“and then looks at the stars” from the bed in the ambulance looks up at boughs of trees shifting quickly lit in blackness blackening soft, deep siren’s song—she died several times that night and only in the weeks to come started and started to come back then forward which is real life

Look straight, and don’t tremble, wreckage of my hanged race: a sarabande dancer, Japanese muslin tight on her live-wire hips arrives with the moonlight, fast as the tam-tam drums. She’ll take you to the grand esplanade where the gallows tell your story, tell of your dim bronze halos licked away by a pale man’s greed. Leave your gallows tears behind, the long-drawn vowels of the lost names of flowers, the long-drawn cries of your burden of grain, the long-drawn cries of your burden of seed-pods, and the long-drawn cries of the seed-pods cut and hung. Shipwreck of my race, twisted in the wind-rush, fall from your broken gallows, wrack, wreck, and driftwood, my bloodied race. My bloodied race fearful, scab-dried, sterile, paralyzed, the low-caste wallflowers trembling at a ball for mice— no. Leave your gallows, there, those: the gallows of time-gone-by. Lift your chestnut-dark and heavy limbs, up from out the shipwreck’s carnage, and up through those long blue-green rolling waves. Sing the wind’s songs, and collect what’s needed, drop by shivering drop, in this, your Lenten fasting, in this, your sorcerer’s midnight, under this, the whip. Leave the gallows, the sap of its cut-wood spits on your skin. You’d hang there, yourself in effigy? No. Live sap runs in the driftwood branch. You’ll play, gentle, a light wind in the shimmering green of a dancer’s beaded muslin skirt, and your broken music will move in the foolish grass that still believes in death— leave your gallows-bones there, in the fool’s green shroud . . . Scratch with the rusted nail of melody, because you live, wreckage of my race, the sky will not forget you, nor the graveyard’s earth, fertile and walled. Your blood still dances, a wreckage of joy, joy soured, obstinate joy, wild and unbroken, shipwreck of my race, sarabande.

Some years ago you heard me sing My doubts on Alexander Byng. His sister Sarah now inspires My jaded Muse, my failing fires. Of Sarah Byng the tale is told How when the child was twelve years old She could not read or write a line. Her sister Jane, though barely nine, Could spout the Catechism through And parts of Matthew Arnold too, While little Bill who came between Was quite unnaturally keen On 'Athalie', by Jean Racine. But not so Sarah! Not so Sal! She was a most uncultured girl Who didn't care a pinch of snuff For any literary stuff And gave the classics all a miss. Observe the consequence of this! As she was walking home one day, Upon the fields across her way A gate, securely padlocked, stood, And by its side a piece of wood On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL Alas! The young illiterate Went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate! Now happily the Bull that day Was rather in the mood for play Than goring people through and through As Bulls so very often do; He tossed her lightly with his horns Into a prickly hedge of thorns, And stood by laughing while she strode And pushed and struggled to the road. The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone A long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, And leaves a padlocked gate alone. Moreover she has wisely grown Confirmed in her instinctive guess That literature breeds distress.

I am locked in a little cedar box with a picture of shepherds pasted onto the central panel between carvings. The box stands on curved legs. It has a gold, heart-shaped lock and no key. I am trying to write my way out of the closed box redolent of cedar. Satan comes to me in the locked box and says,I’ll get you out. Say My father is a shit. I say my father is a shit and Satan laughs and says,It’s opening. Say your mother is a pimp. My mother is a pimp. Something opens and breaks when I say that. My spine uncurls in the cedar box like the pink back of the ballerina pin with a ruby eye, resting beside me on satin in the cedar box. Say shit, say death, say fuck the father, Satan says, down my ear. The pain of the locked past buzzes in the child’s box on her bureau, under the terrible round pond eye etched around with roses, where self-loathing gazed at sorrow. Shit. Death. Fuck the father. Something opens. Satan says Don’t you feel a lot better? Light seems to break on the delicate edelweiss pin, carved in two colors of wood. I love him too, you know, I say to Satan dark in the locked box. I love them but I’m trying to say what happened to us in the lost past.Of course, he says and smiles,of course. Now say: torture. I see, through blackness soaked in cedar, the edge of a large hinge open. Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s cunt, says Satan,I’ll get you out. The angle of the hinge widens until I see the outlines of the time before I was, when they were locked in the bed. When I say the magic words, Cock, Cunt, Satan softly says,Come out. But the air around the opening is heavy and thick as hot smoke. Come in, he says, and I feel his voice breathing from the opening. The exit is through Satan’s mouth. Come in my mouth, he says,you’re there already, and the huge hinge begins to close. Oh no, I loved them, too, I brace my body tight in the cedar house. Satan sucks himself out the keyhole. I’m left locked in the box, he seals the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue. It’s your coffin now, Satan says. I hardly hear; I am warming my cold hands at the dancer’s ruby eye— the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.

Satao, Kenya’s last great tusker, was poached in 2014 Cowards, let us sing in dead Elmolo how the elephants have died. We thank the cavemen, that they drew them, that zoologists described them, for the photos of them herding which the tourists left behind, for who would ever, fools, believe us? Teeth from heaven to the ground!? I stretch my arm out like a trunk to palm the graveyard of its cranium; it’s how, I hear, they mourned. The brain within worked tools and language. I have none: a useless pen (it’s only good for drafting elegies) and even then, no words. We once had tuskers. Tell the birds!

