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You never asked to be a master and God knows (if She would only say so) that I never asked to be a slave. Position papers, grocery lists rain down like ticker-tape on my long-march procession past where you cheer me on, waving from the wistful side of—let's admit it— barricades. You're tired of living without any joy. You think you're going crazy. You need my friendship. You're afraid to demand the right to be afraid. You're trying very hard. I know that, and you can't imagine how I wish it were enough. I need to sleep. I never asked for this; you never asked. Our twenty-five inch son whimpers in the night and my breasts hurt until I wake myself and feed him. He never asked for anything at all. We all want just to be a little happy. Listen, I see an older me, alone in some room, busy on the telephone dialing all my terrible truths. This thing has never let me live as we both know I might have; yet I see this thing can cut me down on some street or podium tomorrow— or just let me live, alone. Our child looks back and forth from your face into mine, and laughs. You worry about us, wondering if something within us has broken. You hold my body as if it were glass that will cut you. I'd stop this if I could, believe me, my beloved. I'm dying of bitterness. I love your forehead. Did I ever tell you that?

The curve of her hip where I’d lay my head, that’s what I’m thinking of now, her fingers gone slow through my hair on a blue day ten thousand miles off in the future somewhere, where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand, cool as her kissing you with crushed ice, her tongue wet with blackberry and melon. That’s what I’m thinking of now. Because I’m all out of adrenaline, all out of smoking incendiaries. Somewhere deep in the landscape of the brain, under the skull’s blue curving dome— that’s where I am now, swaying in a hammock by the water’s edge as soldiers laugh and play volleyball just down the beach, while others tan and talk with the nurses who bring pills to help them sleep. And if this is crazy, then let this be my sanatorium, let the doctors walk among us here marking their charts as they will. I have a lover with hair that falls like autumn leaves on my skin. Water that rolls in smooth and cool as anesthesia. Birds that carry all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand Who saith "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'' Not that, amassing flowers, Youth sighed "Which rose make ours, Which lily leave and then as best recall?" Not that, admiring stars, It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars; Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" Not for such hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. Poor vaunt of life indeed, Were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: Such feasting ended, then As sure an end to men; Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? Rejoice we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive! A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! For thence,—a paradox Which comforts while it mocks,— Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. What is he but a brute Whose flesh has soul to suit, Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? To man, propose this test— Thy body at its best, How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? Yet gifts should prove their use: I own the Past profuse Of power each side, perfection every turn: Eyes, ears took in their dole, Brain treasured up the whole; Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn?" Not once beat "Praise be Thine! I see the whole design, I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: Perfect I call Thy plan: Thanks that I was a man! Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!" For pleasant is this flesh; Our soul, in its rose-mesh Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; Would we some prize might hold To match those manifold Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best! Let us not always say, "Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" Therefore I summon age To grant youth's heritage, Life's struggle having so far reached its term: Thence shall I pass, approved A man, for aye removed From the developed brute; a god though in the germ. And I shall thereupon Take rest, ere I be gone Once more on my adventure brave and new: Fearless and unperplexed, When I wage battle next, What weapons to select, what armour to indue. Youth ended, I shall try My gain or loss thereby; Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: And I shall weigh the same, Give life its praise or blame: Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. For note, when evening shuts, A certain moment cuts The deed off, calls the glory from the grey: A whisper from the west Shoots—"Add this to the rest, Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." So, still within this life, Though lifted o'er its strife, Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, This rage was right i' the main, That acquiescence vain: The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." For more is not reserved To man, with soul just nerved To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: Here, work enough to watch The Master work, and catch Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. As it was better, youth Should strive, through acts uncouth, Toward making, than repose on aught found made: So, better, age, exempt From strife, should know, than tempt Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! Enough now, if the Right And Good and Infinite Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own With knowledge absolute, Subject to no dispute From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Now, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? Not on the vulgar mass Called "work," must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. Ay, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— Thou, to whom fools propound, When the wine makes its round, "Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!" Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. What though the earlier grooves, Which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men; And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I,—to the wheel of life With shapes and colours rife, Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur— There was the cat slopping its milk all day, Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk And August the most peaceful month. To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, Without that monument of cat, The cat forgotten in the moon; And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light, In which everything is meant for you And nothing need be explained; Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself; And east rushes west and west rushes down, No matter. The grass is full And full of yourself. The trees around are for you, The whole of the wideness of night is for you, A self that touches all edges, You become a self that fills the four corners of night. The red cat hides away in the fur-light And there you are humped high, humped up, You are humped higher and higher, black as stone— You sit with your head like a carving in space And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Everything’s been said But one last thing about the desert, And it’s awful: During brush fires in the Sonoran desert, Brush fires that happen before the monsoon and in the great, Deep, wide, and smothering heat of the hottest months, The longest months, The hypnotic, immeasurable lulls of August and July— During these summer fires, jackrabbits— Jackrabbits and everything else That lives in the brush of the rolling hills, But jackrabbits especially— Jackrabbits can get caught in the flames, No matter how fast and big and strong and sleek they are. And when they’re caught, Cornered in and against the thick Trunks and thin spines of the cactus, When they can’t back up any more, When they can’t move, the flame— It touches them, And their fur catches fire. Of course, they run away from the flame, Finding movement even when there is none to be found, Jumping big and high over the wave of fire, or backing Even harder through the impenetrable Tangle of hardened saguaro And prickly pear and cholla and barrel, But whichever way they find, What happens is what happens: They catch fire And then bring the fire with them when they run. They don’t know they’re on fire at first, Running so fast as to make the fire Shoot like rocket engines and smoke behind them, But then the rabbits tire And the fire catches up, Stuck onto them like the needles of the cactus, Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins. They’ve felt this before, every rabbit. But this time the feeling keeps on. And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds All over again, making more fire, all around them. I’m sorry for the rabbits. And I’m sorry for us To know this.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Sometimes I think Sometimes I think In a 2001 interview, Elizabeth Alexander noted, “As for the ‘banner headline’, ‘Race’, I always loved the way that my grandfather, and to a lesser extent my parents, used the word race to talk about ‘the race’ — meaning, of course, black people — as a thing that they could imagine, a body of people that we could imagine, that you could almost get your arms around, that the race was something tangible and palpable.” about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee, Alabama

