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In unexperienced infancy Many a sweet mistake doth lie: Mistake though false, intending true; A seeming somewhat more than view; That doth instruct the mind In things that lie behind, And many secrets to us show Which afterwards we come to know. Thus did I by the water’s brink Another world beneath me think; And while the lofty spacious skies Reversèd there, abused mine eyes, I fancied other feet Came mine to touch or meet; As by some puddle I did play Another world within it lay. Beneath the water people drowned, Yet with another heaven crowned, In spacious regions seemed to go As freely moving to and fro: In bright and open space I saw their very face; Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine; Another sun did with them shine. ’Twas strange that people there should walk, And yet I could not hear them talk; That through a little watery chink, Which one dry ox or horse might drink, We other worlds should see, Yet not admitted be; And other confines there behold Of light and darkness, heat and cold. I called them oft, but called in vain; No speeches we could entertain: Yet did I there expect to find Some other world, to please my mind. I plainly saw by these A new antipodes, Whom, though they were so plainly seen, A film kept off that stood between. By walking men’s reversèd feet I chanced another world to meet; Though it did not to view exceed A phantom, ’tis a world indeed, Where skies beneath us shine, And earth by art divine Another face presents below, Where people’s feet against ours go. Within the regions of the air, Compassed about with heavens fair, Great tracts of land there may be found Enriched with fields and fertile ground; Where many numerous hosts In those far distant coasts, For other great and glorious ends Inhabit, my yet unknown friends. O ye that stand upon the brink, Whom I so near me through the chink With wonder see: what faces there, Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear? I my companions see In you, another me. They seemèd others, but are we; Our second selves these shadows be. Look how far off those lower skies Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes I can them reach. O ye my friends, What secret borders on those ends? Are lofty heavens hurled ’Bout your inferior world? Are yet the representatives Of other peoples’ distant lives? Of all the playmates which I knew That here I do the image view In other selves, what can it mean? But that below the purling stream Some unknown joys there be Laid up in store for me; To which I shall, when that thin skin Is broken, be admitted in.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality; And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

Essay #1 Mrs. Goldberg’s AP Intro to Lit Shakespeare understood the blues. He knew parting was such sweet sorrow. Mr. Shakespeare was the main MC Of the Elizabethan scene and so I figure To be or not to be (similar to how you be?) Be as timeless as hell and as universal Since such questions never go out of style. I only wish Othello had sussed out Iago And taken Iago down to the crossroads And asked Iago the devil’s true-true name. Juliet is like Lady Gaga (in my HBO rewrite) And Romeo lives in Harlem with his moms — Though that’s only his nom-de-plume. He wants to be the first rapper with a PhD. And Robert Burns smiles to keep from crying And when he penned the best-made plans Of mice and men (not rats) often go astray What he really meant was shit happens. Dead Old White Men they knew the blues Though they didn’t always know what They knew okay maybe not even in 1619 By which time Shakespeare was Auld Lang Syne and Burns was not yet in this world But the blues isn’t stuck on color or CP time.

Oh, but to fade, and live we know not where, To be a cold obstruction and to groan! This sensible, warm woman to become A prudish clod; and the delighted spirit To live and die alone, or to reside With married sisters, and to have the care Of half a dozen children, not your own; And driven, for no one wants you, Round the pendant world; or worse than worse Of those that disappointment and pure spite Have driven to madness: ’Tis too horrible! The weariest and most troubled married life That age, ache, penury, or jealousy Can lay on nature, is a paradise To being an old maid. That very time I saw, (but thou couldst not,) Walking between the garden and the barn, Reuben, all armed; a certain aim he took At a young chicken standing by a post, And loosed his bullet smartly from his gun, As he would kill a hundred thousand hens. But I might see young Reuben’s fiery shot Lodged in the chaste board of the garden fence, And the domesticated fowl passed on, In henly meditation, bullet free. My father had a daughter got a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I good-looking, I should, your lordship. And what’s her residence? A hut my lord, she never owned a house, But let her husband, like a graceless scamp, Spend all her little means,—she thought she ought,— And in a wretched chamber, on an alley, She worked like masons on a monument, Earning their bread. Was not this love indeed?

you put this pen in my hand and you take the pen from my hand. the night before the full moon the moon seems full. what is missing is a dark hungry sickle, the sliver of shadow eating us up inside. after the mountains breathe their mint-and-sorrow green against the long summer sky, they burst into hot october laughter, lighting the horizon with citrus, rust, and blood. you put this knife in my hand. we pull. we meet as oceans come together, heaving against and clinging across our salt watery boundary. we approach endlessly like two rails of one track, tied in a parallel that promises our eyes to merge, someplace far off in the distance. you put this feather in my palm. my fingers close around flight.

Shall earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Since passion may not fire thee Shall Nature cease to bow? Thy mind is ever moving In regions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving— Come back and dwell with me. I know my mountain breezes Enchant and soothe thee still— I know my sunshine pleases Despite thy wayward will. When day with evening blending Sinks from the summer sky, I’ve seen thy spirit bending In fond idolatry. I’ve watched thee every hour; I know my mighty sway, I know my magic power To drive thy griefs away. Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine; Yet none would ask a heaven More like this earth than thine. Then let my winds caress thee; Thy comrade let me be— Since nought beside can bless thee, Return and dwell with me.

Like everyone, I wanted my animal to be the hawk. I thought I wanted the strength to eat the eyes first then tear into the fuse box of the chest and soar away. I needed help because I still cowered under the shadow of my father, a man who inspected picture tubes five out of seven nights, who woke to breakfast on burnt roast except the two weeks he’d sleep on a Jersey beach and throw me into the gasoline-sheened waves. I loved him dying indebted not knowing to what, thinking his pension would be enough, released not knowing from what, gumming at something I was afraid to get close enough to hear, afraid of what I was co-signing. So maybe the elephant. The elephant knows when one of its own is suffering up to six miles away. Charges across the desert cognizant of the futility. How can I be forgiven when I don’t know what I need forgiving for? Sometimes the urges are too extreme: to slap on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal is the tiger. Or shark. Or centipede. But I know I’m smaller than that, filling notebooks with clumsy versions of one plaint, one pheromonal call, clamoring over a crumb that I think is the world, baffled by the splotch of one of my own crushed kind, almost sweet, a sort of tar, following a trail of one or two molecules, leaving a trail of one or two molecules.

I hid the deed: —would my life end? The grackle called it back again. The grackle then became my life. A swan’s neck curling to ask what if uncurled to reach into the reed, and struck the stone of what I did. The grackle called it back again. The grackle called it back again.

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed, offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me— I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things— she’d decided that I was after all all right ... twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant, which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected, but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted, what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.

A sudden not-breeze fills the air. Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat. A boat of agony. Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting. Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the fourth wall. How to read that? The optic nerve gets it up. What has been done weighs the heigh. The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket. Acquisitive or generous? Balance implies a man out of sight line removing his shoes. Why a man? is the question. The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher. Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep. They worry but their eyeballs still roll. And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip, the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech. Let us bury Caesar. I hope we find some sand.