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Exert thy voice, sweet harbinger of spring! This moment is thy time to sing, This moment I attend to praise, And set my numbers to they lays. Free as thine shall be my song; As they music, short, or long. Poets, wild as thee, were born, Pleasing best when unconfined, When to please is least designed, Soothing but their cares to rest; Cares do still their thoughts molest, And still th' unhappy poet's breast, Like thine, when best he sings, is placed against a thorn. She begins, Let all be still! Muse, they promise now fulfill! Sweet, oh! sweet, still sweeter yet Can thy words such accents fit, Canst thou syllables refine, Melt a sense that shall retain Still some spirit of the brain, Till with sounds like these it join. 'Twill not be! then change thy note; Let division shake thy throat. Hark! Division now she tries; Yet as far the Muse outflies. Cease then, prithee, cease thy tune; Trifler, wilt thou sing till *June*? Till thy business all lies waste, And the time of building's past! Thus we poets that have speech, Unlike what they forests teach, If a fluent vein be shown That's transcendant to our own, Criticize, reform, or preach, Or censure what we cannot reach.

Excellent In The Two Sister-Arts Of POËsy And Painting: An Ode

Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat: Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, A merciful putting away of what has been. And this we know: Death is not Life, effete, Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen So marvellous things know well the end not yet. Victor and vanquished are a-one in death: Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say, “Come, what was your record when you drew breath?” But a big blot has hid each yesterday So poor, so manifestly incomplete. And your bright Promise, withered long and sped, Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet And blossoms and is you, when you are dead.

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard, he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave unseen with Phil’s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it into the mounded deeps of the city dump. Simply, there were things that Phil didn’t want to hurt his family with. Do you have yours? I have mine. The brown suitcase. Sasha’s sister, on her deathbed—dinky, frail, just a mild skim-milk trickle of a hospice patient— tensed, sat up, and unloosed such confessional invective that it seemed the walls and the sheets would have to be splattered in shit, her cancer having acted with the harsh, disbursing force of a tornado on the brown and hard-shelled suitcase in her electrochemical memory webs. Is yours secure? from love? from sodium pentathol? Last year, when a tornado hit our fringe of downtown businesses, the air was alive for counties around with the downward dance of naked canceled checks, handwritten notes, hotel receipts, e-mail transcripts, smeary Polaroids, a swirl of lacy underwisps that jellyfished the skies, and from The G-Spot Shoppe a rain of plastic pleasure aids, of which one prime example pierced a cow between the eyes and struck her dead. Maybe AIDS—I wasn’t sure. But he was dying, that was sure: as dry as a stick of human chalk, and making the terrible scritch-sound of a stick of chalk, in his throat, in the community air, in the room across from Sasha’s sister. Something . . .hidden in the trace of rundown aura still around him as we chatted there one morning . . . a tv? a sissyboy tv? I wasn’t sure, but it was obvious his life-chalk held a story not yet written, not confessed yet for this storyniverous planet. And when I remembered my mother’s own last days . . . the way a person is a narrative, the strength of which is either revelation or withholding. It was summer, and the garden at the nursing home was fat with summer’s pleasures: flowered mounds like reefs of coral, bees as globular as whole yolks. In her room, my mother disappeared a breath at a time, and everything else was only a kind of scenery for that. The wink of pollen in the light. The birds. Their feather-lice. The bursting spores. Those opened-up cicada husks abandoned on the patio —the small, brown, unlocked luggage that’s completed its work in this world.

These New York City Pigeons cooing in the air shaft are responsible for me stubbing my toe spraining my ankle and getting sick on ammonia fumes That pigeon roosting on the clothesline stole my nightgown Those pigeons on the street lamp made me feel foolish while riding in a black car completely splattered with their grey & white poo poo These New York City pigeons are not calm like pigeons of Oxalá in Brazil and do not croon like doves of Zimbabwe New York City pigeons moan strange    low    mournful    quivering cancer-like moans mixed with hungry hyena barks & gulping loss of the forest cries New York City pigeons are not relaxed like pigeons sunning at Marcel Duchamp swimming pool in San Francisco New York City pigeons are not happy like pigeons standing on head of the woman selling bananas on a street corner in Johannesburg New York City pigeons flap viral leather fungus dust from wings into faces then sit on steps vocalizing & waiting for the death of humankind New York City pigeons are not friendly like pigeons eating flaky crescent-shaped rolls at Hotel du Piémont in Paris New York City pigeons are not content like pigeons posing for photos on arms of men in plaza of Caracas New York City pigeons will lounge on ledges & murmur profanity all day will fight for fucking space in the mating season shit on air conditioners & wipe their asses on windows while big cockroaches suck Sucrets in the dark New York City pigeons are not alert like pigeons sitting quietly on bicycles in peace memorial park of Hiroshima New York City pigeons roll their pearly eyes inflate their throats and defecate on the shoulders of pedestrians New York City pigeons have no love for crumb-throwing pigeon lovers & no year of the pigeon is celebrated at least not for these New York City Pigeons

