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The jaunty crop-haired graying Women in grocery stores, Their clothes boyish and neat, New mittens or clean sneakers, Clean hands, hips not bad still, Buying ice cream, steaks, soda, Fresh melons and soap—or the big Balding young men in work shoes And green work pants, beer belly And white T-shirt, the porky walk Back to the truck, polite; possible To feel briefly like Jesus, A gust of diffuse tenderness Crossing the dark spaces To where the dry self burrows Or nests, something that stirs, Watching the kinds of people On the street for a while— But how love falters and flags When anyone’s difficult eyes come Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique Soul, its need unlovable: my friend In his divorced schoolteacher Apartment, his own unsuspected Paintings hung everywhere, Which his wife kept in a closet— Not, he says, that she wasn’t Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing My rock radio sing my self-pity: “The Angels Wished Him Dead”—all The hideous, sudden stare of self, Soul showing through like the lizard Ancestry showing in the frontal gaze Of a robin busy on the lawn. In the movies, when the sensitive Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns Trying to rescue the thrashing Anti-semitic bully, swimming across The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth: Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself. The weather Changes in the black of night, And the dream-wind, bowling across The sopping open spaces Of roads, golf courses, parking lots, Flails a commotion In the dripping treetops, Tries a half-rotten shingle Or a down-hung branch, and we All dream it, the dark wind crossing The wide spaces between us.

At night Chinamen jump on Asia with a thump while in our willful way we, in secret, play affectionate games and bruise our knees like China’s shoes. The birds push apples through grass the moon turns blue, these apples roll beneath our buttocks like a heath full of Chinese thrushes flushed from China’s bushes. As we love at night birds sing out of sight, Chinese rhythms beat through us in our heat, the apples and the birds move us like soft words, we couple in the grace of that mysterious race.

