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Eugen Boissevain died in the autumn of 1949. I had wondered already, at the time of our visit, what would happen to Edna [Millay] if he should die first. —Edmund Wilson 1 She cleaned house, and then lay down long On the long stair. On one of those cold white wings That the strange fowl provide for us like one hillside of the sea, That cautery of snow that blinds us, Pitiless light, One winter afternoon Fair near the place where she sank down with one wing broken, Three friends and I were caught Stalk still in the light. Five of the lights. Why should they care for our eyes? Five deer stood there. They looked back, a good minute. They knew us, all right: Four chemical accidents of horror pausing Between one suicide or another On the passing wing Of an angel that cared no more for our biology, our pity, and our pain Than we care. Why should any mere multitude of the angels care To lay one blind white plume down On this outermost limit of something that is probably no more Than an aphid, An aphid which is one of the angels whose wings toss the black pears Of tears down on the secret shores Of the seas in the corner Of a poet’s closed eye. Why should five deer Gaze back at us? They gazed back at us. Afraid, and yet they stood there, More alive than we four, in their terror, In their good time. We had a dog. We could have got other dogs. Two or three dogs could have taken turns running and dragging down Those fleet lights, whose tails must look as mysterious as the Stars in Los Angeles. We are men. It doesn’t even satisfy us To kill one another. We are a smear of obscenity On the lake whose only peace Is a hole where the moon Abandoned us, that poor Girl who can’t leave us alone. If I were the moon I would shrink into a sand grain In the corner of the poet’s eye, While there’s still room. We are men. We are capable of anything. We could have killed every one of those deer. The very moon of lovers tore herself with the agony of a wounded tigress Out of our side. We can kill anything. We can kill our own bodies. Those deer on the hillside have no idea what in hell We are except murderers. They know that much, and don’t think They don’t. Man’s heart is the rotten yolk of a blacksnake egg Corroding, as it is just born, in a pile of dead Horse dung. I have no use for the human creature. He subtly extracts pain awake in his own kind. I am born one, out of an accidental hump of chemistry. I have no use. 2 But We didn’t set dogs on the deer, Even though we know, As well as you know, We could have got away with it, Because Who cares? 3 Boissevain, who was he? Was he human? I doubt it, From what I know Of men. Who was he, Hobbling with his dry eyes Along in the rain? I think he must have fallen down like the plumes of new snow, I think he must have fallen into the grass, I think he Must surely have grown around Her wings, gathering and being gathered, Leaf, string, anything she could use To build her still home of songs Within sound of water. 4 By God, come to that, I would have married her too, If I’d got the chance, and she’d let me. Think of that. Being alive with a girl Who could turn into a laurel tree Whenever she felt like it. Think of that. 5 Outside my window just now I can hear a small waterfall rippling antiphonally down over The stones of my poem.

Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake, a boy growing old at the dining room table, pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books the flowers he picked all morning in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus, azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris; reading in another book their names he knows, and then the names from their secret lives; lives alchemical, nautical, genital; names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script; secrets botanical description could never trace: accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife, kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred, horned, brained. Flowers seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged, the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted from time, and stilled by inward gazing. Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds in the words for their parts, the accounts of their histories, and their scattered pollen, something to do with his own fate and the perfection of all dying things. And when it's time, he discovers in the kitchen the note left for him that says his parents have gone and will return by noon. And when it's time, the dove calls from its hiding place and leaves the morning greener and the one who hears the dove more alone.

Except when once we drew identical lots nothing’s ever come between us. We keep our drifts of space spare and daily shake our down. You’ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts. Stuck with sharp wind, both bloods are rare and rarely do we taste the walnut’s knot of oil. We wake between our fitted sheets and shake our fists or pretend real fright but not in this do we dare touch. My rib cage can stand in yours, yours become the swinging doors through which magician’s swords will slice and miss that knotted muscle. It is a trick. We’ll make an endless show of the outright clanking, irregular beating of our acrobatic hearts. We’ve designed the double bars of depth; our hearts skip — the tumbleset we think is absence, the somersault we call forbearance — the hearts are there, doing turns that teach us to count and keep each finger close to its own sly pulse.

You thought you saw me! But you didn't. I wear black turtlenecks. Black panties. Live in a tall cave! You don't know where my cave is. But I come out. Every day! To buy mustard & relish! See what— A man. Walking away from me. No good. Smash him! With a loud smash! Smash his metal table and cards. Good! Down in my cave. Put on my Seahawk gear! Watch Parade of Homes. Watch Ron Popeil put chicken & fishes & burgers & pork & macaroni in the same box. Hey! I can sell that box! At school. Where I smash the gym teacher in his head! I don't wear my uniform. I don't clean my locker. I don't share my lunch with the athletes. My lunch—mustard. Straight from the packet. No one sits next to me. Keep working my skills. Keep circling the word blood in Macbeth. Good. It takes days. It takes days.

