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George Borrow in his Lavengro Tells us of a Welshman, who By some excess of mother-wit Framed a harp and played on it, Built a ship and sailed to sea, And steered it home to melody Of his own making. I, indeed, Might write for Everyman to read A thaumalogue of wonderment More wonderful, but rest content With celebrating one I knew Who built his pipes, and played them, too: No more. Ah, played! Therein is all: The hounded thing, the hunter's call; The shudder, when the quarry's breath Is drowned in blood and stilled in death; The marriage dance, the pulsing vein, The kiss that must be given again; The hope that Ireland, like a rose, Sees shining thro' her tale of woes; The battle lost, the long lament For blood and spirit vainly spent; And so on, thro' the varying scale Of passion that the western Gael Knows, and by miracle of art Draws to the chanter from the heart Like water from a hidden spring, To leap or murmur, weep or sing. I see him now, a little man In proper black, whey-bearded, wan, With eyes that scan the eastern hills Thro' thick, gold-rimmèd spectacles. His hand is on the chanter. Lo, The hidden spring begins to flow In waves of magic. (He is dead These seven years, but bend your head And listen.) Rising from the clay The Master plays The Ring of Day . It mounts and falls and floats away Over the sky-line . . . then is gone Into the silence of the dawn!

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough. Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman      ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces    of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet         I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me       And has taken      I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images    for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

Soon I will make my appearance But first I must take off my rings And swords and lay them out all Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river In reckoning the days I have Left on this earth I will use No fingers

You’re right about the praise I dish your way jail’s the comeuppance of a liar poet My only want is your content and if I hold another want may I never be granted it Each full moon is born of a crescent yet what’s a full moon got Vitiligo and the morning sees me with eyes of dew a fever that breaks out on your integument On your skin exanthem is a pasture of anemones Because you’re one of them I love my enemies

The trees have sex, Teach, Focus. Tohu Bohu Chaos in a green light. Alone again. How alone I twist at the end of thought when illness is forgot and the speaker is punched on the bark on the soft models. The old abbot looked at us and laughed. He loved electronic gadgets for his tomb. You were as beautiful as six almonds as beautiful as the naked foot of the messenger of peace. You sat in a corner of the page.

As a man may go to Costco, Buy the jumbo pak of diapers, double liters of Coke and Diet Coke and a sixpack and stock up on Doritos and Cheetos and Eveready batteries, so I perhaps Formless in the vast republic Grasp the metaphysical thing, commodity, crucially desired Hologram of national intent. Caught In the managed aisle the Jargon of experts washes o'er the perfectly stacked Special K, Cheerios, Wheaties, Apple Jacks, and Count Chocula Low on the shelves that toddlers might harry their Mothers for sweet breakfast treats. In Niger the children and livestock go hungry Once more but a fortified peanut butter paste Plumpy'nut promises to revive those babies Quickly who are not yet too far gone. Research has given us hope that all Shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well Till the moment it's not. It's not. Unto the lord Julian of Norwich poured forth her Voice. Into the desert the Tuareg Wander, their herds and children starved. Between ocean Expanses a people of plenty' chatter brawl and sometimes Yawn. Days so short it seems the earth is Zooming unto its longsought anonymous abyss.

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.” They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly dead. What appears transparent is really flame burning so brightly it appears like glass. What you’re looking through is the act of giving: One thing in life needed desperately, given to another, or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies are not transparent, but sometimes the color of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another, glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.

so he said: you ain’t got no talent if you didn’t have a face you wouldn’t be nobody and she said: god created heaven and earth and all that’s Black within them so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit they tell me plenty sisters take care better business than you and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings and all good things to eat and said: “that’s good” so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under yo skirt and been giving you the big play you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib from adam and said we will call this woeman and her name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts that simone may sing a song and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu so she replied: show me someone not full of herself and i’ll show you a hungry person

He reminds me of someone I used to know, but who? Before class, he comes to my office to shmooze, a thousand thousand pointless interesting speculations. Irrepressible boy, his assignments are rarely completed, or actually started. This week, instead of research in the stacks, he’s performing with a reggae band that didn’t exist last week. Kids danced to his music and stripped, he tells me gleefully, high spirit of the street festival. He’s the singer, of course— why ask if he studied an instrument? On the brink of graduating with an engineering degree (not, it turned out, his forte), he switched to English, his second language. It’s hard to swallow the bravura of his academic escapes or tell if the dark eyes laugh with his face. Once, he brought me a tiny persimmon he’d picked on campus; once, a poem about an elderly friend in New Delhi who left him volumes of Tagore and memories of avuncular conversation. My encouragement makes him skittish— it doesn’t suit his jubilant histrionics of despair. And I remember myself shrinking from enthusiasm or praise, the prospect of effort-drudgery. Success—a threat. A future, we figure, of revision—yet what can the future be but revision and repair? Now, on the brink again, graduation’s postponed, the brilliant thesis on Walker Percy unwritten. “I’ll drive to New Orleans and soak it up and write my paper in a weekend,” he announces in the Honors office. And, “I want to be a bum in daytime and a reggae star at night!” What could I give him from my life or art that matters, how share the desperate slumber of my early years, the flashes of inspiration and passion in a life on hold? If I didn’t fool myself or anyone, no one could touch me, or tell me much . . . This gloomy Houston Monday, he appears at my door, so sunny I wouldn’t dare to wake him now, or say it matters if he wakes at all. “Write a poem about me!” he commands, and so I do.