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after this, the cold more intense, and the night comes rapidly up . angels in the fall . around a tongue of land, free from trees . awakened by feeling a heavy weight on your feet, something that seems inert and motionless . awestruck manner, as though you expected to find some strange presence behind you . coming through the diamond-paned bay window of your sanctum . a crimson-flowered silk dressing gown, the folds of which I could now describe . deathly pallor overspreading . describing the exact nature of your nightly troubles . discomfort at seeing a surface spoiled . echo and foretaste . the entrance blocked, not only by brambles and nettles, which have to be beaten aside, but by piles of faggots, old boxes, and even refuse . expecting every moment to see the door open and give admission to the original of my detested portrait . fantastic wigs, costumes, other disguises . filling up the width of the street . frequent tussles . the glitter of silver and glass and the subdued lights and cackle of conversation around the dinner table . high-backed carved oak chair . I have omitted in my narration . . . . in a great raftered hall . in a tableau vivant, as an angel, sewn up in tights, with wings on your back . light your candle and  open the window . lines of your dress, with a hint of underthings . looking up, our problem still unsolved . luxurious with heavy silk and rich rococo furniture, all of it much soiled with age . many questions about the stars, of which you gave me my first intelligent idea . meanwhile, the snow, with ominous steadiness, and the wind falls . my weakness for the Ypsilanti Waltz, which I did regard as the most wonderful of compositions . neat strip of fine turf edging the road and running back until the poison of the dead beech leaves kills it under the trees . never venturing farther than a sandy beach, but losing everything at sea . not crawling or creeping, but spreading . not just out of repair, but in a condition of decay . only a foul trick after all . on the face of the judge in the picture, a malignant smile . profound impressions of unearthly horror . rambles and adventures among the rocky banks . the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hangs down . rough horseplay and quarrels . sashes that splinter at a touch . the serpentlike form of the seraphim . something uncertain at work among the monuments . the thing on the bed, slowly shifting . till this particular day has passed through all the seasons of the year . the vicar, who used to tell us the story of Robinson Crusoe . waves and their whelps . while with a sickening revulsion after my terror, I drop half fainting across the end of the bed . with a pair of great greenish eyes shining dimly out within the lattice fronts . with painted carvings of saints and devils, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope

I Fate is cleverer than the king of Babylon. Shadow of yew fall through windows onto the floor of the nave and touch the pillars with tattered shade. You claim the dearest wish of your life is to sink into a soul-freezing situation of horror.  The music of a crash caught in the hollow of a wooded hillside. 2 Grave, questioning sweep—chiefly the weird that arouses our keenest hopes. The garden of dreams contains a summerhouse, hazy period of my growth. There are bodies, not greatly extended, called seas nevertheless, because of their depth and violence. I’ve some little doubt about this ceremony entirely embedded in a cup of grassy hills. 3 Pardon me for loitering. I was sleeping soundly when I was roused by the loud clang of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick, flung against the banister. Unprotected, destitute of the means of self-defense, you hug to yourself the consciousness of vanished beauty. The sea is un- certain, on the main and also along the coast. 4 Strange rooms. Through these experimental years, who can describe beauty in the dead of night? Complain of frivolity or of portraits exactly like ghosts. The waters of the great surrounding sea will completely evaporate when the sun opens the fifth of its seven eyes. Oh yes, I take pleasure in backgrounds, bringing them forward. 5 These are only a few of many legendary details, called from the distant future where each thing has its end, including sea, sun, the eyes. You live in another season—even now I feel acrobatic instincts. Large strange rooms. A silver cup from his household plate, a sky of the same gray tones, a great wilderness of books. 6 When the sea subsides into utter calm, changing clouds caught in its clarity, then fishermen say the sea is thinking about itself. A dark back room, looking down upon a narrow courtyard—waking out of some dreams of specters, bellowing the most frightful shrieks, forgetting only at the sound of somebody’s voice. 7 You light me to bed with your light, and never a night but I am prey to ghostly visions—a tenderness no usual in my family. The lion pauses a certain space of time, amid a sea of divers thoughts, choppy half desires, memoranda of search and hunger, very peculiar ideas of the world.

Down in the shipyard, day and night, The Galahads of the dock, Hard as the sinews of basin rock, Build an ocean cosmopolite. The rivets stab and the hammers bite Into the beams and plates of steel Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel. We, The workers of the world strike catholic notes On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats Epics of industry. Day and night The diapason puts The bent-winged gulls to flight And shakes the harbor and quakes the ground And leaps at the suns like Prometheus bound. Our matrix shapes our citizen of the world To cross the churning mountains of the sea, Nor fashions a canoe to sail a lake In cool felicity.

