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When they first came their mouths agape their bodies shining like beetles about to stir every edge poised for the multitude of steps some moment of leaping not yet taken their hides stiff shielding some tenderness within, warming to the creak of movement over penitent steps or dusty wastes, unyielding tasks or stony memorials of waiting through the heat of day's quiet middle, every icy threshold or soggy spring their heels flush with pavement, their soles flung aside only for love, all the tattered maps of their seams, every unforgiving rub.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou. When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare, There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear. He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse, Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house. There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue; But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew. There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell; And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell; With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done, As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one. Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do, And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou. His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze, Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze. The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool, So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool. In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play. Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? — Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars. And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans, But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means; For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above; But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love — A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true — (God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that's known as Lou.) Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear; But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear; That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie; That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die. 'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through and through — "I guess I'll make it a spread misere", said Dangerous Dan McGrew. The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood; And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood. The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash, And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash, And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way; In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm, And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn; But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true, That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew." Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark, And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark. Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew, While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou. These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know. They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it's so. I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two — The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that's known as Lou.

1    In a concussion, the mind severs the pain: you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle, and landing face first in a cholla. But a woman stabbed in her apartment, by a prowler searching for money and drugs, will never forget her startled shriek die in her throat, blood soaking into the floor. The quotidian violence of the world is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains; its pull is everywhere. But let me live a life of violent surprise and startled joy. I want to thrust a purple iris into your hand, give you a sudden embrace. I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived writing characters in gold ink on black silk— not to frame on a wall, but to live the splendor now. 2    Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated and, believing she had sold the genetic research on carp, signed a confession. Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque sitting under palm trees. Is it so hard to see things as they truly are: a route marked in red ink on a map, the shadows of apricot leaves thrown in wind and sun on a wall? It is easy to imagine a desert full of agaves and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun. But to truly live one must see things as they are, as they might become: a wrench is not a fingerprint on a stolen car, nor baling wire the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate, but see the men in drenched clothes as men who saw and saw and refuse to see. 3    Think of being a judge or architect or trombonist, and do not worry whether thinking so makes it so. I overhear two men talking in another room; I cannot transcribe the conversation word for word, but know if they are vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic. An elm leaf floats on a pond. Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist then a cartographer, but wanting so does not make it so. It is not a question of copying out the Heart Sutra in your own blood on an alabaster wall. It is not a question of grief or joy. But as a fetus grows and grows, as the autumn moon ripens the grapes, greed and cruelty and hunger for power ripen us, enable us to grieve, act, laugh, shriek, see, see it all as the water on which the elm leaf floats. 4    Write out the memories of your life in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all dies, no lives. Each word you speak dies, no lives. Is it all at once in the mind? I once stepped on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out the purple spines; blood soaked my hands. But one spine was left, and I carried it a thousand miles. I saw then the olive leaves die on the branch, saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep’s corpse. To live at all is to grieve; but, once, to have it all at once is to see a shooting star: shooting star shooting star.

We speak of mankind. Why not wavekind? Barrel-chested military water rushes in a mass to break the shore earth into stonekind. Pphlooph pphlooph the waves grope indistinctly for the shore. As delicate as a butterfly along a cheek a boat with white and orange sail appears. A small boy in a life-belt sits in front and looks ahead with all his might. His father steers, attached like a shaft to his son’s safety and the sail’s management. A sunfish thrown back by a fisherman lies drowned and pitching. The eyes are white in death. This is the raw data. A mystery translates it into feeling and perception; then imagination; finally the hard inevitable quartz figure of will and language. Thus a squirrel tail flying from a handlebar unmistakably establishes its passing rider as a male unbowed in a chipper plume.

