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Toll for the brave— The brave! that are no more: All sunk beneath the wave, Fast by their native shore. Eight hundred of the brave, Whose courage well was tried, Had made the vessel heel And laid her on her side; A land-breeze shook the shrouds, And she was overset; Down went the Royal George, With all her crew complete. Toll for the brave— Brave Kempenfelt is gone, His last sea-fight is fought, His work of glory done. It was not in the battle, No tempest gave the shock, She sprang no fatal leak, She ran upon no rock; His sword was in the sheath, His fingers held the pen, When Kempenfelt went down With twice four hundred men. Weigh the vessel up, Once dreaded by our foes, And mingle with your cup The tears that England owes; Her timbers yet are sound, And she may float again, Full charg'd with England's thunder, And plough the distant main; But Kempenfelt is gone, His victories are o'er; And he and his eight hundred Must plough the wave no more.

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s been drinking and has no idea who this curious Andalusian is, unable even to speak the language of poetry. The young man who brought them together knows both Spanish and English, but he has a headache from jumping back and forth from one language to another. For a moment’s relief he goes to the window to look down on the East River, darkening below as the early night comes on. Something flashes across his sight, a double vision of such horror he has to slap both his hands across his mouth to keep from screaming. Let’s not be frivolous, let’s not pretend the two poets gave each other wisdom or love or even a good time, let’s not invent a dialogue of such eloquence that even the ants in your own house won’t forget it. The two greatest poetic geniuses alive meet, and what happens? A vision comes to an ordinary man staring at a filthy river. Have you ever had a vision? Have you ever shaken your head to pieces and jerked back at the image of your young son falling through open space, not from the stern of a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York but from the roof of the building he works on? Have you risen from bed to pace until dawn to beg a merciless God to take these pictures away? Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human— the only animal that’s got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sights and will not let go. The young man was my cousin, Arthur Lierberman, then a language student at Columbia, who told me all this before he died quietly in his sleep in 1983 in a hotel in Perugia. A good man, Arthur, he survived graduate school, later came home to Detroit and sold pianos right through the Depression. He loaned my brother a used one to compose hideous songs on, which Arthur thought were genius. What an imagination Arthur had!

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known. I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg. The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train, and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again, (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back, (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows, Has nested in the trees and undergrowth. Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both, One moves with an uncertain violence Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense Or the dull thunder of approximate words. On motorcycles, up the road, they come: Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys, Until the distance throws them forth, their hum Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh. In goggles, donned impersonality, In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust, They strap in doubt – by hiding it, robust – And almost hear a meaning in their noise. Exact conclusion of their hardiness Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts They ride, direction where the tyres press. They scare a flight of birds across the field: Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes. It is a part solution, after all. One is not necessarily discord On earth; or damned because, half animal, One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes Afloat on movement that divides and breaks. One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward. A minute holds them, who have come to go: The self-defined, astride the created will They burst away; the towns they travel through Are home for neither bird nor holiness, For birds and saints complete their purposes. At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.

A page, a huntsman and a priest of God Her lovers, met in jealous contrariety Equally claiming the sole parenthood Of him the perfect crown of their variety. Then, whom to admit, herself she could not tell: That always was her fate, she loved too well. “But many-fathered little one,” she said, “Whether of high or low, of smooth or rough, Here is your mother whom you brought to bed; Acknowledge only me; be this enough; For such as worship after shall be told A white dove sired you or a rain of gold.”

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon, The dinosaur, who left dried tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow, I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness Have lain too long Facedown in ignorance, Your mouths spilling words Armed for slaughter. The Rock cries out to us today, You may stand upon me, But do not hide your face. [...]

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller, those hotel rooms where the TV remote waits by the bed like a suicide pistol, those hours in the air amid white shirts whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers, those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts— such venues of transit grow dearer than home. The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss, the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life? No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror, in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent, and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide down through the cloud cover to a single runway at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

On starless, windless nights like this I imagine I can hear the wedding dresses Weeping in their closets, Luminescent with hopeless longing, Like hollow angels. They know they will never be worn again. Who wants them now, After their one heroic day in the limelight? Yet they glow with desire In the darkness of closets. A few lucky wedding dresses Get worn by daughters—just once more, Then back to the closet. Most turn yellow over time, Yellow from praying For the moths to come And carry them into the sky. Where is your mother's wedding dress, What closet? Where is your grandmother's wedding dress? What, gone? Eventually they all disappear, Who knows where. Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it. I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill. But what sad story brought it there, And what sad story will take it away? Somewhere a closet is waiting for it. The luckiest wedding dresses Are those of wives Betrayed by their husbands A week after the wedding. They are flung outside the double-wide, Or the condo in Telluride, And doused with gasoline. They ride the candolescent flames, Just smoke now, Into a sky full of congratulations.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances. They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds. They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets. The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image—but magnified. Athena, the very mother of wisdom, squabbled with Poseidon like any human sibling until their furious tempers made the sea writhe. Zeus wore a crown of lightning bolts one minute, a cloak of feathers the next, as driven by earthly lust he prepared to swoop down on Leda. Despite their power, frailty ran through them like the darker veins in the marble of these temples we call monuments. Looking at Jefferson now, I think of the language he left for us to live by. I think of the slave in the kitchen downstairs.