Bedfordshire A blue bird showing off its undercarriage En route between our oldest universities Was observed slightly off-course above Woburn In the leafy heart of our sleepiest county: Two cyclists in tandem looked up at the same moment, Like a busy footnote to its asterisk. Berkshire Once on the causeway outside Steventon I had a vision of living in willing exile, Of living the knowingly imperfect life But with a boundless and joyous energy Like Borodin played by the North Berkshire Youth Orchestra in its early days. Buckinghamshire A goose in the garden of the second-best pub In Marsh Gibbon was busy doing its dirty toothpaste And noisy, too, when a woman staggered out Of the lounge bar into the deserted car-park Saying: ‘I could never think of the child at my breast As anything other than a penis with a mouth.’ Cambridgeshire The bird arrived. Nothing so stately-exciting As Handel’s dusky queen that was unspooling Perhaps too loudly from a scribbling student cell, But looped between the trees, a flash of green: And only the having chanced to look just there Could tell you it had ever been away. Cheshire There was a young woman of Cheadle, who wore her heart Upon her sleeve, bright chevron! Oh, the keen-eyed Men of Cheadle, as in the jealous month When the registration numbers of new estate cars Change all over wealthy suburban Cheshire, And they picked out her heart with a needle. Cornwall The very last cat to speak Cornish had a glass eye And kept a corner shop, selling shoe-laces and bullseyes, Brasso and Reckitt’s Blue. My great-aunt remembers Buying postcards from him as a girl, When George’s profile sped them for a penny. Aching to talk, he died of pure loneliness. Cumberland They play bezique in Threlkeld and they play For keeps in Shap. And all the shapely clouds Roll through the streets like weeping chemistry Or cows escaped. And tea is served in the lounge Over a jig-saw puzzle of the Princess Elizabeth Beneath wet panes, wet mountains and wet sky. Derbyshire Once upon a time, in Derbyshire’s leaking basement Where you lie back in boats and quant by walking the ceiling, A strange girl in the dripping darkness attached Her damp lips to mine fast, like a snail’s adherence To cold stone in dusty nettles, and all unseeen The bluejohn slid by me: yellows, greys and purples. Devon You will never forget the fish market at Barnstaple: Wet gills, double bellies, gleaming scales, Shells like spilt treasure. And the cream there thicker Than a virgin’s dream, and Devon’s greatest poet Born Gay, on Joy Street, taught by Robert Luck: It is the paradise of all fat poets. Dorset When the old woman entered the sea at Charmouth And the great waves hung over her head like theatre curtains, I thought of the sibyl who charmed the rocks to yield Their grainy secrets till history bore down Upon her and the liquid world was fixed For ever in the era of the fossils. Durham At the end of your battered philosophical quest, The purity of Durham rises like an exhalation, Like the stench of sulphur in a barrel. Birds Build in the walls of the cloisters, disappearing into holes Like black-robed devotees. Inside it is quiet, The oatmeal crimping distant in grey air. Essex I had a vision in the dead of night Of all the kitchens of commuters’ Essex Alight like the heads of snakes; and down them slid The bored wives and daughters of the managers Who were at the identical time arriving On the ladders of their power and fatigue. Gloucestershire Armorial memorials reduced To leper stone, forests to hedges, hedges To sickled stumps where perch the songless birds Of Gloucestershire, and vans require the roads Before them in their headlights. No one speaks In the time it takes to cross the greenest county. Hampshire Driving at evening down the A 34 Like a ski-run, the sun a deiphany, The car-radio a percussive Russian insistence: Pure pleasure, pure escape! Past Winchester, Unseen its stalking scholars, past everything, Driving through Hampshire, driving for the boats! Herefordshire Alone between the Arrow and the Wye, Wales to the west, keeping its rain and secrets, I wandered in cider country, where the shade Beneath the trees is golden red and noisy With the jealous spite of wasps: Ariconium, The poet Philips, his long hair combed out! Hertfordshire Hertfordshire is full of schoolmasters, And archaeologists who are part-time poets. Together they apportion past, present And future among their imaginary admirers In the form of examination papers, foul Drafts, and labels of dubious information. Huntingdonshire Herds of deer are moving through the trees Of Huntingdonshire noisily and rather Slowly. An idle hand sweeping the lyre Brings tears to the eyes of the moderately rich. They will dip their hands in their pockets, gently dip But not too deep. You’ve got to keep money moving. Kent Old men coming up to bowl remember Other old men who in their turn remembered Things that were hardly worth remembering Through long still nights in Ashford, Faversham, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells and Westerham Where even now the fields still smell of beer. Lancashire All the oven doors of Lancashire Swing open on the hour, revealing vast Puddings. After tea, the lovers stroll, Their hands in each other’s back trouser pockets, Feeling the strange swell of the flexing buttock. The sun sinks, and the Ribble runs to the sea. Leicestershire Cheeks of angels, lips compressed, donate To brass invisible impulsions of Purely material breath: a county’s children Gather to create an overture, While brothers and fathers leaping over hedges Wind horns to their alternative conclusion. Lincolnshire M1, M18, M180: the roads With their bright and bowline intersections sweep North to Scunthorpe. Go further if you will To where the Trent meets the Humber and Lincolnshire ends. There, at Alkborough, you may draw breath And if Nicky’s at home she will give you a cup of something. Middlesex Middlesex is mostly roundabouts, the bright Voice of five p.m., insistent infotainment: Fingers gallop irritably on the steering-wheel; The nails make little clicks. Down the line Of fuming stationary Volvos boys bully with headlines That tell the drivers all about the place they have come from. Norfolk Norfolk is somehow inverted: it’s all sky With clouds as bulky as castrati or lines of Dryden Sailing out above you, tinged with sunset. Get as far as you can, but not too far, Say to the Tuesday Market Place at King’s Lynn Where all the conveyancing is done in verse. Northamptonshire Once half-lost here, when only a map of sounds Or smells could lead us from a wood, we came At evening to horse-brass and low-timbered beams Where the world had evolved to its great public state And the men and women of Northampton, being counted And with amber drinks, found themselves to be happy. Northumberland Traitors’ county: from one end to the other You can walk bright-eyed with never a second glance From a stocky frowning people who move slowly And mind their own business. For they have seen it all: When the mist clears over Northumberland It leaves squat towers, valleys scarred with lead. Nottinghamshire There is one red door in one slightly curved Street in one nameless market town That contains behind it for a moment an image Of the planet’s destiny: a girl stooping To a hallway mirror, making her lips move Into a theatrical kiss, a self kiss. Oxfordshire The kingfisher has long flown. Along the Cherwell The biscuit of bridge and college wall is blank Of its image, but with a passing presence Like a photograph taken with an open shutter. This, we reflect, is just the sense of our life, Aware of something the very moment that we miss it. Rutland Rutland is large enough for you and me To stumble into as into a wood without being seen, To tread its moss-starred carpet, enchanted By the chipped china of the russulas, Pink, grey, grey and green-grey, and red, Peeping beneath the oaks, not far from Oakham. Shropshire Shropshire Blue, still made, the Lord be praised, Tart veins that kept the Romans here and Housman From the rope. The iron bridges lead you to it, Farms knee-deep in cow. And if you stop off In red-earthed Bridgnorth, that vigilant town, Be sure your pint is not ungraced with cheese. Somerset A thousand airy harps! We hardly dare To let out breath, for our imagination Responds to these full-throated sounds as though To the ranks of the ever-delighting dead, our wise Visionaries, and this is the county of dreams And of the moon’s occult praesidium. Staffordshire Staffordshire is where you almost came from, Darkened beneath burnt clay, perpetual dusk. It is the housewife’s dream, twinkling hearths Bright with Zebo, scrubbed pumice steps And, in the bathroom, a finger on the nozzle And little lavender farts to begin the day. Suffolk I’ve had Leigh and buried St Edmunds, Stowed Felix and Market and Upland, I’ve been shut up in Boxton, found it painful in Akenham And felt totally stupid in Assingham: Carrying around one’s valuable despair like a fleece, To live in Suffolk is to suffocate. Surrey Flying in perfect formation above the sleeping Cul-de-sacs of Surrey, you observe The blocked pairing of houses, each with a garage, Like epaulettes. What whisperings behind The party walls! What eavesdropping, and what Bad timing! Well done! Sorry, partner! Boom! Sussex Chalk pie, a quality of sun like laughter, Distance predicted in hoof-beats: everywhere here Is vigilance as well as cruel amusement, That tempered island quality called sardonic. From Rye to Selsey Bill, something is on offer, A glittering spread, the bottom drawer pulled out. Warwickshire Driving to Wales I crossed a corner of Warwickshire That seemed to be hardly space at all, the home Of Dr Hall and his famous father-in-law Or of magic woods where lovers were lost and found, But simply the minutes that it took to tell An unimportant story, now forgotten. Westmorland Once again the skies are open over the whole county: From Clifton to Burton, from Grasmere to Brough, The pubtalk steaming with anoraks and orange parkas. But I can remember one solitary eye Raging in silence in the dripping marsh, Its dewy lashes spooning aphids from the air. Wiltshire In Wiltshire they are sending extra-terrestrial Signals: what will the Venusians think of us? Four-footed creatures who like to move in circles? Let’s hope they never noisily discover That we are only half the men they thought us, Stumbling at tangents from our glimpsed perfection. Worcestershire Oh darling, come to Broadway: there we’ll take Tea and scones and jam made from the plums Of Pershore, perfect, pitless, palate-pleasing. A stroll in the model street, a browse at Gavina’s. Then it’s right foot down in the Volvo, plenty of Scotch And the largest bed we can find at the Bull in Worcester. Yorkshire The brown teapot is always warming here For there will be a time when you must come home Though you be unknown except to the flowered dead. On the moors the diagonal smoke rises Like a bitter smile, tight but welcoming: Cousin country, extra places for tea.

