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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.” Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating “’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door— Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;— This it is and nothing more.” Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”— Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore— Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;— ’Tis the wind and nothing more!” Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door— Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door— Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as “Nevermore.” But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered— Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.” Then the bird said “Nevermore.” Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore— Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of ‘Never—nevermore’.” But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking “Nevermore.” This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er, But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er, She shall press, ah, nevermore! Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. “Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore; Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!— Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted— On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore— Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore— Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” “Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting— “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting,still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!

There is something men and women living in houses Don’t understand. The old alchemists standing Near their stoves hinted at it a thousand times. Ravens at night hide in an old woman’s shoe. A four-year-old speaks some ancient language. We have lived our own death a thousand times. Each sentence we speak to friends means the opposite As well. Each time we say, “I trust in God,” it means God has already abandoned us a thousand times. Mothers again and again have knelt in church In wartime asking God to protect their sons, And their prayers were refused a thousand times. The baby loon follows the mother’s sleek Body for months. By the end of summer, she Has dipped her head into Rainy Lake a thousand times. Robert, you’ve wasted so much of your life Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you Do that again? I would, a thousand times.

Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down, a green blaze bent into mud and they come to me, at dawn three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly (we know this from national geography class, the borders of states, the major cities). They hung themselves from fans. In the hot air they hung themselves so that their father would not be forced to tender gold he did not have, would not be forced to work his fists to bone. So that is how a portion of the story goes. Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls. How old were they? Of marriageable age certainly. Sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, something of that sort. How do I feel about it? What a question! I am one of three sisters, most certainly I do not want father to proffer money he does not have for my marriage. Get a scooter, a refrigerator, a horde of utensils, silks, and tiny glittering bits of gold to hang about my ears and throat. Gold is labor time accumulated . . . labor time defined. Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard trained in Indian history and geography, Kerala University, first class first. The storm tree puts out its limbs and I see three girls swinging. One of them is me. Step back I tell myself. Saumiya, step back. The whole history of womankind is compacted here. Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight, breathe into the strokes of catastrophe, and let the school bus wait. You will get to it soon enough and the small, hot faces. See how the monsoon winds soar and shunt tropic air into a house of souls, a doorway stopped by clouds. Set your feet into broken stones and this red earth and pouring rain. For us there is no exile.

Bless this boy, born with the strong face of my older brother, the one I loved most, who jumped with me from the roof of the playhouse, my hand in his hand. On Friday nights we watched Twilight Zone and he let me hold the bowl of popcorn, a blanket draped over our shoulders, saying, Don't be afraid. I was never afraid when I was with my big brother who let me touch the baseball-size muscles living in his arms, who carried me on his back through the lonely neighborhood, held tight to the fender of my bike until I made him let go. The year he was fourteen he looked just like Ray, and when he died at twenty-two on a roadside in Germany I thought he was gone forever. But Ray runs into the kitchen: dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, pushes back his sleeve. He says, Feel my muscle, and I do.

A recipe for lamb tagine demands a mysterious ingredient: raz el hanout. Animal, vegetable, compound of kings like myrrh? I decide not to look it up, to wait and see. At first it is everything we seek but can’t express. Then it reverses: everything thrust upon us—think fast!— by the universe, like the leg my friend Tom caught when a cyclist got clipped by a car, the driver stinking drunk at 9:00 AM. Severed above the knee, the leg flung itself into the air, a javelin. Tom, always quick, reached up and caught it. But the story has a twist. After the cyclist died in an ambulance, the widow inexplicably came on to Tom. Not that Tom is unattractive. Indeed he is the sort of man I’d throw myself at if I were a leg. It’s hard to imagine the sex that Tom and this woman would have had there in the hotel room with the blackout curtains pulled. I’ve never had sex with Tom myself, but if I had been that leg or that woman I might have whispered, “What fine reflexes you have, Sir!” “Sir, say something tender!” “Cradle me against the guttural gasp from your solar plexus.” “Oh, Sir, I sense the tip of bone on skin, a surge of déjà vu.” “I am coming, I am about to come, your shuddering lover, your raz el hanout.”

The darkness draws me, kindly angels weep Forlorn beyond receding rings of light, The torrents of the earth’s desires sweep My soul through twilight downward into night. Once more the light grows dim, the vision fades, Myself seems to myself a distant goal, I grope among the bodies’ drowsy shades, Once more the Old Illusion rocks my soul. Once more the Manifold in shadowy streams Of falling waters murmurs in my ears, The One Voice drowns amid the roar of dreams That crowd the narrow pathway of the years. I go to seek the starshine on the,waves, To count the dewdrops on the grassy hill, I go to gather flowers that grow on graves, The world’s wall closes round my prisoned will. Yea, for the sake of the wild western wind The sphered spirit scorns her flame-built throne, Because of primroses, time out of mind, The Lonely turns away from the Alone. Who once has loved the cornfield’s rustling sheaves, Who once has heard the gentle Irish rain Murmur low music in the growing leaves, Though he were god, comes back to earth again. Oh Earth! green wind-swept Eirinn, I would break The tower of my soul’s initiate pride For a gray field and a star-haunted lake, And those wet winds that roam the country side. I who have seen am glad to close my eyes, I who have soared am weary of my wings, I seek no more the secret of the wise, Safe among shadowy, unreal human things. Blind to the gleam of those wild violet rays That burn beyond the rainbow's circle dim, Bound by dark nights and driven by pale days, The sightless slave of Time’s imperious whim; Deaf to the flowing tide of dreams divine That surge outside the closed gates of birth, The rhythms of eternity, too fine To touch with music the dull ears of earth— I go to seek with humble care and toil The dreams I left undreamed, the deeds undone, To sow the seed and break the stubborn soil, Knowing no brightness whiter than the sun. Content in winter if the fire burns clear And cottage walls keep out the creeping damp, Hugging the Old Illusion warm and dear, The Silence and the Wise Book and the Lamp.