I The light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought, quick adulterous tread at the heart. Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air, torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre. In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light falling upon the brown boy’s slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing up from blind innocence, ensnared by dimness into the deprivations of desiring sight. But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft, diffuse with rapture absorb the flame. Their bodies yield out of strength. Waves of visual pleasure wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience. A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns the tips of their bodies, lips, ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd. His thighs are flesh, are clouds lit by the sun in its going down, hot luminescence at the loins of the visible. But they are not in a landscape. They exist in an obscurity. The wind spreading the sail serves them. The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin serve them. That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be, serves them. The dark serves them. The oil scalding his shoulder serves them, serves their story. Fate, spinning, knots the threads for Love. Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them. II This is magic. It is passionate dispersion. What if they grow old? The gods would not allow it. Psyche is preserved. In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold it is age that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets we go, to their faltering, their unaltering wrongness that has style, their variable truth, the old faces, words shed like tears from a plenitude of powers time stores. A stroke.   These little strokes.   A chill. The old man, feeble, does not recoil. Recall. A phase so minute, only a part of the word in- jerrd. The Thundermakers descend, damerging a nuv. A nerb. The present dented of the U nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod? Cloud. Invades the brain. What if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd? Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower— where among these did the power reside that moves the heart? What flower of the nation bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture? Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities. For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing? Noble men in the quiet of morning hear Indians singing the continent’s violent requiem. Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, idiots fumbling at the bride’s door, hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war. Where among these did the spirit reside that restores the land to productive order? McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson, dwell in the roots of the heart’s rancor. How sad “amid lanes and through old woods” echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln! There is no continuity then. Only a few posts of the good remain. I too that am a nation sustain the damage where smokes of continual ravage obscure the flame. It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! that cried: “The theme is creative and has vista.” “He is the president of regulation.” I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure. III (for Charles Olson) Psyche’s tasks—the sorting of seeds wheat      barley      oats      poppy      coriander anise      beans      lentils      peas      —every grain in its right place before nightfall; gathering the gold wool from the cannibal sheep (for the soul must weep and come near upon death); harrowing Hell for a casket Proserpina keeps that must not be opend . . . containing beauty? no!      Melancholy coild like a serpent that is deadly sleep we are not permitted to succumb to. These are the old tasks. You’ve heard them before. They must be impossible. Psyche must despair, be brought to her insect instructor; must obey the counsels of the green reed; saved from suicide by a tower speaking, must follow to the letter freakish instructions. In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa mixd in whose mind (to draw the sorts) are all seeds as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill had part restored by an insect, was upheld by a lizard (to draw the sorts) the wind is part of the process defines a nation of the wind— father of many notions, Who? let the light into the dark? began the many movements of the passion? West from east   men push. The islands are blessd (cursed)   that swim below the sun, man upon whom the sun has gone down! There is the hero who struggles east widdershins to free the dawn   and must woo Night’s daughter, sorcery, black passionate rage, covetous queens, so that the fleecy sun go   back from Troy, Colchis, India . . . all the blazing armies spent, he must struggle alone toward the pyres of Day. The light that is Love rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark. Roses and blood flood the clouds. Solitary first riders advance into legend. This land, where I stand, was all legend in my grandfathers’ time: cattle raiders, animal tribes, priests, gold. It was the West. Its vistas painters saw in diffuse light, in melancholy, in abysses left by glaciers as if they had been the sun primordial carving empty enormities out of the rock. Snakes lurkd guarding secrets.         Those first ones survived solitude. Scientia holding the lamp, driven by doubt; Eros naked in foreknowledge smiling in his sleep;    and the light spilld, burning his shoulder—the outrage that conquers legend— passion, dismay, longing, search flooding up where the Beloved is lost. Psyche travels life after life, my life, station after station, to be tried without break, without news, knowing only—but what did she know? The oracle at Miletus had spoken truth surely: that he was Serpent-Desire that flies thru the air, a monster-husband. But she saw him fair whom Apollo’s mouthpiece said spread pain beyond cure    to those wounded by his arrows. Rilke torn by a rose thorn blackend toward Eros.          Cupidinous Death! that will not take no for an answer. IV Oh yes!      Bless the footfall where step by step      the boundary walker (in Maverick Road      the snow thud by thud      from the roof circling the house—another tread) that foot      informd by the weight of all things that can be elusive no more than a nearness to the mind of a single image Oh yes!      this most dear the catalyst force that renders clear the days of a life from the surrounding medium! Yes, beautiful rare wilderness! wildness that verifies strength of my tame mind, clearing held against indians, health that prepared to meet death, the stubborn hymns going up into the ramifications of the hostile air that, decaptive, gives way. Who is there?   O, light the light! The Indians give way, the clearing falls. Great Death gives way   and unprepares us. Lust gives way.    The Moon gives way. Night gives way.   Minutely,   the Day gains. She saw the body of her beloved dismemberd in waking . . . or was it in sight?Finders Keepers we sang when we were children      or were taught to sing before our histories began      and we began who were beloved      our animal life toward the Beloved,      sworn to be Keepers. On the hill before the wind came the grass moved toward the one sea, blade after blade dancing in waves. There the children turn the ring to the left. There the children turn the ring to the right. Dancing . . . Dancing . . . And the lonely psyche goes up thru the boy to the king that in the caves of history dreams. Round and round the children turn. London Bridge that is a kingdom falls. We have come so far that all the old stories whisper once more. Mount Segur, Mount Victoire, Mount Tamalpais . . . rise to adore the mystery of Love! (An ode? Pindar’s art, the editors tell us, was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor. But if he was archaic, not classic, a survival of obsolete mode, there may have been old voices in the survival that directed the heart. So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said,Listen to Me! The oracle had said,Despair! The Gods themselves abhor his power. And then the virgin flower of the dark falls back flesh of our flesh from which everywhere . . . the information flows that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves from the area of my lamp toward morning. In the dawn that is nowhere I have seen the willful children clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.

—in memory ofCynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance,Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor,Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney,Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr.,Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Myra ThompsonShot and killed while at church.Charleston, SC (6-18-2015), RIP poem by        poem we can end the violence every day                        after every other day 9 killed in Charleston, South Carolina they are not 9 they are each one alive we do not know you have a poem to offer it is made of action—you must search for it     run outside and give your life to it when you find it    walk it back—blow upon it carry it taller than the city where you live when the blood comes down do not ask          if it is your blood   it is made of 9             drops honor them wash them stop them from falling

It is their way to find the surface when they die. Fish feed on fish and drop those beautiful bones to swim. I see them stretch the water to their need as I domesticate the separate air to be my breath. These fish die easily. I find my surface in the way they feed. Their gathering hunger is a flash like death. No agony as if my mind had eaten death.