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord.   Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Here comes Shitty Kitty en route to the Gulf of Tonkin or en route to a race riot? That is the question and meanwhile discipline is the keystone and meanwhile did you see on TV helicopters being ditched into the sea? That is also my film and meanwhile all refugees must be treated as suspects. Looking for your husband? Looking for your son? That is the question and meanwhile she was the mother of the boy or that is what the translator said or Shitty Kitty or shall we adhere to traditional concepts of military discipline tempered with humanitarianism? That is the question and meanwhile South Korea exports military labor left over from the war. That is also my history or is that your history? That is the question and meanwhile (CHORUS: Dictator Park Chung Hee and his soldiers in Ray-Bans) How much? $7.5 million=per division or Binh Tai massacre=$7.5 million or Binh Hoa massacre=$7.5 million or Dien Nien—Phuoc Binh massacre=$7.5 million or Go Dai massacre=$7.5 milion or Ha My massacre=$7.5 million or Phong Nhi & Phong Nhat massacre=$15 million or Tay Vinh massacre=$7.5 million or Vinh Xuan massacre=$7.5 million or Mighty History? That is the question and meanwhile a riot began over a grilled cheese sandwich at Subic Bay. Discrimination or perception? That is the question and meanwhile the sailor refused to make a statement or translate? That is the question and meanwhile twenty-six men all black were charged with assault and rioting and meanwhile did you translate? That is my question and meanwhile lard or Crisco? Aye, aye, sir! (Anti-CHORUS: kittens in frilly white bonnets, bibs, and mittens) K I T T Y  S O N G I, aye-aye-sir! I, crazy-daisy-sir! I, export-quality-sir! I, grill-grill-sir! I, meow-meow-sir! I, kitty-litter-sir!

