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Seems lak to me de stars don't shine so bright, Seems lak to me de sun done loss his light, Seems lak to me der's nothin' goin' right, Sence you went away. Seems lak to me de sky ain't half so blue, Seems lak to me dat eve'ything wants you, Seems lak to me I don't know what to do, Sence you went away. Seems lak to me dat eve'ything is wrong, Seems lak to me de day's jes twice ez long, Seems lak to me de bird's forgot his song, Sence you went away. Seems lak to me I jes can't he’p but sigh, Seems lak to me ma th’oat keeps gittin’ dry, Seems lak to me a tear stays in ma eye, Sence you went away.

Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud: The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall Where the simple heart is bowed. O in wild innocence it rides The rare ungovernable element, But once it sways to terror and descent, The marches of the wind are its abyss, No wind staying it upward of the breast— Let mind be proud for this, And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt, Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.

The dead are having a party without us. They’ve left our worries behind. What a bore we’ve become with our resentment and sorrow, like former lovers united for once by our common complaints. Meanwhile the dead, shedding pilled sweaters, annoying habits, have become glamorous Western celebrities gone off to learn meditation. We trudge home through snow to a burst pipe, broken furnace, looking up at the sky where we imagine they journey to wish them bon voyage, waving till the jet on which they travel first class is out of sight— only the code of its vapor trail left behind.

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way To the siding-shed, And lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray As men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp Stood staring hard, Sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp Winked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent. Nor there if they yet mock what women meant Who gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bells In wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to still village wells Up half-known roads.

Send your spirit to revive our corpses, and ripple the longed-for land again. The crops come from you; you’re good to all— and always return to restore what has been.

Soul, don’t complain, says Senhal, who means by “soul” a thing like “future,” possesses without knowing it not soul, but future, is little present, Senhal, & less past when this she shares, not always willing all, the pale pearl earth with you & shelters in her heart a stunted lemon tree, inviolate, & shielded by a sour ring of fire, the kind that keeps a Valkyrie asleep. Always born too early, Senhal lights these candles not to read by, but to watch the diamonds flower & die within their hot, blue nuclei, which seem to flicker with secret intent that fails, all told, to comprehend her. & arguably, this darkness is, for her, the best of them, refusal of the soul she never recognizes as refusal of the future which she is instead of all her otherwises — & might she have been — conscience-calmed — perhaps — or else a bird of the earthly paradise in which one barely needs to eat or else subsists on manna or some other fragrant zero denuded of the tang of death & the numb green shade, a starry zone, orthogonal with luminous errata, in which a lake of ultramarine has been used with never parsimony in all the places where blue is required to smudge a Thule out of sand & sea & air, a seeming there that seeming wants to hold her in its arms, in which one could be one & yes the ripe quicksilver that the artificer poured into the throats of statues to give them voice had never brought the air alive with hoarsest cries & muffled pleas (lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber did they cry?) as if nor it nor any thing mercurial had ever learned to savor love & poison in one mouth?

William cut a hole in his Levi’s pocket so he could flop himself out in class behind the girls so the other guys could see and shit what guts we all said. All Konga wanted to do over and over was the rubber band trick, but he showed everyone how, so nobody wanted to see anymore and one day he cried, just cried until his parents took him away forever. Maya had a Hotpoint refrigerator standing in his living room, just for his family to show anybody who came that they could afford it. Me, I got a French kiss, finally, in the catholic darkness, my tongue’s farthest half vacationing loudly in another mouth like a man in Bermudas, and my body jumped against a flagstone wall, I could feel it through her thin, almost nonexistent body: I had, at that moment, that moment, a hot girl on a summer night, the best of all the things we tried to do. Well, she let me kiss her, anyway, all over. Or it was just a flagstone wall with a flaw in the stone, an understanding cavity for burning young men with smooth dreams— the true circumstance is gone, the true circumstances about us all then are gone. But when I kissed her, all water, she would close her eyes, and they into somewhere would disappear. Whether she was there or not, I remember her, clearly, and she moves around the room, sometimes, until I sleep. I have lain on the desert in watch low in the back of a pick-up truck for nothing in particular, for stars, for the things behind stars, and nothing comes more than the moment: always now, here in a truck, the moment again to dream of making love and sweat, this time to a woman, or even to all of them in some allowable way, to those boys, then, who couldn’t cry, to the girls before they were women, to friends, me on my back, the sky over me pressing its simple weight into her body on me, into the bodies of them all, on me.

Being in a coma can play havoc with your sense of time. It can turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost between bedroom and office. If you are to live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners, step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time, you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake to a busy underground world, where people in body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where. Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving your sense of time, which was never supposed to have an end.

for Sophie Hawkes I (Weapons) doubled corners of the situation the words duped by this dialectic know the pose of “brushing against” insistence on detail severe eyelashes the weapons must be kept in order (take the game of courtesy of charm) her knees crossed over the manner of his undressing her a chord (deceptively resonant) a strength of image but scanty provisions interrupt her concerns for doors into sleep focuses the story can be carried in two hands finale: I have turned on with shifting strands of light

for C. Like shoes she chose for comfort, not for style, that fit her contours without chafe or blistering Here is sanity. It took her years to arrive, like an explorer settling at last into uneasy retirement, a small cottage at the edge of the sea. How the breakers crash against the underpinnings; still, the walls hold firm. Hearth blazing steadily, she tries to warm to it tells herself she is mature now, this is good. The days of stalking, done, the rabid pulse, the blood-drenched kisses, all behind her now. Wearied, finally, of careless cruelties, she will stay here, grow old with you. And, sensible, lacking her gift for self-deception, you know she struggles with devotion, you listen as she moans inside her dreams, and watch, without remarking, as she tracks the tap of high heels just beyond the window, their rhythm growing fainter with each step.