Day is carved in marble, a man reclining, a naked giant suffering. Preoccupied Day faces Night, who is a woman, huge, naked, Herculean, both pillowed on their uncarved rough marble bed. They need light to be seen, neither has anything to do with the sun or moon. Art is not astronomy, but the heavens are useful as gardening to poets, not useful as love or loneliness. If I write out of arrogance and ignorance a poem called Day, my chisel and mallet, words and pen, paper my marble, I must not confuse sunlight and Day, petals with hours. I could rhyme, perhaps by reason and chance describe the nature of Day. I might discover Nature is surprisingly sometimes moral, unexpected, a principle over which the lovers Night and Day quarrel. In my poem, faithful Night and faithful Day quarreled; rhyme told me they quarreled because Day is gold, Night hates the thought of celestial money, rages at the starless differences between cost and price. Michelangelo did not choose to make a sculpture Prezzo, or put the finger of God on a coin. Day and Night saw Danaë’s legs spread apart for Zeus to enter as a shower of gold. They are not household gods or saints. Better I write about things nearby, a chair, a stool, the principle I’m sitting on. Day is my dictionary. If my Day were animal, he might be a baby elephant who eats leaves. My good Day stays close to his mother, who is murdered for her ivory tusks. My Day is an endangered specie. I whisper into elephant ears,peace, my darling little Day. An owl hoots,your Day has no given name! True, I refuse names useful to many others: Sabbath, Sunday, Friday, Saturday. My Day is not baptized, circumcised, or blessed. I pick him up and hold Day in my arms. I put my head in Day’s open mouth. I tongue Day, and Day tongues me. Yes, although my Day loves Night, he tongues me in and out of bed. My Day knows Night carnally, lets Night know me. So I love Day today. And I love Night tonight.

Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his mouth, he has mastered to mutilate you: the Joker's voice, so unlike the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar. Once I have the voice that's the line and at the end of the line is a hook and attached to that is the soul.

The field blank in snow. But I mean this page. Now print mars the surface to make surface Seen. Sheen only error brings. Perfect rage So the sun rises. Rage is your slow practice That makes of every day another day In whose gathering promise the shy sparrows Shiver instead of sing. I want to go away. See these footsteps? These black shapes in the snow? If there is a word for them, it’s no word I know.Pursuit?, no.Proof?, no. Don’t call it fear. Could I cross this white sheet if I were coward, Edge to edge, margin to margin, never Referring to anything outside itself?— Stop that. Stop pointing to the photo on the shelf.

“It is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto everyone we meet, he doth not kill us.” —Sir Thomas Browne We’re down here in the basement dodging bombs. As our loves freckle with age we must adore them more ferociously. Come winter you kick back and ready your weapons for spring. My next task was to get well. Five million years ago, there were different terrors. Saber toothed fears. Edgar Allen Poe was terrified of being buried alive. Fear is a civilising influence. It keeps us in line. Fear of bacteria. Of our own murderous kind. Of aliens superior to us in every way who’ll arrive any moment and sensibly decide to clean house. A terrible cry arises from the thick of things. My begging bowl runneth over. Heaven has been relocated and we’re not telling you where. Not even a hint. I don’t love you anymore. What might it mean to die a worthy death and how much should one brood about that ahead of time? I was just trying to get back to the boat alive. Let us lurch forward or hellward. What an adorable form of anarchy when the body outwits us. I am a heretic in their eyes, so they will kill us both and murder your children if they find our hiding place. Despite everything, I awoke full of praise for you, as I do each morning. Coughing constantly, I rinsed my hands and ate some seeded crackers. I thought about your face and prayed.

I wish I would like a ship that all night carries its beloved captain sleeping through no weather slip past dawn and wake with nothing but strange things that did not happen to report but I get up in the dark and parachute quietly down to the kitchen to begin the purely mental ritual plugging in of the useless worry machine above me she sleeps like the innocent still dreaming older sister to all gentle things the white screen impassively asks me to say what does not matter does so I shut it down and think about the lake near where I live it’s a lagoon getting lighter like an old blue just switched on television maybe a Zenith it has two arms they stretch without feeling east to embrace an empty park a little light then everything has a shadow I almost hear a silent bell low voices I brought us to this old city the port connects to the world where everyone pretends to know they live on an island waiting for the giant wave in some form maybe radiation in the yard the wind blows the whole black sky looks down for an instant through my sleepy isolate frame a complex child hologram flickers angrily holding a green plastic shovel then disappears leaving an empty column waiting Bill who I knew was so angry is dead whatever he was going through I kept away I never did anything I love his poem he was really good I keep forgetting his last name I always leave his handmade book on my desk not to remember but because for hours after everything everyone says sounds like a language I never knew but now speak spirit I know you would have hated how I think you would have liked this music in another room pushing the alien voice into the millennium the one you left so early spirit you were right all noble things are gone except to struggle and be loved