Seems there was this Professor a member of what should be called The Good German Department Must have signed his name to 5,000 petitions in front of the Co-Op on Cedar and bought two tons of benefit cookies Blames Texas for the sorry state of the oceans Rode a Greyhound bus “Civil Rights,” Alabama, 1960 Found the long yellow war “deplorable” Believes John “Duke” Wayne’s values to be inferior to his He said, “Ishmael, I’d love to do the right thing for as you know I’m all for the right thing and against the wrong thing, but these plaster of paris busts of deceased Europeans Our secret ways Our sacred fears "These books, leather-bound 'copyright 1789’ All of these things, precious to me, gleaming like the stainless steel coffee urn in the faculty club, an original Maybeck, 1902 “I’d stand up for Camelot by golly, even if it meant shooting all the infidels in the world,” he said reaching into his desk drawer “Why, I might even have to shoot you, Ishmael” Staring down the cold tunnel of a hard .38 I thought Most people are to the right when it comes to where they must eat and lay their heads!

Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids; I must not laugh, nor weep sins and be wise; Can railing, then, cure these worn maladies? Is not our mistress, fair Religion, As worthy of all our souls' devotion As virtue was in the first blinded age? Are not heaven's joys as valiant to assuage Lusts, as earth's honour was to them? Alas, As we do them in means, shall they surpass Us in the end? and shall thy father's spirit Meet blind philosophers in heaven, whose merit Of strict life may be imputed faith, and hear Thee, whom he taught so easy ways and near To follow, damn'd? Oh, if thou dar'st, fear this; This fear great courage and high valour is. Dar'st thou aid mutinous Dutch, and dar'st thou lay Thee in ships' wooden sepulchres, a prey To leaders' rage, to storms, to shot, to dearth? Dar'st thou dive seas, and dungeons of the earth? Hast thou courageous fire to thaw the ice Of frozen North discoveries? and thrice Colder than salamanders, like divine Children in th' oven, fires of Spain and the Line, Whose countries limbecs to our bodies be, Canst thou for gain bear? and must every he Which cries not, "Goddess," to thy mistress, draw Or eat thy poisonous words? Courage of straw! O desperate coward, wilt thou seem bold, and To thy foes and his, who made thee to stand Sentinel in his world's garrison, thus yield, And for forbidden wars leave th' appointed field? Know thy foes: the foul devil, whom thou Strivest to please, for hate, not love, would allow Thee fain his whole realm to be quit; and as The world's all parts wither away and pass, So the world's self, thy other lov'd foe, is In her decrepit wane, and thou loving this, Dost love a wither'd and worn strumpet; last, Flesh (itself's death) and joys which flesh can taste, Thou lovest, and thy fair goodly soul, which doth Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loathe. Seek true religion. O where? Mirreus, Thinking her unhous'd here, and fled from us, Seeks her at Rome; there, because he doth know That she was there a thousand years ago, He loves her rags so, as we here obey The statecloth where the prince sate yesterday. Crantz to such brave loves will not be enthrall'd, But loves her only, who at Geneva is call'd Religion, plain, simple, sullen, young, Contemptuous, yet unhandsome; as among Lecherous humours, there is one that judges No wenches wholesome, but coarse country drudges. Graius stays still at home here, and because Some preachers, vile ambitious bawds, and laws, Still new like fashions, bid him think that she Which dwells with us is only perfect, he Embraceth her whom his godfathers will Tender to him, being tender, as wards still Take such wives as their guardians offer, or Pay values. Careless Phrygius doth abhor All, because all cannot be good, as one Knowing some women whores, dares marry none. Graccus loves all as one, and thinks that so As women do in divers countries go In divers habits, yet are still one kind, So doth, so is Religion; and this blind- ness too much light breeds; but unmoved, thou Of force must one, and forc'd, but one allow, And the right; ask thy father which is she, Let him ask his; though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is; Be busy to seek her; believe me this, He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best. To adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go, And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so. Yet strive so that before age, death's twilight, Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night. To will implies delay, therefore now do; Hard deeds, the body's pains; hard knowledge too The mind's endeavours reach, and mysteries Are like the sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes. Keep the truth which thou hast found; men do not stand In so ill case, that God hath with his hand Sign'd kings' blank charters to kill whom they hate; Nor are they vicars, but hangmen to fate. Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy soul be tied To man's laws, by which she shall not be tried At the last day? Oh, will it then boot thee To say a Philip, or a Gregory, A Harry, or a Martin, taught thee this? Is not this excuse for mere contraries Equally strong? Cannot both sides say so? That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know; Those past, her nature and name is chang'd; to be Then humble to her is idolatry. As streams are, power is; those blest flowers that dwell At the rough stream's calm head, thrive and do well, But having left their roots, and themselves given To the stream's tyrannous rage, alas, are driven Through mills, and rocks, and woods, and at last, almost Consum'd in going, in the sea are lost. So perish souls, which more choose men's unjust Power from God claim'd, than God himself to trust.