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O thou bright jewel in my aim I strive To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach. I cease to wonder, and no more attempt Thine height t’explore, or fathom thy profound. But, O my soul, sink not into despair, Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head. Fain would the heaven-born soul with her converse, Then seek, then court her for her promised bliss. Auspicious queen, thine heavenly pinions spread, And lead celestial Chastity along; Lo! now her sacred retinue descends, Arrayed in glory from the orbs above. Attend me,Virtue, thro’ my youthful years! O leave me not to the false joys of time! But guide my steps to endless life and bliss. Greatness, or Goodness, say what I shall call thee, To give an higher appellation still, Teach me a better strain, a nobler lay, O Thou, enthroned with Cherubs in the realms of day!

I have come to collect the various species of America: ruby-spotted, tigers, kites & pipevines — an armory of wings & two-week bodies. The room swells openly & I ascend to the top — I am separate from the boy who swats persistently. Tucked in the corner of a window, a white morpho, the only kind to perch long enough for me to satisfy my collecting — its lunar afterglow still hanging as I pulse & pace to get a closer look. I am separate from the boy who climbs a nearby tower & shouts for his father. Perhaps I am half of this — a set of dots for eyes, spine for spine, my insides half my father’s — half my mother’s.Kuv tus ntsuj plig unlike the fate of quick bodies, sovereign cavities, mother whose torso fell early in harvest — a bed of muscle to hold her from splitting in two — & do we hear it? As in a fever the boy runs back & does not see the white morpho the way I must see it: my personal moon stone-ripe in this foreign corner, mother as fauna forever — inhuman & gazing. Then my body a chariot pulled by a pair of orange helicons sweeping towards the main water feature (complete with koi). This place in which I dream the new body — whole & abiding — I am reaching for the boy now as warden to both the living & the afterliving — the privilege in every gesture — like mother’s first gifts: name & citizenship, poetry always in departure, the song about the moon falling over, fast in flames —

—how her loose curls float above each silver fish as she leans in to pluck its eyes— You died just hours ago. Not suddenly, no. You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself: from your window, fishermen swirled sequins; fishnets entangled the moon. Now the dark rain looks like dark rain. Only the wine shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses and we raise a toast to you as so and so's daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow— slides into another lap to eat another pair of slippery eyes with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time, for being chewed a little. If only I could go to you, revive you. You must be a little alive still. I'd like to put this girl in your lap. She's almost feverishly warm and she weighs hardly anything. I want to show you how she relishes each eye, to show you her greed for them. She is placing one on her tongue, bright as a polished coin— What do they taste like? I ask. Twisting in my lap, she leans back sleepily. They taste like eyes, she says.

I might not wash today. I might let the weekend slide into gratifying anarchy. I am supposed to be thankful, this town is not among the true nightmare portions of the world. A roof over my head and quite sufficient shine on the silver, thanks. I might, though. Haven’t you seen it? Your city pokes a crafty fang at a flight path. It’s my city too, I suppose. You think you are in control. Idiot! To name is to own, not to know. And now we are so used to blood we miss the silly crimson pity of it. I dream of hardmen, the torturer’s tweezers; of scholars supplanting their teeth in basement gardens. It’s there, but you miss it. I don’t miss a thing. It’s always there, the aura before a seizure, inside my expendable circuitry, deeper than dog years down, always, even always. I dream of the made face coming apart in my hands like wet bread. I might not dress today. I might suck sauce from the bottle. Here’s mud in your gloria mundi, and a blue blowtorch to your extremities, dear. How do you feel about that? Or the massive enigma of love? Does anything shock you? I am supposed to be grateful, the shirt on my back and quite enough coal in the cellar, thanks. But a grand mal growls at the back of the mind, and the back of the mind is a bottle bank, love. We come and go, stooped in their palisades. The rich are always with us, their hexentanz and agonies. Here’s Kate, we all love Kate, oblivious, bombshell, and didn’t she used to be us? Not me. Your city, its nicotine fingers, windows lit, yellow and sickly. Here’s where we crouch our snouts to the wall. I might not leave the house today. Haven’t you seen what’s out there? Their vaunting faith; the awful punitive spring. I dream of muti and suitcases; grown men stabbed in their Camden hamlets, eyes without faces, world without end. It’s there, still there, but you do not see it. I see everything. I see it all. And the billy-born-drunks in the house next door are shouting again. Inadmissible figments slurred through the wall.

