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May 4, 1959 for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959

I’ve sent my empty pot again To beg another slip; The last you gave, I’m grieved to tell December’s frost did nip. I love fair Flora and her train But nurse her children ill; I tend too little, or too much; They die from want of skill. I blush to trouble you again, Who’ve served me oft before; But, should this die, I’ll break the pot, And trouble you no more.

Ain’t nothing more beautiful than a French diplomat in an Italian suit discussing the intimate ties between poetry and constipation with a United States Senator in a discount blazer from the Men’s Wearhouse bought especially for the occasion of proposing the Anti-Chimera Act, a prime indicator that if children were once the future, they are not the past, which is growing hairier every moment, so as to keep us from penetrating its insides, which we must nibble on as if nibbling on donuts, by which I mean rubrics, glittering rubrics in the dry heat of an empty test bank full of raccoons with flexible snouts and long tails that materialize in the shrubbery as thick-set stocky fraternity brothers suicide bomb colleges full of free thinking mavericks with tuning forks in their ears and rubber dicks in their pockets, a veritable cure for loneliness and its side effects, including the desire to fantasize about mythological genitalia in the pants of pundits who declare that to be alive is fundamentally okay as long as poets test their verses on guinea pigs before submitting them to us humans as we exit the amalgamated marshland of surplus value and enter an ordinary evening on which ordinary people dream of lubricated condoms for dogs, of mules who practice the pull-out method, of birth control pills for cats, of floating trousers that haunt city squares in search of red-walled boutiques where silk stockings and boot-cut chinos fight for the attention of disembodied legs while merchants masturbate, aroused by visions of painless castration, aroused by hands without arms scribbling conjunctions into dusty ceilings, aroused by hands without arms stirring infinite bowls of soup, aroused by module-makers who insist only on the metaphorical value of money as represented in the hieroglyphics painted on the walls of financiers who accumulate capital through the unjustified sexual behavior of adulterous women who appear asymmetrically—legs over heads, hands coming out of butts—in public ceremonies in which syringes suck out erroneous feelings from their bodies while suits and ties stuff bones and ears into decorative bottles and jars.

After Don McKay I crawl back       he unpacks his tools oils the wooden handles        rinses the metal fragrant       his thighs fragrant his sneer koi & eternity inked on his skin          an ecstatic blue a bewildered green some wounds are ovals some wounds are opals the ears of a white wolf pivot        toward the moon I flee now & then         alone in the desert for months a nomad in a kimono of pressed-together dust beautiful his throat his words         even more beautiful “it’s my turn to ask for a bit more from you” he likes it when I bleed         strangers once gently he hammers gold into a sentence       gently the sentence enters me

A thing too perfect to be remembered: stone beautiful only when wet. *     *     * Blinded by light or black cloth— so many ways not to see others suffer. *     *     * Too much longing: it separates us like scent from bread, rust from iron. *     *     * From very far or very close— the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle. *     *     * As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves, we listen to the murmuring dead. *     *     * Any point of a circle is its start: desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring. *     *     * In a room in which nothing has happened, sweet-scented tobacco. *     *     * The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents. *     *     * Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes. Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does “earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No, yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard, hammering winter? When my father was buried, the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . . Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened, mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But they have their validity, don't they, yes? their sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . . questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal, and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics. What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if I wept? What if I simply put the page down, rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising light, and walked back up to his stone a final time, just that, no drama, and it was so cold, and the air was so brittle, metal buckled out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me, where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.

carnegie hall, october 19, 2014 beauty eludes me, usually. i soak up the lush red, violet, indigo blooms abdullah ibrahim’s cool fingers pluck from the keyboard’s bed, but bring to these ‘rooms’ (stanzas forged from replayed past as today’s not-news) no solacing bouquets. my weeds? i conjure rough green to rupture from seeds so furious they bleed — or, grieving, raise crabgrass and blue notes, peppered with rust, where he grows flowers. yes, i tend my plants incisively : no phrase that droops or wants out of the sun survives long. but the rest run wild, flush vivid, throw shade, deluge fruit, lavishly express their dissonant root.

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

The grasses are light brown and the ocean comes in long shimmering lines under the fleet from last night which dozes now in the early morning Here and there horses graze on somebody’s acreage Strangely, it was not my desire that bade me speak in church to be released but memory of the way it used to be in careless and exotic play when characters were promises then recognitions.  The world of transformation is real and not real but trusting. Enough of these lessons?  I mean didactic phrases to take you in and out of love’s mysterious bonds? Well I myself am not myself and which power of survival I speak for is not made of houses. It is inner luxury, of golden figures that breathe like mountains do and whose skin is made dusky by stars.

Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one running in the yard pulse pulse the absence. Leave them not to the empty yards. They resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes one was angry sometimes someone called her "wife" someone's hair receding. An uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness and oh what to do with it. (How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.) It had been some time since richness intangible and then they made a whole coat of it. Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale. A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along. Borderless and open the days go on—