“It isn’t a game for girls,” he said, grabbing a fifth with his right hand, the wind with his left. “For six days I raced Jack Daniels. He cheated, told jokes. Some weren’t even funny. That’s how come he won. It took a long time to reach this Yellow River. I’m not yet thirty, or is it thirty-one? Figured all my years carried the same hard thaw. Out here, houselights hid deep inside the trees. For awhile I believed this road cut across to Spring Creek and I was trucking home. I could kid you now, say I ran it clean, gasping on one lung, loaded by a knapsack of distrust and hesitation. I never got the tone in all the talk of cure. I sang Honor Songs, crawled the railroad bridge to Canada. Dizzy from the ties, I hung between both worlds. Clans of blackbirds circled the nearby maple trees. The dark heart of me said no days more than these. As sundown kindled the sumacs, stunned by the river’s smile, I had no need for heat, no need to feel ashamed. Inside me then the sound of burning leaves. Tell them I tumbled through a gap on the horizon. No, say I stumbled through a hummock and fell in a pit of stars. When rain weakened my stride, I heard them singing in a burl of white ash, took a few more days to rave at them in this wood. Then their appaloosas nickered in the dawn and they came riding down a close ravine. Though the bottle was empty, I still hung on. Foxtails beat the grimace from my brow until I took off my pain like a pair of old boots. I became a hollow horn filled with rain, reflecting everything. The wind in my hand burned cold as hoarfrost when my grandfather nudged me and called out my Lakota name.” In memory of Mato Heholgeca’s grandson

—For My Students Breakfast, and I’m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey. I’m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio— life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages of a book remind me of Tucson and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home. There was a sofa in front of my one window where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings stirred in the trees with their admonishments. Stepping back there now, I remember feeling hopeless after reading Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.” I recall how I put the book on the coffee table and closed my eyes and saw blood glowing in my arteries. In the leaves, the starlings went on with their disconnected chatter, and I said to myself, “I’ll never write anything like ‘And the bull alone with a high heart! At five o’clock in the afternoon.’” For three months, I didn’t write one word but instead passed the days swimming in the public pool where, from my half-closed eyes, I watched light ride the splashing water or resting on the surface when I floated, face down, sinking with fear: “What do I do now?” I asked. Some nights, I filled my red truck with gas and drove west on the 19 until my headlights flooded the desert, and when the city was less than pinpoints of glitter, and when all I could hear was the whine of silence in my ears, I parked alongside the highway, leaned against my pickup, and stared at stars so sure of themselves as they shone that I believed they couldn’t help but give me something that would make me sit at my desk and write. I felt directionless and wanted to walk out into the landscape, but I feared snakes and scorpions hiding in the buckhorn and staghorn as I recalled my father’s words, “You’ll be lost forever on the far side of the moon”— words that haunted me as I imagined slipping into lunar shadows that no human telescope would spot as I wandered lost and ripped with nostalgia for the nights I read in used bookstores on Campbell—a time when the future seemed so clear I smelled it in dirt that somebody rinsed from the sidewalk as I walked home. Then, one night while sipping black coffee along the side of the 19, I remembered lying on the living room floor as my father and I listened to Brahms’s “Lullaby,” which inspired me to practice “Away in a Manger” on my trumpet: “It’s a lullaby. Play it like that,” my father said as my sixth grade lips struggled to phrase notes that would please a child under the beating stars, and remembering this, I looked up to the oblivious heavens and tied words to images—Cassiopeia, Perseus, Cygnus, Pegasus— and let them sing clearly through my mind.

It seems these poets have nothing up their ample sleeves they turn over so many cards so early, telling us before the first line whether it is wet or dry, night or day, the season the man is standing in, even how much he has had to drink. Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow. Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name. "Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's. "Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea" is another one, or just "On a Boat, Awake at Night." And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with "In a Boat on a Summer Evening I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird. It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem." There is no iron turnstile to push against here as with headings like "Vortex on a String," "The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever. No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over. Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall" is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders. And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors" is a servant who shows me into the room where a poet with a thin beard is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine whispering something about clouds and cold wind, about sickness and the loss of friends. How easy he has made it for me to enter here, to sit down in a corner, cross my legs like his, and listen.

—Independence Day Celebration 2011, Dhaka i. In a courtyard, in these stacks of chairs before the empty stage—near are we Lord, near and graspable. Lord, accept these humble offerings: stacks of biscuits wrapped in cellophane, stacks of bone in glass: thighbone, spine. Stacks of white saucers, porcelain circles into which stacks of lip-worn cups slide neat. Jawbone, Lord. Galleries of laminated clippings declaring war. Hands unstack chairs into rows.The dead: they still go begging.