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I It is a little isle amid bleak seas— An isolate realm of garden, circled round By importunity of stress and sound, Devoid of empery to master these. At most, the memory of its streams and bees, Borne to the toiling mariner outward—bound, Recalls his soul to that delightful ground; But serves no beacon toward his destinies. It is a refuge from the stormy days, Breathing the peace of a remoter world Where beauty, like the musing dusk of even, Enfolds the spirit in its silver haze; While far away, with glittering banners furled, The west lights fade, and stars come out in heaven. II It is a sea—gate, trembling with the blast Of powers that from the infinite sea—plain roll, A whelming tide. Upon the waiting soul As on a fronting rock, thunders the vast Groundswell; its spray bursts heavenward, and drives past In fume and sound articulate of the whole Of ocean’s heart, else voiceless; on the shoal Silent; upon the headland clear at last. From darkened sea—coasts without stars or sun, Like trumpet—voices in a holy war, Utter the heralds tidings of the deep. And where men slumber, weary and undone, Visions shall come, incredible hopes from far,— And with high passion shatter the bonds of sleep.

Morn on her rosy couch awoke, Enchantment led the hour, And mirth and music drank the dews That freshen’d Beauty’s flower, Then from her bower of deep delight, I heard a young girl sing, ‘Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.’ The Sun in noon-day heat rose high, And on the heaving breast, I saw a weary pilgrim toil Unpitied and unblest, Yet still in trembling measures flow’d Forth from a broken string, ‘Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.’ ’Twas night, and Death the curtains drew, ’Mid agony severe, While there a willing spirit went Home to a glorious sphere, Yet still it sigh’d, even when was spread The waiting Angel’s wing, ‘Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.’

Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem. “They came up and died just like they do every year on the rocks.” The poem feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed    itself, a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. This beauty is an inner persistence toward the source striving against (within) down-rushet of the river, a call we heard and answer in the lateness of the world primordial bellowings from which the youngest world might spring, salmon not in the well where the hazelnut falls but at the falls battling, inarticulate, blindly making it. This is one picture apt for the mind. A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, where last year’s extravagant antlers lie on the ground. The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears new antler-buds, the same, “a little heavy, a little contrived”, his only beauty to be all moose.

For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house after my mother’s death; she died the year before; she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute to weed the garden or to walk just a little way along Prospect Street, for a few minutes only and now almost now she’d be coming back, we’d hear the screen door, Bev would be back and saying something casual about— about the cats, Daphne and Chloe, or about Mrs. Yamokofsky next door or about the pear tree, “or a colored stone she found.” That was the phrase that ended my poem in 1976: “or a colored stone she found.” The phrase rang slightly false but I wanted it—the “ound” and “one” sounds sounded profound and in 1976 “stone” was still a word guaranteed poetic. But did my mother ever pick up colorful stones? Wasn’t that more something I did fifteen years earlier? In the poem I was trying to turn my ironic mother into an ideal figure certified sweet like a child. But what could I make her say? Something very sly and wry? The poetry would be in her voice, the way of her voice being hers—voice of my mother—whether the words were about the cats or Mrs. Yamokofsky or potatoes to peel for mashing. Not your mother.My mother. Poetry of her saying in her Bev way “those potatoes” or “Mrs. Yamokovsky” or “Daphne’s gone down by the Black River but if we feed Chloe I’m sure she’ll be back.” And my father and Kimbo and me just going “Yeah” or “In a minute” because this was all just life.

That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there. Corazón, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit. He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own . . . The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

You write not what you want, but what flaws flower from rust You want to write about the universe, how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts watching over us and instead what you get on the page is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway— the wails of the girlfriend or widow, her long lamentation so sensuous in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance Poetry is a sickness You want to write about Adoration, the glistening sweat on your honey's chest in which you've tasted the sun's caress, and instead what you get is a poem about the first of four times your mother and father split up Want to write about the perfection of God and end up with just another story of a uniquely lonely childhood If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote I'd be dead Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice, and look here, see, what got left behind when all the sand and dust cleared is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen braids the reddish hair of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter Outside, no blinking stars No holy kiss's approach Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems from prison You want everyone to feel empowered Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit one word at a time You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives Middle-finger your literalist boss Blow grocery cash on library fines Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready You live in an attic for nine years You go bankrupt You smoke too much Drink too much Alienate family and friends Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero your secret power will become loss Loss like only old people must know when the last red maple on the block goes and the drizzle turns to snow Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written The ghazal that bled your index finger Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear That slam poem you're still paying for The triolet that smiled to violate you through both ears But Poet, Sucker, Fool It's your job to find meaning in all this because you are delusional enough to believe that, yes, poetry is a sickness, but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up, but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood not ten minutes after the ambulance left was gorgeous Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream, but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical fruit for one another every Xmas Eve How in the morning before opting out I watched that tiny Native girl fumbling to braid her own and her now- snoring mother's long black hair together in a single cornrow— If I can just always squiggle down like this: even half as much as what I'd otherwise need to forget maybe these scales really will one day tip to find each flaw that made us Exquisite

