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I passed him by at first. From the photograph Peered sepia eyes, blindered, unappeased From a lair of brows and beard: one not amazed At anything, as if to have looked enough Then turned aside worked best for him—as if Night vision was the discipline that eased The weight of what he saw. A man’s gaze posed Too long in the sun goes blank; comes to grief. That face could be a focus for this back room, For pack-rat papers strewn as if in rage, Fond notes unread: each wary eye a phial Unstopped to let huge Melville out, to calm The sea of pages; Melville in older age: The grown man’s sleepy defiance of denial.

My sister in her well-tailored silk blouse hands me the photo of my father in naval uniform and white hat. I say, “Oh, this is the one which Mama used to have on her dresser.” My sister controls her face and furtively looks at my mother, a sad rag bag of a woman, lumpy and sagging everywhere, like a mattress at the Salvation Army, though with no holes or tears, and says, “No.” I look again, and see that my father is wearing a wedding ring, which he never did when he lived with my mother. And that there is a legend on it, “To my dearest wife, Love Chief” And I realize the photo must have belonged to his second wife, whom he left our mother to marry. My mother says, with her face as still as the whole unpopulated part of the state of North Dakota, “May I see it too?” She looks at it. I look at my tailored sister and my own blue-jeaned self. Have we wanted to hurt our mother, sharing these pictures on this, one of the few days I ever visit or spend with family? For her face is curiously haunted, not now with her usual viperish bitterness, but with something so deep it could not be spoken. I turn away and say I must go on, as I have a dinner engagement with friends. But I drive all the way to Pasadena from Whittier, thinking of my mother’s face; how I could never love her; how my father could not love her either. Yet knowing I have inherited the rag-bag body, stony face with bulldog jaws. I drive, thinking of that face. Jeffers’ California Medea who inspired me to poetry. I killed my children, but there as I am changing lanes on the freeway, necessarily glancing in the rearview mirror, I see the face, not even a ghost, but always with me, like a photo in a beloved’s wallet. How I hate my destiny.

Full the blow to a gong —gone blind with the sight of white Silk, O milk of my reason— sun reseen in My mad mad mirror. Gibbous Sense Less science: the Wish-apparition of a perfect fact. As thought, the war Of one upon one. Half Half a mind almost mine. Whole fragment, I am A being from another word. Crescent Bow bent back—to what release? My lone line, the join of all I am not. A minor truth betrays A major one— A lore for the lyre. For it is written:liar with a why. New Calling all coincidence, I will Deem the dark my day. Yet—if I say I am lying, I am lying To you now. O zero raised to zero—I am lying with you now.

(‘The Winged Hats’ — Puck of Pook’s Hill ) Rome never looks where she treads. Always her heavy hooves fall On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads; And Rome never heeds when we bawl. Her sentries pass on—that is all, And we gather behind them in hordes, And plot to reconquer the Wall, With only our tongues for our swords. We are the Little Folk—we! Too little to love or to hate. Leave us alone and you’ll see How we can drag down the State! We are the worm in the wood! We are the rot at the root! We are the taint in the blood! We are the thorn in the foot! Mistletoe killing an oak— Rats gnawing cables in two— Moths making holes in a cloak— How they must love what they do! Yes—and we Little Folk too, We are busy as they— Working our works out of view— Watch, and you’ll see it some day! No indeed! We are not strong, But we know Peoples that are. Yes, and we’ll guide them along To smash and destroy you in War! We shall be slaves just the same? Yes, we have always been slaves, But you—you will die of the shame, And then we shall dance on your graves! We are the Little Folk, we, etc.

