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Always a broom leaned against a wall, meals never on time, if they come at all. Days without dates through which she moves empty and stubborn, slightly confused. Ironing hung dejectedly over a chair, gestures that come from who-knows-where. Old letters unanswered, piled together, papers and pills stuffed deep in a drawer. Thankful to be part of your heart’s great whole yet devoted to the limits of her own small skull. O orderly biped, take heed, leave her alone—let her read.

The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar is what the painter considers as she strokes her- self into story. There is less to the jolt that comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds, a jolt riding from his shoulder blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida Kahlo. Here, he says,let me spread my flesh out like a table linen, let my bones be silver that touches, making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass, set properly, I have class enough.

Dead to the world I have failed you Forgive me, traveller. Thirsty, I was no fountain Hungry, I was not bread Tired, I was no pillow Forgive my unwritten poems: the many I have frozen with irony the many I have trampled with anger the many I have rejected in self-defence the many I have ignored in fear unaware, blind or fearful I ignored them. They clamoured everywhere those unwritten poems. They sought me out day and night and I turned them away. Forgive me the colours they might have worn Forgive me their eclipsed faces They dared not venture from the unwritten lines. Under each inert hour of my silence died a poem, unheeded

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years. Outside the vineyards vanished under rain, And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang Their lost songs:Amapola; La Paloma; Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess, Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own. Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish. I hated high school then, & on weekends drove A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone. Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing, And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then. I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings, The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind Of solitude the world usually allows Only to kings & criminals who are extinct, Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin Each autumn, & made that little hell of days— The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs. The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared. And the girls I tried to talk to after class Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed, With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment. Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road. A life like that? It seemed to go on forever— Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend. And then the first ice hung like spider lattices Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One, And then the first dark entering the trees— And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner, The way they always seemed afraid of something, And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.

On the side of the road a deer, frozen, frigid. Go back to your life, the voice said. What is my life? she wondered. For months she lost herself in work—Freud said work is as important as love to the soul—and at night she sat with a boy, forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes. Then the ice thawed and the deer came to life. She saw her jump over the fence, she saw her in the twilight, how free she looked. She saw her eyes shiny as marbles, as much a part of this world as the fence a worker pounds into the earth. At night she still sat with the boy. He’s learning “Au Claire de la Lune.” Do you know it? He has established a relationship with his violin. He knows that it takes practice to master it: the accuracy of each note, to wrestle his feelings to the listener. But he’s impatient. Sometimes what he hears and feels are not always the same.Again, the poet says. She knows if he tries to silence his fervor, he might not ever know who he is. The poet contemplates whether a deer can dream. Rich blood-red berries on a branch, pachysandra in the garden. A soft warm bed in the leaves.

for Jim Schley The umbrella, in this case; Earlier, the stool, the Wooden pillars that hold up the roof. This guy, you realize, Will dance with anything— —He likes the idea. Then he picks up some lady’s discarded sandals, Holds them next to his head like sea shells, Donkey ears. Nothing, his body states, Is safe from the dance of ideas!

for Michele (1966-1972) Michele has become another dead little girl. An easy poem. Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five year old photograph of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it. Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias. Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses so dark the mind comes to them without color. Dark on the Greek hillside. Dark, volcanic, dry and stone. Where the oldest women of the world are standing dressed in black up in the branches of fig trees in the gorge knocking with as much quickness as their weakness will allow. Weakness which my heart must not confuse with tenderness. And on the other side of the island a woman walks up the path with a burden of leaves on her head, guiding the goats with sounds she makes up, and then makes up again. The other darkness is easy: the men in the dreams who come in together to me with knives. There are so many traps, and many look courageous. The body goes into such raptures of obedience. But the huge stones on the desert resemble nobody’s mother. I remember the snake. After its skin had been cut away, and it was dropped it started to move across the clearing. Making its beautiful waving motion. It was all meat and bone. Pretty soon it was covered with dust. It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go. Toward any dark trees.

A poet! —He hath put his heart to school, Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff Which art hath lodged within his hand—must laugh By precept only, and shed tears by rule. Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff, And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool, In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool Have killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph. How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold; And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree Comes not by casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality.

I summon up Panofskv from his bed Among the famous dead To build a tomb which, since I am not read, Suffers the stone’s mortality instead; Which, by the common iconographies Of simple visual ease, Usurps the place of the complexities Of sound survivors once preferred to noise: Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy Nightmarish sloth, a tree Of parrots in a pride of family, Immortal skunks, unaromatically; Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine Quill-less, a superfine Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line Of geese, unnavigating by design; Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks, A hundred porous arks Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks Ape mother mules or imitation sharks— And each of them half-venerated by A mob, impartially Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry Unable mouth, symmetrically awry. But how shall I, in my brief space, describe A tomb so vast, a tribe So desperately existent for a scribe Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe, I who have sought time’s memory afoot, Grateful for every root Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit, Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it, I see myself unnoticed on the stair That, underneath a clear Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.

Is it, then, your opinion Women are putty in your hands? Is this the face to launch upon A thousand one night stands? First, please, would you be so kind As to define your contribution To modern verse, the Western mind And human institutions? Where, where is the long, flowing hair, The velvet suit, the broad bow tie; Where is the other-worldly air, Where the abstracted eye? Describe the influence on your verse Of Oscar Mudwarp’s mighty line, The theories of Susan Schmersch Or the spondee’s decline. You’ve labored to present us with This mouse-sized volume; shall this equal The epic glories of Joe Smith? He’s just brought out a sequel. Where are the beard, the bongo drums, Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals, As who, released from Iowa, comes To tell of wondrous scandals? Have you subversive, out of date, Or controversial ideas? And can you really pull your weight Among such minds as these? Ah, what avails the tenure race, Ah, what the Ph.D., When all departments have a place For nincompoops like thee?