What’s yr race and she said what’s yr hurry how ’bout it cock asian man I’m just going for curry. You ever been to ethni-city? How ’bout multi-culti? You ever lay out skin for the white gaze? What are you, banana or egg? Coconut maybe? Something wrong Charlie Chim-chong-say-wong-leung-chung? You got a slant to yr marginal eyes? You want a little rice with that garlic? Is this too hot for you? Or slimy    or bitter    or smelly    or tangy    or raw    or sour — a little too dirty on the edge hiding underneath crawling up yr leg    stuck between the fingernails? Is that a black hair in yr soup? Well how you wanna handle this? You wanna maintain a bit of différ-ence? Keep or mother’s other? Use the father for the fodder? What side of John A. Macdonald’s tracks you on anyway? How fast you think this train is going to go?

The Roman candle of a yard light caramelizes the old snow. The glow trespasses the dark hold of December, dimming the view of the night sky with its winter triangle a boy strains to see through the haze, as he lets his jacket hang open, unzipped to the cold. He knows to return through the black cleft between buildings, below electric wires that seem to carry a little train of snow on their slim rails, where he throws the switch that shuts off the bulb on its pole, that opens the dome to a blast of stars in outer space, to the pinpoint of Jupiter, to the constellation of Orion hunting the Great Bear that the boy follows to find a smudge of gray–he can gaze through that peep hole to another galaxy also spangled with radiance from stars that traveled two and a half million light years before appearing as a signal in the rod cells of his eyes that pass impulses through neurons and nerves to his brain that creates images. He draws in a sharp breath, the high voltage power box of his chest hot and humming.

Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it is violation—his own: he touches the bruises at each shoulder and, on his chest, the larger bruise, star-shaped, a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands, has tried—can't remember . . . That kind of rhythm to it, even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable, which is why we keep coming here, to find it, or that's what we say. We dive in and, as usual, the swimming feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first slackens that much more quickly, if you don't look back. Regret, like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time swimming a bit farther, leaving the shore the way the water—in its own watered, of course, version of semaphore–keeps leaving the subject out, flashing Why should it matter now and Why, why shouldn 't it, as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.

Radiant dog on doublecross, and I, by night, a raven fly. My fear is that eternity has an alm that is ordinary to ten thousand and worn from my strings, my console of limbs, and I a missing part. It is the world that's new, not I, and submarines can shoot the land from the wheelbarrow of sickly pastorals. Give me the swamp any day! or the huts that pave the slave to freedom. From a small cloud in my ears the song has leapt the valley curtained with snow, and for ascendant harmony the gambler thumbs his cards. Of all the queens one is a witch whose curse is that she's held. The horses roll the stone and trot after their maturity sweepstakes. This time the homeliest won't ride my bet into hasty subtract glue. The pieces fly and here I lie, triangle of head and gut and thigh. Put me on my mount, Tomahawk, and past the river our cortege will dust the heavy fur, and peasants' prayers will touch the smell of holy cadaver. I will have sun and manly rage, and Mike Atlas will trim me up to rip the bier from my brother's hearse, and avenge me for my loss. The gallows hurt! and for my scheme I hang on the bridge's span where my mother will trust my lips with tears, the ones I send her now.