All seas are seas in the moon to these lonely and full of light. High above laundries and rooftops the pinstriped silhouettes speak nightmare as do the faces full of fire and orange peel. Every citizen knows what’s the trouble:America’s longest river is—New York; that’s w

People would come to my great-grandmother’s house. She was in a room. They would stay in the kitchen. The words their words rolled like cars by on a train Here from somewhere else and going somewhere else Moving on faster almost than we could read them, Sound them out my brother and me with our small mouths, Chessie, a cat, see? the Erie, Santa Fe, Ferrocarril, Ore cars from the Southern Pacific, brown And all the numbers of all the engines. The words they rolled easier, fat and longer With each beer held in a fist and hit Against brown lips and thin tongues, And things slid out of those mouths then with the drinking, Took shape in sounds larger than we were, those uncles’ laughs, Loud things which could be called back no longer. The words they rolled into plates of food Up with the smoke curling, there around the elbows, the words And the smoke, a tablecloth, a rope wound like a hypnotist’s wheel) All of it catching the heads of our mother in weak headlocks That fooled us—we had thought we were stronger With our thousand gatling short words, Half tears, half whispered. We were not. The words they rolled their wheels they rolled Until the mayonnaise turned light and then dark brown Until we slept in the corners, my brother and my cousins, Me with Midnight and Puerquito, our own hands Held around ourselves, our voices intimate Only with the animals, who understood something of us, Who let us hold their heads to our chests, Who looked at the things we whispered. The words, they rolled, they, they would not stop. I closed my eyes then, and their phrases became birds, Long birds, fat, snake birds that would not fly. A single laugh, some thin tongue pulled to its shrill Kicking roots, this one laugh, an uncle’s, It was the thinnest and strongest string Pulling their faces up together like puppets And they hit each other, those wooden heads Laughing, hit each other rolling, blunt-edged Side hitting sides like rocks and pieces of hill Heading along toward some bottom, heading Somewhere, the place of the broken parts. Nothing would take me by the hand, only the handle On the drawer in the corner, my hand holding it, my eyes Seeing how it became a licorice stick, then thousands of them Holding me, by the eyes, so I could see nothing, Hear only the sounds of a second world In league with the thunder and this night of summer. The words, they rolled, they would not stop, They would not take me home.

Too hot to rest, I toss my arms off the bed. My night- gown wet with sweat. I feel you — a sack of scavenged skulls on my chest — sipping the salt from my breasts. Imp. Incubus. Im- pulse. You and me like a mare that must be broken in by breaking in- to. Tamed is how fire is by giving itself something to destroy: it destroys it- self. But who can deter- mine what’s inside another? What is risked when we enter    ... Caliper. Forceps. Scalpel. Oculus. Perhaps you’re the wilderness that waits with- in me. Perhaps an other mystery, I open beneath you. Yoked. Harnessed. Paralyzed. At once a- wake and a- sleep. I nay. I knock over the kerosene lamp. Light of the rational mind snuffed. Shadow of shadows. Because I can’t see, I sense. Your thumb thrumming my mouth. A command. Arch- angel. Vision of invasion. Insemination. My horse heart beating with yours.

The screamer sleeps, inside. The desert's wide awake: the mouse, the rattlesnake. I've come out here to hide, behind our house, below the riddled sky, afraid of what our bodies made. To the south: Mexico... These are the nights men run. Guaymas before midday, a beach-town life...I play it out. Such things are done. The Rincons seep like a stain into the paling east. The borders are policed. The wail, nearby, of a train.

Did a big brain       raise us into mountains to range over the valley, to see the approach     before whoever it was     knew they would walk a path between dusk & dawn half-awake? An eye squinted, & sex as idea made the lids dance. Now, the brain pauses     on the edge of ascension or surrender, one sleepy hand pointing at a totem, & the other weighing a stick or jagged stone.

I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s in a running-shoe box held shut with elastic bands. Then I clean the corners where she has eaten and slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food from the baseboard, dumping the litter and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic dishes I hide in the basement, the pee- soaked towel I put in the trash. I put the catnip mouse in the box and I put the box away, too, in a deep dirt drawer in the earth. When the death-energy leaves me, I go to the room where my daughter slept in nursery school, grammar school, high school, I lie on her milky bedspread and think of the day I left her at college, how nothing could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax out from between her floorboards, or taking a razor blade to the decal that said to the firemen, “Break this window first.” I close my eyes now and enter a place that’s clearly expecting me, swaddled in loss and then losing that, too, as I move from room to bone-white room in the house of the rest of my life.