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We arrive eight hours before morning but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand prickled with fringes of eelgrass, and the world's baby teeth ground down to this pall of sand. It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight — You can see in each stunted and strung-out live oak the shape of the wind's hands. On this last stand before the Outer Banks Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters to shelter stunned and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes. The groove fits my tongue so for forty more pages I keep the light on, pulled by a man oaring his way through childhood to a stung and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied lessing & moring of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason this freight of rain, salt in my hair. That child I was, what was she mourning before death charged his first fare? We wake and hurry to slip our moorings. The ferry's there.

In the hermetic almost dark under the fluorescent dizz I found her broken nerves, smoke coming off the dashes, the caps like jolts to the neck, the pried-open spaces between vowels where the teeth bit off twine and the tongue was raw then cool with ice. The air of the stockroom after lunch was the marbleized silence of the small blank pages she stitched into privacy. Air of paper and faint glue bond, carbon, graph, yellow pads, in the stockroom I could read alone— the confetti of money dissolved on the blank wall. After work, I slid the numbered poems on blue mimeo into my playbook, and felt the open field the zig-zagging past cornerbacks, the white lines skewed to heaven. Excuse my mood—unbridled, chemical, her scrawled messages smooth to the mind, excuse my absence, again and yes, then, too— the cold stone of the Palisades was there after we split— alone naked in the Hudson, the water greasing me in the tepid, chemical mix, before I returned to the cement of 9W in my father’s Skylark the night black and soundless within.

How many miles to the border where all the sky there is exists for the soul alone? Where the only breathers breathing are constructed from some new electricity and the flowers are made indestructible, and messages from the dead arrive like calm white birds with a gift? One more night of spiritual ice and we might all become birds, green birds frozen on a black winter branch. There is a drumming in the shadows under leaves: a million eight-eyed spiders on the march. The buckeyes beat themselves half to death against some lit-from-within screen.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after. Clay that tastes of care or carelessness, clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust. Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. There are honeys so bitter no one would willingly choose to take them. The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, honey of cruelty, fear. This rebus—slip and stubbornness, bottom of river, my own consumed life— when will I learn to read it plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? Not to understand it, only to see. As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices. Each yes, each no continues, this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup. The ladder leans into its darkness. The anvil leans into its silence. The cup sits empty. How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

I Why will Delia thus retire, And idly languish life away? While the sighing crowd admire, ’Tis too soon for hartshorn tea: II All those dismal looks and fretting Cannot Damon’s life restore; Long ago the worms have eat him, You can never see him more. III Once again consult your toilette, In the glass your face review: So much weeping soon will spoil it, And no spring your charms renew. IV I, like you, was born a woman, Well I know what vapors mean: The disease, alas! is common; Single, we have all the spleen. V All the morals that they tell us, Never cured the sorrow yet: Chuse, among the pretty fellows, One of honor, youth, and wit. VI Prithee hear him every morning At least an hour or two; Once again at night returning— I believe the dose will do.

it's your 1st year of college & you should be missing home by now but mostly you don't. you read the Chicago newspapers & call family on Sundays. you pick up going to church at a place adjacent to the projects. you're not from the projects & the ones in Chicago seem worse but there's comfort in being around plainspoken folk. the church folk feed you & also cook you food. you take African American studies classes & sleep through Spanish & write poems at night. you read the newspaper. you consider pledging a fraternity. you go to parties to watch people. you don't miss home. you call your ex girl a lot. you imagine her face across the phone line. you stare at the scar on her chin. it is shiny & smooth. you read the newspaper. you text new girls mostly. you invite them to play cards & bet clothes or take them to dinner on your birthday so you don't spend it alone or you share their extra-long twin beds or you just text them. it's your 1st year of college & your nephew is tiny & your niece is young enough to be happy & the world is new & you are not going home for Thanksgiving. you are in the South at a new friend's house. you go to church with his family & to his old high school's basketball game & to his malls & to his grandmother's house. you did not make your team past 9th grade & never went to malls much. your grandmother had been dead for 2 years now. you read the newspaper. his family are nice people. you do not miss home. you go back to school. you stop talking to your ex girl. she has a new guy. you do not miss home. you write poems. you read the newspaper. there are still more kids dying. your 1st year of college & you should be missing but you're still here. you write papers about black people & voting & violence & families & that is the same paper. you don't read the newspaper. you have finals to finish. you go to church on Sunday with your new friend & you talk to new girls & consider pledging. you have heard the fraternities will haze you. you have heard about beating but you are not from the projects & you are not in Chicago. you stop reading the newspaper. you decide to kiss a girl & mean it. you decide to pledge a fraternity. you should have more information about the newspaper. & the girl. & the fraternity. you should call home more. you don't read the newspapers or call. you are not from the projects or Chicago. you do not miss home. or your ex girl. or your newspaper. there are still more kids dying. you convince your new friend to pledge the fraternity. he worries about the hazing, the beatings. you tell him this is an opportunity. don't miss it.

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember what it was like in the spring of 1950 before the burning coal entered my life. I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels and one crooked broken masculine one and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain with skin wrinkled up like a chicken's beside the razor and the silver tap. I didn't live in Paris for nothing and walk with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire and I didn't save the picture of the two of us moving through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams unless I wanted to see what coals had done to their lives too. I say it with vast affection, wanting desperately to know what the two of them talked about when they lived in Pennsylvania and what they talked about at St. Elizabeth's fifty years later, looking into the sun, 40,000 wrinkles between them, the suffering finally taking over their lives. I think of Gilbert all the time now, what we said on our long walks in Pittsburgh, how lucky we were to live in New York, how strange his great fame was and my obscurity, how we now carry the future with us, knowing every small vein and every elaboration. The coal has taken over, the red coal is burning between us and we are at its mercy— as if a power is finally dominating the two of us; as if we're huddled up watching the black smoke and the ashes; as if knowledge is what we needed and now we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge. The tears are different—though I hate to speak for him—the tears are what we bring back to the darkness, what we are left with after our own escape, what, all along, the red coal had in store for us as we moved softly, either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning, on the gray sidewalks and the green ocean; in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores; in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.

Last night she came to me, my mother, dead: but as she was in the photo, that last Christmas, wearing a red dress, and her lipstick was red (I wonder if that means she lives in hell), and I saw again that she was beautiful, the same high forehead I have, the same wide brow, and just my age, forty-nine; and now I was talking fast, because I knew I had no time, and I told her I loved her, I told her how her life had informed mine, and I begged her to come to me again, to meet my children, my wife. I said to her—My work, see what I have made, I have tried to do what you did not live to do. But she smiled at me and began to fade.

In the day’s mirror you see a tall black man. Fingers of gold cattail tremble, then you witness the rope dangling from a limb of white oak. It’s come to this. You yell his direction, the wind taking your voice away. You holler his mama’s name & he glances up at the red sky. You can almost touch what he’s thinking, reaching for his hand across the river. The noose pendulous over his head, you can feel him grow inside you, straining to hoist himself, climbing a ladder of air, your feet in his shoes.

Heartbeat trembling your kingdom of leaves near the ceremony of water, I never insisted on you. I admit I delayed. I was the Empress of Delay. But it can’t be put off now. On the sacred branch of my only voice – I insist. Insist for us all, which is the job of the voice, and especially of the poet. Else what am I for, what use am I if I don’t insist? There are messages to send. Gatherings and songs. Because we need to insist. Else what are we for? What use are we?