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The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands When imperceptive hands, Feeling, have gone astray. It is what one should say. Few minds will come to this. The poet’s only bliss Is in cold certitude— Laurel, archaic, rude.

On the morning of the 20th National Day my uncle came home and told us: “All our troops have got into position, for the Russians may throw an atom-bomb on us today.” After breakfast he returned to the headquarters, but I had to go to school and join the celebration. The fear oppressed my back like a bag of sand. I could not raise the little triangle flag in my hand, nor could I shout slogans with my classmates. During the break I called together my best friends and told them what would occur on this day. Benli said, “I must go home and tell my dad to kill all our chickens.” Qingping said, “I must tell my aunt not to buy a sewing machine. Who would care about clothes if that happens.” Yimin and I said nothing, but we knew what we were going to do. We decided to go to the army, for we did not want to be roasted at home like little pigs.

On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky. Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, And nigh at hand, only a very little above, Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades. From the beach the child holding the hand of her father, Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all, Watching, silently weeps. Weep not, child, Weep not, my darling, With these kisses let me remove your tears, The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition, Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge, They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again, The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure, The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine. Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars? Something there is, (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper, I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,) Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

October 18, 1914 I dreamt that people from the Land of Chimes Arrived one autumn morning with their bells, To hoist them on the towers and citadels Of my own country, that the musical rhymes Rung by them into space at meted times Amid the market's daily stir and stress, And the night's empty star-lit silentness, Might solace souls of this and kindred climes. Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear; From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood Had shattered these to shards amid the gear Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.

Families when a child is born Hope it will turn out intelligent. I, through intelligence Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope that the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he'll be happy all his days And grow into a cabinet minister.

“Sooner or later we'll all get to speak like Ted Berrigan” A donkey might consider itself a white stallion and the ear-phones oft the desert tune into us A hair-breaking pallor Nothing to be afraid of How long has the checker-board been “on the scene”? It's the miracle she-wolf. I know I am “too serious” For “The Daughters of Nothing already for Nothing” Who will erase my ulcer See its dry its dry it's got a combination My friends. What's left over? Pagliacci. In the guise of Enrico Caruso bangs his drum with hysteric eyes His girl-friend's inside he's beating the heart of his bass drum O that crazy clown Pagliacci! It seems we stood and talked like this before Don't Grab from me Baby I keep my face and open spigot a cry of the winds Fall all your fresh newspapers Inquisitors Happiness It is the divine stone the white stone with the name which no one knows New York City On Ted's 31st Birthday

Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after one party, our self-parody of our own stammering speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness and differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town, and the long phone calls that followed with their emphatic reiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavored alcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed, stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hit the LP’s end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table, prompting a dim:Uh oh; your imitation of your mother’s habitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about you to shoe salesmen: She has a funny foot; the apartments, the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchanged unedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness, which we might have assumed the verbal equivalent of sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wanted as much as we could have, it was our post-graduate work in The Humanities. Even now, I can’t resist striking up a conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducing myself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced, but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point; I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who left through the hole of an argument decades ago, a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybe the early years of motherhood, which I missed sharing with you on playground benches. But surely I will see you on the bus someday, and your greeting will package our jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance. And so I will expect you will tell me how much I have misunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions, because I never expect those people who have mattered to remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke. And of course I have to remember what parted us, that I found faults with your other friends, that I spoke as critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person, and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyard dog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here, again, telling you everything with no reason but for memory’s insistence that I string an apology from what I see.

Before the sixth day of the next new year, Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear: Four kings shall be assembled in this isle, Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile. Many men then shall have an end of crosses, And many likewise shall sustain great losses; Many that now full joyful are and glad, Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad; Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear, The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear. Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down, In every city and in every town. By day or night this tumult shall not cease, Until an herald shall proclaim a peace; An herald strong, the like was never born, Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.

When bodies broken and all bodies seared Are counted up, uncrusted, tagged as feared, We know next day the scene will stand alone On pages white and mindless of the bone. Shall notice recognize beyond the burned, Or caption past the people tritely charred, Related dusty partness with the term Antiquity, the sense of death in stone And knowledge of the previously marred? On battlefields of Troy or Tuscany Or other places where techniques engaged, When warrior fell, or blade or boy enraged, Of them did campfire journalists of song Forget collective going, all but pathos, In wretchedness and fact of having gone? Accuse the gnostic grammar of old wars: It maims our grasp of accidental death Past putting down of papers to decry Their overlooking what it means to die.