(MODERN MACHINERY) We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine, We were melted in the furnace and the pit— We were cast and wrought and hammered to design, We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit. Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask, And a thousandth of an inch to give us play: And now, if you will set us to our task, We will serve you four and twenty hours a day! We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive, We can print and plough and weave and heat and light, We can run and race and swim and fly and dive, We can see and hear and count and read and write! Would you call a friend from half across the world? If you’ll let us have his name and town and state, You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled Across the arch of heaven while you wait. Has he answered? Does he need you at his side? You can start this very evening if you choose, And take the Western Ocean in the stride Of seventy thousand horses and some screws! The boat-express is waiting your command! You will find the Mauretania at the quay, Till her captain turns the lever ’neath his hand, And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea. Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head And lay their new-cut forests at your feet? Do you want to turn a river in its bed, Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat? Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down From the never-failing cisterns of the snows, To work the mills and tramways in your town, And irrigate your orchards as it flows? It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills! Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills, And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake. But remember, please, the Law by which we live, We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die! We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings— Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!- Our touch can alter all created things, We are everything on earth—except The Gods! Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!

Not unusual, to have therapy only one night a week, to have a professional to talk to about personal problems. Evening would be a typical time, after work. It might require traveling there by public transportation, in a city where few people have cars, and taxis have become expensive in the past few years. Some movies have a scene where a character in the movie is tapping on a wall, along a bookshelf, then suddenly, the wall slides aside. Therapists can let their clients in by buzzing a button, if they’re in a private office they don’t share with any colleagues. The wall may have ornamental architectural devices trimming it, but those stay in place when it moves and slides aside. If one client arrives before the previous session is finished, he or she has to wait in a waiting area. He can put his hands on his lap, palms down on his thighs. Upon first seeing it, you don’t realize that there is another room, a corridor, hidden behind the wall. They must suspect that there is a secret panel, because there they are tapping on the wall. They hold an ear near the wall and tap it with two fingers. The later client may see the previous client leaving, therapist shaking his or her hand goodbye, “Until next week,” and the client could develop feelings about this weekly exchange, might feel jealousy. The actors in the movie could then go inside the hidden room or secret corridor behind the sliding panel and escape from some deadly danger that has been threatening.

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry. I who don’t know the secret wrote the line. They told me (through a third person) they had found it but not what it was not even what line it was. No doubt by now, more than a week later, they have forgotten the secret, the line, the name of the poem. I love them for finding what I can’t find, and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.

We have a secret, just we three, The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry-tree; The bird told the tree, and the tree told me, And nobody knows it but just us three. But of course the robin knows it best, Because she built the—I shan't tell the rest; And laid the four little—something in it— I'm afraid I shall tell it every minute. But if the tree and the robin don't peep, I'll try my best the secret to keep; Though I know when the little birds fly about Then the whole secret will be out.

Suddenly with a shy, sad grace She turns to me her lighted face, And I, who hear some idle phrase, Watch how her wry lips move And guess that the poor words they frame Mean naught for they would speak the same Message I read in the dark flame Within her eyes, which say, “I love.” But I can only turn away. I, that have heard the deep voice break Into a sing-song, sobbing shake, Whose flutter made my being quake, What ears have I for women's cries? I, that have seen the turquoise glaze Fixed in the blue and quivering gaze Of one whom cocaine cannot daze, How can I yield to women's eyes? I, who can only turn away. I, that have held strong hands which palter, Borne the full weight of limbs that falter, Bound live flesh on the surgeon's altar, What need have I of women's hand? I, that have felt the dead's embrace? I, whose arms were his resting-place? I, that have kissed a dead man's face? Ah, but how should you understand? Now I can only turn away.

Lo, in my soul there lies a hidden lake, High in the mountains, fed by rain and snow, The sudden thundering avalanche divine, And the bright waters’ everlasting flow, Far from the highways’ dusty glare and heat. Dearer it is and holier, for Christ’s sake, Than his own windy lake in Palestine, For there the little boats put out to sea Without him, and no fisher hears his call, Yea, on the desolate shores of Galilee No man again shall see his shadow fall. Yet here the very voice of the one Light Haunts with sharp ecstasy each little wind That stirs still waters on a moonlit night, And sings through high trees growing in the mind, And makes a gentle rustling in the wheat. . . . Yea, in the white dawn on this happy shore, With the lake water washing at his feet, He stands alive and radiant evermore, Whose presence makes the very East wind kind, And turns to heaven the soul’s green-lit retreat.