Tightened jaw, I did not love. Flashback of myself  jerked about, legs high above my head, men laughing, I came to sea drifts, movement and crashing. I found I am not so far from God exploding. Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live. Seven storks still and white on a gold lake. My lazy eye glances back to that original split, myself  high above myself. Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’t know hours from minutes. I was hypervigilant for catastrophes. My head raging then numb. The early garden bare, and now, shocked with sudden memory, I return to changing sky hues, blooms of lilac bursting along sidewalks. Lazy in the grass, I free myself of guilt, imagine musicians in the park, us overcoming ourselves. My eyes open before stars. Holy these leaves, these skies. What is torn opens for the light.

exploring the farm as a child I would part the tall grasses, moving through the dirt beneath the thick rushes. consisting mainly of overgrown clover and clusters of foliage, I’d map the distance that made up our property. it seemed endless, that innocent drive to run further beneath the ceiling of leaves, expanses of earth shifting beneath a child’s slight weight. I would imagine how far the landscape stretched. one afternoon when my parents were at the races I followed the pasture floor to the fenceline at the back of the property. wanting to go further, I hovered a blade of grass over the ticking wire as I had watched Dad do so many times, to test if it was safe to cross. feeling nothing, I wrapped my hands around one of the copper threads — struck by that first surge through the body, electricity running like a vein of blood beneath the skin as though a voice screamed through a haze, blinding my eyes and rattling my mind with panic. no longer wishing to know more, to understand, I stood startled at the trapped earth and wires that had run a painful electric current through my body. it would have been foolish to even attempt climbing over into the neighboring paddock. all I could do then was give up.

A high school mash note’s stammering lust. Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare, and somehow graphed into that air a young man’s foolscap poem when a just, loose joinery of words was all that mattered. But then in last night’s dream, she (mother, wife, mash note’s love?) tells me a box holding secret life has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard: a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves, fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes. And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave, the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whens and whos, the frayed veils between death and here... I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.

My father has a pair of shoes So beautiful to see. I want to wear my father's shoes. They are too big for me. My baby brother has a pair As cunning as can be. My feet won't go into that pair. They are too small for me. There's only one thing that I can do Till I get small or grown. If I want to have some fitting shoes I'll have to wear my own.