At the podium measured and grave as a metronome the (white, male) poet with bald- gleaming head broods in gnom- ic syllables on the death of 12-year-old (black, male) Tamir Rice shot in a park by a Cleveland police officer claiming to believe the boy’s plastic pistol was a “real gun” like his own eager to discharge and slay while twelve feet away at the edge of the bright-lit stage the (white, female) interpreter signing for the deaf is stricken with emotion — horror, pity, disbelief — outrage, sorrow — young-woman face contorted and eyes spilling tears like Tamir Rice’s mother perhaps, or the sister made to witness the child’s bleeding out in the Cleveland park. We stare as the interpreter’s fingers pluck the poet’s words out of the air like bullets, break open stanzas tight as conches with the deft ferocity of a cormo- rant and render gnome-speech raw as hurt, as harm, as human terror wet-eyed and mouth-grimaced in horror’s perfect O.

Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies, over the girl with her first electric, how her high, thin voice, amplified many times over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's in the green grass of the festival site. Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide the pistil and the pollen inside. Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands, over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening. It rejoices over Japan, over Korea, over arts refined over a thousand years— the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea. Rejoices over the poet, that his heart still beats.

to W.S. Merwin I said, “Nothing for the last time.” You said, “Everything for the last time.” Later I thought you made everything more precious with “everything for the last time”: the last meditation, the last falling asleep, the last dream before the final makebelieve, the last kiss good night, the last look out the window at the last moonlight. Last leaves no time to hesitate. I would drink strong coffee before my last sleep. I’d rather remember childhood, rehearse forgiveness, listen to birdsong or a Spanish housemaid singing, scrubbing a tiled floor in Seville— I’d scrub and sing myself.O Susanna Susanna, quanta pena mi costi. I would strangle the snakes of lastness like Herakles in his crib before I cocked my ear to Mozart for the last time. There is not sky or clouds enough to cover the music I would hear for the last time. I know a bank whereon the wild thyme of everything for the last time grows, covered with deadly nightshade and poison hemlock. No last, no first, thinking in the moment, years ago, you prepared the soil in Hawaii before you planted your palm trees, then shared most of your days and nights with them as equals. You built your house with a Zen room. I made no prayer when I dug a hole and pushed in a twelve-foot white pine, root ball locked in green plastic netting. I did not cut the netting, so twenty years later a tall, beautiful, white pine died. I lynched the roots. To save my life I would let them seize, cut out a bear’s heart, I would partake in its flesh. But you would die before you’d let them kill that bear. Again, I say, “Nothing for the last time.” You say, “Everything for the last time.” Sailor, I would have killed a stranger to save the world. Sailor, you would not. We kissed goodbye on the cheek. I hope not for the last time. Home, I look into my brass telescope— at the far end, where the moon and distant stars should be, I see my eye looking back at me, it’s twinkling and winking like a star. I go to bed. My dogs, donkeys and wife are sleeping. I am safe. You are home with your wife you met and decided to marry in four days.

It had better been hidden But the Poets inform: We are chattel and liege Of an undying Worm. Were you, Will, disheartened, When all Stratford’s gentry Left their Queen and took service In his low-lying country? How many white cities And grey fleets on the storm Have proud-builded, hard-battled, For this undying Worm? Was a sweet chaste lady Would none of her lover. Nay, here comes the Lewd One, Creeps under her cover! Have ye said there’s no deathless Of face, fashion, form, Forgetting to honor The extent of the Worm? O ye laughers and light-lipped, Ye faithless, infirm, I can tell you who’s constant, ’Tis the Eminent Worm. Ye shall trip on no limits, Neither time ye your term, In the realms of His Absolute Highness the Worm.