The house in Broad Street, red brick, with nine rooms the weedgrown graveyard with its rows of tombs the jail from which imprisoned faces grinned at stiff palmettos flashing in the wind the engine-house, with engines, and a tank in which young alligators swam and stank, the bell-tower, of red iron, where the bell gonged of the fires in a tone from hell magnolia trees with whitehot torch of bud the yellow river between banks of mud the tall striped lighthouse like a barber’s pole snake in the bog and locust in the hole worn cigarette cards, of white battleships, or flags, or chorus girls with scarlet lips, jackstones of copper, peach tree in the yard splashing ripe peaches on an earth baked hard children beneath the arc-light in a romp with Run sheep Run, and rice-birds in the swamp, the organ-grinder’s monkey, dancing bears, okras in baskets, Psyche on the stairs— and then the north star nearer, and the snow silent between the now and long ago time like a train that roared from place to place new crowds, new faces, for a single face no longer then the chinaberry tree nor the dark mockingbird to sing his glee nor prawns nor catfish; icicles instead and Indian-pipes, and cider in the shed arbutus under pinewoods in the spring and death remembered as a tropic thing with picture postcard angels to upraise it and trumpet vines and hummingbirds to phrase it then wisdom come, and Shakspere’s voice far off, to be or not, upon the teacher’s cough, the latent heat of melting ice, the brief hypotenuse from ecstasy to grief amo amas, and then the cras amet, the new-found eyes no slumber could forget, Vivien, the affliction of the senses, and conjugation of historic tenses and Shakspere nearer come, and louder heard, and the disparateness of flesh and word, time growing swifter, and the pendulums in shorter savage arcs that beat like drums— hands held, relinquished, faces come and gone, kissed and forgotten, and become but one, old shoes worn out, and new ones bought, the gloves soiled, and so lost in limbo, like the loves— then Shakspere in the heart, the instant speech parting the conscious terrors each from each— wisdom’s dishevelment, the purpose lamed, and purposeless the footsteps eastward aimed the bloodstream always slower, while the clock followed the tired heart with louder knock, fatigue upon the eye, the tardy springs inviting to no longer longed-for things— the birdsong nearer now than Shakspere’s voice, whispers of comfort—Death is near, rejoice!— remember now the red house with nine rooms the graveyard with its trumpetvines and tombs— play jackstones now and let your jackstones be the stars that make Orion’s galaxy so to deceive yourself until you move into that house whose tenants do not love.

It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay train’s strung-out hoo, deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tiled dome: he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue, while we all wait to be chuted to car lot or home, closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed, every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.

Some dreamily smoke cigarettes, some track toddlers who walk like drunks. Buzzy, the picnic grounds, noisy, sun-crazed, how forks and spoons don’t exactly lie flat. A mountain’s here, a famous overlook from which you’d see none of this. Like that first daguerreotype, its moving carriages and those who strolled never picked up in the long exposure, a Paris street emptied by the camera, only houses and lamp posts gone eternal. Or the one who stopped for a shoe shine, the one who knelt to the task. At the picnic—a commotion. A large man to a younger man.

Unraveling velvet, wave after wave, driven by wind, unwinding by storm, by gravity thrown— however, heaving to reach you, to find you, I've striven undulant, erosive, blown— or lying flat as glass for your falling clear down: I can't swallow you. So why have I felt I've reached you—as two reflected stars, surfaced, lie near—as if the sky's close element is one in me, where starfish cleave to stones—if you're so far? I've touched you, I know, but my rush subsides; our meetings only leave desire's fleeting trace. Every place I touch you changes shape. Shore, lie down— undo. I'll fill your thirsty bones with blue. I'll flood your every cave and we'll be one.

Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit, Mere imitation of the inimitable: In heaven we have the real and true and sure. ’Tis there they neither marry nor are given In marriage but are as the angels: right, Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ To say that! Marriage-making for the earth, With gold so much,— birth, power, repute so much, Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these! Be as the angels rather, who, apart, Know themselves into one, are found at length Married, but marry never, no, nor give In marriage; they are man and wife at once When the true time is: here we have to wait Not so long neither! Could we by a wish Have what we will and get the future now, Would we wish aught done undone in the past? So, let him wait God’s instant men call years; Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, Do out the duty! Through such souls alone God stooping shows sufficient of His light For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.