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Any half-decent rapper Can conjure the dead, Can reach into graves And accuse God Of Indian-giving. The trick is ancestral, No more magic than memory’s Hidden strings & chains. Trust me, We haven’t forgotten a name. Say them. Raise your hands. Holler at me!

from Sonnets, Second Series XVII Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars Could swifter speed, or slower, round the sun, Than in this year of variance thou hast done For me. Yet pain, fear, heart-break, woes, and wars Have natural limit; from his dread eclipse The swift sun hastens, and the night debars The day, but to bring in the day more bright; The flowers renew their odorous fellowships; The moon runs round and round; the slow earth dips, True to her poise, and lifts; the planet-stars Roll and return from circle to ellipse; The day is dull and soft, the eave-trough drips; And yet I know the splendor of the light Will break anon: look! where the gray is white!

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for world peace and eternal salvation. — Reuters He started small: fasting here and there, days, then weeks. Once, he stood under a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting for nothing—not even to sleep. It came to him in a dream:You must roll on this earth, spin your heart in rain, desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab any cuts from the day before, and lay prone on the road while his twelve men swept the ground in front of him with sisal brooms. Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man rolling through puddles, past storefronts where children would throw him pieces of butter candy he’d try and catch in his mouth at each rotation. His men swept and sang, swept and sang of jasmine-throated angels and pineapple slices in kulfi cream. He rolled and rolled. Sometimes in his dizzying spins, he thought he heard God. A whisper, but still.

Someday our buried life will come to this: a shaft of sunlight touching the Etruscan surfaces, the basin still intact as if awaiting hands. How many centuries sequestered is an expert's guess, you tell me. I admire the tiles some craftsman spiraled in the ceiling's dome detailing Neptune's beard. Or someone's. What will they say of us, who have no home (we like to say) but one another? When they pry our hearts apart and excavate the sum, is that the place we'll lie? Where the words lie?

I went back, as to my relatives. When I arrived, the elms had been shaved. But you were all the same. The buildings, the dry classrooms. I embraced your eyes, your avenues. You were fixed in the same expressions. Your flat voices, your dental work, like your lips, slipping over words already said. Additional agricultural pamphlets; many of you sat in private offices. Why did I think I could drag it all back, the former edge of town where streets ended in fields under clouds puffed like the French phrases he kissed me with in the sucked-in breath of that illusive happiness. Coming back, listening, looking; ready to take your bodies in my hands. Returning to streets that had poured heavy shopping malls over the hay-sweet grass where he and I lay whispering the most important nonsense of my desperate and embittered life.

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom, And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night. And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.

Romance, who loves to nod and sing, With drowsy head and folded wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet Hath been—a most familiar bird— Taught me my alphabet to say— To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild wood I did lie, A child—with a most knowing eye. Of late, eternal Condor years So shake the very Heaven on high With tumult as they thunder by, I have no time for idle cares Through gazing on the unquiet sky. And when an hour with calmer wings Its down upon my spirit flings— That little time with lyre and rhyme To while away—forbidden things! My heart would feel to be a crime Unless it trembled with the strings.

A stupor on the heath, And wrath along the sky; Space everywhere; beneath A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high. Sullen quiet below, But storm in upper air! A wind from long ago, In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there, And singed the triple gloom, And let through, in a flame, Crowned faces of old Rome: Regnant o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came. Uprisen as any sun Through vistas hollow grey, Aloft, and one by one, In brazen casques the Emperors loomed large, and sank away. In ovals of wan light Each warrior eye and mouth; A pageant brutal bright As if once over loudly passed Jove’s laughter in the south; And dimmer, these among, Some cameo’d head aloof, With ringlets heavy-hung, Like yellow stonecrop comely grown around a castle roof. An instant: gusts again, Then heaven’s impacted wall, The hot insistent rain, The thunder-shock; and of the Past mirage no more at all, No more the alien dream Pursuing, as we went, With glory’s cursèd gleam: Nor sin of Cæsar’s ruined line engulfed us, innocent. The vision great and dread Corroded; sole in view Was empty Egdon spread, Her crimson summer weeds ashake in tempest: but we knew What Tacitus had borne In that wrecked world we saw; And what, thine heart uptorn, My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law.

It is to Emerson I have turned now, damp February, for he has written of the moral harmony of nature. The key to every man is his thought. But Emerson, half angel, suffers his dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th, 1832, of an evening strange with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin. —Emerson looking in, clutching his key. Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing as if stunned by persistent cold wind or leaning over, as from rough breath. I have brought my little one, bundled and gloved, to the lonely place to let her run, hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened along the ground hard from a winter drought. I have come out for the first time in weeks still full of fever, insomnia-fogged, to track her flags of breath where she’s dying to vanish on the hillsides of bramble and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal, one or two sparrows, something with yellow— scatter in small explosions of ice. Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased by the physical crunch of the ground, damp from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot, that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath too rocky to cultivate, covered thick with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled, —that half of him for whom nature was thought. Kate has found things to deepen her horror for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick bramble, or the bramble itself enough to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood- colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa. What does she see when she looks at such things? I do not know what is so wrong with me that my body has erupted, system by system, sick unto itself. I do not know what I have done, nor what she thinks when she turns toward her ill father. How did Emerson behold of his Ellen, un- embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands? Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own natures. Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night with his journal, the awful natural fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been deeper sacrifice than a sacrament. Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down like light snow on the beautiful hills? Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . . —His other half worried by the wording.

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann The modern biographers worry “how far it went,” their tender friendship. They wonder just what it means when he writes he thinks of her constantly, his guardian angel, beloved friend. The modern biographers ask the rude, irrelevant question of our age, as if the event of two bodies meshing together establishes the degree of love, forgetting how softly Eros walked in the nineteenth-century, how a hand held overlong or a gaze anchored in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart, and nuances of address not known in our egalitarian language could make the redolent air tremble and shimmer with the heat of possibility. Each time I hear the Intermezzi, sad and lavish in their tenderness, I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden among late-blooming roses and dark cascades of leaves, letting the landscape speak for them, leaving us nothing to overhear.