I. I came then to the city of my brethren. Not Carthage, not Alexandria, not London. The wide blue river cutting through the stone Arrowy and cool lay down beside her, And the hazy and shining sea lay in the offing. Ferries, pouring the foam before them, sliding Into her groaning timbers, rang and rang; And the chains tumbled taut in the winches. Upstream the matted tugs in the heavy water, Their soiling smoke unwrapped by the salt wind, Footed with snowy trampling and snowy sound. On tethers, pointing the way of the tide, The crusted freighters swung with their sides gushing. On evening’s ship pointing northward, A golden sailor at sunset stood at the bow, As aloft in the strands a tramcar with tiny clanging Slowly soared over, far upward and humming still. II. Not Athens, Alexandria, Vienna or London. And evening vast and clean above the city Washed the high storeys with sea-light, with a silken Sky-tint on the planes and the embrasures: The clump of crags and glitter sinking eastward With the slow world, the shadow-lipping shores, Pale after-conflagration of the air. On terraces, by windows of tiredness, The eyes dropped from that glow to the dusk atremble, Alive with its moving atomic monotone: There the hot taxis at the pounding corner Fitted their glossy flanks and shifted, waiting, And the girls went by with wavering tall walking, Their combed heads nodding in the evening: The hour of shops closing, the cocktail hour, Lighting desire and cigarettes and lighting The strange lamps on the streaming avenue.

There were bees about. From the start I thought The day was apt to hurt. There is a high Hill of sand behind the sea and the kids Were dropping from the top of it like schools Of fish over falls, cracking skulls on skulls. I knew the holiday was hot. I saw The August sun teeming in the bodies Logged along the beach and felt the yearning In the brightly covered parts turning each To each. For lunch I bit the olive meat: A yellow jacket stung me on the tongue. I knelt to spoon and suck the healing sea ... A little girl was digging up canals With her toes, her arm hanging in a cast As white as the belly of a dead fish Whose dead eye looked at her with me, as she Opened her grotesque system to the sea ... I walked away; now quietly I heard A child moaning from a low mound of sand, Abandoned by his friend. The child was tricked, Trapped upon his knees in a shallow pit. (The older ones will say you can get out.) I dug him up. His legs would not unbend. I lifted him and held him in my arms As he wept. Oh I was gnarled as a witch Or warlock by his naked weight, was slowed In the sand to a thief’s gait. When his strength Flowed, he ran, and I rested by the sea ... A girl was there. I saw her drop her hair, Let it fall from the doffed cap to her breasts Tanned and swollen over wine red woolen. A boy, his body blackened by the sun, Rose out of the sand stripping down his limbs With graceful hands. He took his gear and walked Toward the girl in the brown hair and wine And then past me; he brushed her with the soft, Brilliant monster he lugged into the sea ... By this tide I raised a small cairn of stone Light and smooth and clean, and cast the shadow Of a stick in a perfect line along The sand. My own shadow followed then, until I felt the cold swirling at the groin.

So the tide forgets, as morning Grows too far delivered, as the bowls Of rock and wood run dry. What is left seems pearled and lit, As those cases Of the museum stood lit With milk jade, rows of opaque vases Streaked with orange and yellow smoke. You found a lavender boat, a single Figure poling upstream, baskets Of pale fish wedged between his legs. Today, the debris of winter Stands stacked against the walls, The coils of kelp lie scattered Across the floor. The oil fire Smokes. You turn down the lantern Hung on its nail. Outside, The boats aligned like sentinels. Here beside the blue depot, walking The pier, you can see the way The shore Approximates the dream, how distances Repeat their deaths Above these tables and panes of water— As climbing the hills above The harbor, up to the lupine drifting Among the lichen-masked pines, The night is pocked with lamps lit On every boat offshore, Galleries of floating stars. Below, On its narrow tracks shelved Into the cliff’s face, The train begins its slide down To the warehouses by the harbor. Loaded With diesel, coal, paychecks, whiskey, Bedsheets, slabs of ice—for the fish, For the men. You lean on my arm, As once I watched you lean at the window; The bookstalls below stretched a mile To the quay, the afternoon crowd Picking over the novels and histories. You walked out as you walked out last Night, onto the stone porch. Dusk Reddened the walls, the winds sliced Off the reefs. The vines of the gourds Shook on their lattice. You talked About that night you stood Behind the black pane of the French Window, watching my father read some long Passage Of a famous voyager’s book. You hated That voice filling the room, Its light. So tonight we make a soft Parenthesis upon the sand’s black bed. In that dream we share, there is One shore, where we look out upon nothing And the sea our whole lives; Until turning from those waves, we find One shore, where we look out upon nothing And the earth our whole lives. Where what is left between shore and sky Is traced in the vague wake of (The stars, the sandpipers whistling) What we forgive.If you wake soon, wake me.