Uniformly over the whole countryside The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward; The autumn haze drifts in deep bands Over the pale water; White egrets stand in the blue marshes; Tamalpais, Diablo, St. Helena Float in the air. Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill We look out over fifty miles of sinuous Interpenetration of mountains and sea. Leading up a twisted chimney, Just as my eyes rise to the level Of a small cave, two white owls Fly out, silent, close to my face. They hover, confused in the sunlight, And disappear into the recesses of the cliff. All day I have been watching a new climber, A young girl with ash blonde hair And gentle confident eyes. She climbs slowly, precisely, With unwasted grace. While I am coiling the ropes, Watching the spectacular sunset, She turns to me and says, quietly, “It must be very beautiful, the sunset, On Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.”

I climbed the roll of hay to watch the heron in the pond. He waded a few steps out, then back, thrusting his beak under water, pulling it up empty, but only once. Later I walked the roads for miles, certain he’d be there when I returned. How is it for him, day after day, his brittle legs rising from warm green scum, his graceful neck curled, damp in the bright heat? It’s a dull world. Every day, the same roads, the sky, the dust, the barn caving into itself, the tin roof twisted and scattered in the yard. Again, the bank covered with oxeye daisy that turns to spiderwort, to chicory, and at last to goldenrod. Each year, the birds— thick in the air and darting in wild numbers— grow quiet, the grasses thin, the light leaves earlier each day. The heron stood stone-still on my spot when I returned. And then, his wings burst open, lifting the steel- blue rhythm of his body into flight. I touched the warm hay. Hoping for a trace of his wild smell, I cupped my hands over my face: nothing but the heat of fields and skin. It wasn’t long before the world began to breathe the beat of ordinary hours, stretching out again beneath the sky.

for Shari Lewis (1934-1998) Once again, I've missed Lamb Chop's Play-Along Which, as it is, isn't broadcast in Papiamento, myself being the Centurion of the English where I am Aha! The Brook,Cherith running by here meaning the while I can “compare notes” with Elijah (Without a Jezebel to spook him!) Although admittedly in the movie Betty Davis is a winnter, ever quite without a struggle Especially in the Waltz sequence Which continues to reverberate in my head. So that I ask “Is it, I, then, that am “The Revenant”? This McTalk with its “scrolling windows” can never answer. But just now, could use A bit of that compote of “stewed pears With cinnamon” The discalced Carmelite Sisters fed San Juan De La Cruz thus, nursing and resusciating him back to “health” Which is, in itself, at best —a provisional state! Other than that,

Once, I was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow, sleepy and nameless. As-ifness strange to myself, but complete. Light on the neck-nape of time as two wings of one starling, or lovers so happy neither needs think of the other.

Once in moonlight when I had not slept for three nights, when there was no food and a long rain had stopped, and some had slept outside in the rain you could see the streaks it had left on their skin, once in the eighth week of my captivity, alone in the moonlight outside on the ledge, I looked up and felt the stars move strangely back and forth, a slow rocking, as though the Lord were rocking us somehow back and forth, and I was not afraid but tears came anyway as I remembered my children so far away, the way children can call you back in through your thoughts and keep you awake like hearing the stars ring all night long. And when you watch animals die, when deer die you notice it, how they don’t cry out— I could see it in my mind’s eye— they don’t cry out but lie there, eyes open, and then they are dead outside of themselves they are dead but inside themselves they have joined the earth where they have always been rocking and rocking.—And so I was able to sleep a few hours before our next remove, miles and miles beyond the Great River, though I had lost track of our place in the world.

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world. Then we took it for granted. Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind. Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head. And once Doubt ruptured the web, All manner of demon thoughts Jumped through— We destroyed the world we had been given For inspiration, for life— Each stone of jealousy, each stone Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light. No one was without a stone in his or her hand. There we were, Right back where we had started. We were bumping into each other In the dark. And now we had no place to live, since we didn't know How to live with each other. Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another And shared a blanket. A spark of kindness made a light. The light made an opening in the darkness. Everyone worked together to make a ladder. A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world, And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children, And their children, all the way through time— To now, into this morning light to you.