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Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears,— Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,— Take them, and give me my childhood again! I have grown weary of dust and decay,— Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away; Weary of sowing for others to reap;— Rock me to sleep, mother – rock me to sleep! Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue, Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you! Many a summer the grass has grown green, Blossomed and faded, our faces between: Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain, Long I tonight for your presence again. Come from the silence so long and so deep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Over my heart, in the days that are flown, No love like mother-love ever has shone; No other worship abides and endures,— Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours: None like a mother can charm away pain From the sick soul and the world-weary brain. Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold, Fall on your shoulders again as of old; Let it drop over my forehead tonight, Shading my faint eyes away from the light; For with its sunny-edged shadows once more Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore; Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Mother, dear mother, the years have been long Since I last listened your lullaby song: Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem Womanhood’s years have been only a dream. Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace, With your light lashes just sweeping my face, Never hereafter to wake or to weep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!

1 Water roared everywhere around us, yet from the bank all we could see of it were quick spumes and flashes here and there, in among the boulders. Cautiously, as if they might awaken, we clambered over the gigantic slabs and humps, the sun-baked ovals lumpy as hammered clay, and saw downstream below us only the vague shapes of others, almost billowy, like magnified amoebas, stretching away to even vaguer ones beyond them, turning the narrow streambed through the valley to a lunar seam. 2 Easing ourselves down over the massive sides (we were hot and tired, eager for the pools below) we could make out older water in the rough grain, undulating and immobile currents, band swirled on band, mica-speckled, cloudy, each seeming to move off, as it faded, through the stone—each one a glacial rune, each boulder an innumerable pebble in the ice sheet’s tidal suck and drag: two hundred thousand years, two billion, five, the molten core, spoor of gasses in the vast night, at our fingertips. 3 Then the pool: your clothes shed, with one hand braced against the rock ledge you had slipped into the hip-high rushing water, and were wading out, bent over, reaching like the blind before you for the slippery boulder you slid across, pushing against the white weight of the pouring mist, your skin goose-fleshed, speckled bright as mica, and then, part mist yourself, you turned back, smiling, calling though I couldn’t hear you, calling and waving for me to climb down to where you were, to join you there. And so I did.

I'm selling my old rock records, the reggae and the Dead, the Beatles and bands no one heard after the Amazing Kathy Dalton became less so and Airto—busted for possession, his album's face behind ten fingers blacked with stationhouse ink— deported. A Stone retired, Mick past fifty, Van Morrison— composer of the world's best Celtic fuck music—gone spiritual, while "Peaceful Easy Feeling" sells Prozac, and the trippy paisley vinyl of Dave Mason's "Alone Together," Big Brother's funky R. Crumb cover (fat nipply Janis dragging that ball and chain) are quaint collectibles, like Fiestaware or bottles from defunct breweries; useful things no one uses anymore, worth money.

Despite that you wrote your name and number on its fuselage in magic marker neither your quiet hours at the kitchen table assembling it with glue nor your choice of paint and lacquer nor your seemingly equally perfect choice of a seemingly breezeless day for the launch of your ambition nor the thrill of its swift ignition nor the heights it streaks nor the dancing way you chase beneath its dot across that seemingly endless childhood field will ever be restored to you by the people in the topmost branches of whose trees unseen it may yet from its plastic chute on thin white string still swing.

I've got a rocket In my pocket; I cannot stop to play. Away it goes! I've burned my toes. It's Independence Day.

No longer interested in evil, the soul turns on its back at the watering hole, kicks its muscled legs. Everything goes neon pink and green in the noonday sun when I press my thumbs to my little black eyes. My snout, wet with its own abundant grease, smells nothing of threat, of consequence. I put my hands behind my head, I have no bidding to do. My feet go up on the desk, a woman appears at my side. This is what I’ve earned in Eden. The right to close my eyes when the camouflage trousers come wading through the apple blossom’s slough — and the dream of myself as a baby emerging from the mortal body, hoof by gleaming hoof.

(from her to ravish meaning ravine On the other side artifice slumbers in the green. The shadow follows hour by hour hollow and gloomy and which call me forth) ……………………………….grafted onto the sentence o a long time distant to hang on my belly obscure parallel images and tattoos age suggestive of the fingernail grazing the thigh the valley get turned on

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket Known to me wherever the flattened cat Squirmed home to a hole between housewall and paving. Known! And in the turns of it, no welcome, No flattery of the beckoned lighted eye From a Rose of the rose-brick alleys of Toulouse. Those more than tinsel garlands, more than masks, Unfading wreaths of ancient summers, I Sternly cast off. A stern eye is the graceless Bulk and bruise that at the steep uphill Confronts me with its drained-of-colour sandstone Implacably. The Church. It is Good Friday. Goodbye to the Middle Ages! Although some Think that I enter them, those centuries Of monkish superstition, here I leave them With their true garlands, and their honest masks, Every fresh flower cast on the porch and trodden, Raked by the wind at the Church door on this Friday. Goodbye to all the centuries. There is No home in them, much as the dip and turn Of an honest alley charmingly deceive us. And not yet quite goodbye. Instead almost Welcome, I said. Bleak equal centuries Crowded the porch to be deflowered, crowned.

Surprised by a frill of white flower where I'd never planted an eye, I decided to fence it with sticks and let the renegade live in undoctored soil where the garden gave way to volunteer poplars and acidic white pine. Why not? After all, away from the tribe, in clay where beetles drill and weeds emerge inspired, it might grow eccentric, proliferate and thrive. When autumn air said disinter , to fill the bin for winter, I troweled under and pulled the stem until a rabble of rough spuds red as Etruscan urns emerged as if to prove that whatever urge drove the rogue to sow itself and strive beyond all cultivation might offer a vital lesson to any apostate instinct aspiring to survive.

The role of elegy is To put a death mask on tragedy, A drape on the mirror. To bow to the cultural Debate over the aesthetization of sorrow, Of loss, of the unbearable Afterimage of the once material. To look for an imagined Consolidation of grief So we can all be finished Once and for all and genuinely shut up The cabinet of genuine particulars. Instead there’s the endless refrain One hears replayed repeatedly Through the just ajar door: Some terrible mistake has been made. What is elegy but the attempt To rebreathe life Into what the gone one once was Before he grew to enormity. Come on stage and be yourself, The elegist says to the dead. Show them Now—after the fact— What you were meant to be: The performer of a live song. A shoe. Now bow. What is left but this: The compulsion to tell. The transient distraction of ink on cloth One scrubbed and scrubbed But couldn’t make less. Not then, not soon. Each day, a new caption on the cartoon Ending that simply cannot be. One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.