The seas has made a wall for its defence of falling water. Those whose impertinence leads them to its moving ledges it rejects. Those who surrender it will with the next wave drag under. Sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion. The way to the dunes is easy. The shelving sand is stiffened in the rain and loosened again in the sun’s fingers. Children, lustful of the glistening hours drink and are insatiate. Wind under the eyelids, confusion walling their ears, their bodies glow in the cold wash of the beach. And after, they walk with rigid feet the planked street of the town. They miss the slipping texture of the sand and a sand pillow under the hollow instep. They are unmoved by fears that breed in darkening kitchens at sundown following storm, and they rebel against cold waiting in the wind and rain for the late sail. Did you, as I, condemn the coastal fog and long for islands seen from a sail’s shadow? The dunes lie more passive to the wind than water is. This, then, the country of our choice. It is infertile, narrow, prone under a dome of choral sound: water breaking upon water. Litter of bare logs in the drift— the sea has had its sharp word with them. Wild roses, wild strawberries cover the dune shoulder It is a naked restless garden that descends from the crouched pine to shellfish caught in flat reflecting sands. We lose the childish avarice of horizons. The sea ends against another shore. The cracked ribs of a wreck project from the washed beach. Under the shell-encrusted timbers dripping brine plucks at the silence of slant chambers opening seaward. What moving keel remembers such things as here are buried under sand? The transitory ponds and smooth bar slide easily under the advancing tide, emerging with the moon’s turning. Clear lagoons behind the shattered hulk, thin movements of sea grass on the dune rim bending against cloud, these things are oursI Submissive to the sea and wind, resistful of all else, sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion.

XI A hundred generations, yes, a hundred and twenty-five, had the strength each day not to eat this and that (unclean!) not to say this and that, not to do this and that (unjust!), and with all this and all that to go about as men and Jews among their enemies (these are the Pharisees you mocked at, Jesus). Whatever my grandfathers did or said for all of their brief lives still was theirs, as all of it drops at a moment make the fountain and all of its leaves a palm. Each word they spoke and every thought was heard, each step and every gesture seen, by God; their past was still the present and the present a dread future’s. But I am private as an animal. I have eaten whatever I liked, I have slept as long as I wished, I have left the highway like a dog to run into every alley; now I must learn to fast and to watch. I shall walk better in these heavy boots than barefoot. I will fast for you, Judah, and be silent for you and wake in the night because of you; I will speak for you in psalms, and feast because of you on unleavened bread and herbs.

In our house, all the clocks are turned off and the mirrors Don’t work. We sit like bread in a stay-fresh wrapper, Keep ourselves to our selves. Sometimes the speeches Are so beautiful it hurts. On the porch where we can’t be Seen to smile, the honeysuckle meshes with silent Weeds. We rock back and forth, back and forth in our long Black dresses. Mosquitoes taste our blood and find it good. Inside, candles are lit every night and keep going Until they burn themselves down. We kiss our fingers To our lips like Italians, promise we’ll never look back. Whip-poor-will. When the doorbell rings we don’t answer. In winter, the fur grows long on the horses and the ice Grows long on the eaves. We sleep in the same bed Like good animals, braid our hair together, tailor Our limbs to fit.Conspiracy of wood.