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Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown until heaps of rich, beautiful fabric were strewn over the chairs and sofas. They posed before mirrors, with their diamonds and trinkets and floor-length furs. Smiling at me from the mirror, they vaguely promised help. They became distracted—by constantly ringing phones, by obsequious secretaries, bustling in with packages, flowers, messages, all the paraphernalia, all part of the uninterruptible rounds of the rich, the nice rich, smiling soothingly, as they touched their hair or picked up their phone extensions. Absently patting my arm, they smiled, “It will be all right.” Dusk fell on the city as I ran, naked, weeping, into the streets. I ran to the home of Barbara, my friend, Who, as a young girl, rescued four Loyalist soldiers from a Spanish prison; in her teenage sweater set and saddle shoes and knee socks, she drove an old car sagging with Loyalist pamphlets across the Pyrenees all the way to Paris without being caught. And not long ago, she helped save a group of men from Franco’s sentence of death. In my dream, Barbara telephones Barcelona. I realize this isn’t quite right, but I just stand there paralyzed, as one does in dreams. Then, dimly, from the other end of the line, through the chatter of international operators, we hear artillery fire, the faint tones of lost men, cracked voices singing, “Los Quartros Generales” through the pulsations of the great, twisted cable under the ocean. Agonía, agonía, sueño, fermente & sueño. Este es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía. “No, Barbara!” I scream. "We are not back there. That’s the old revolution. Call up the new one.” Though I know that, every day, your friends, Nicanor, telephone Santiago, where the number rings and rings and rings with never an answer. And now the rings are turning into knells: The church bells of Santiago tolling the funeral of Neruda, his poems looted, his autobiography stolen, his books desecrated in his house on Isla Negra. And among the smashed glass, the broken furniture, his desk overturned, the ruined books strewn over the floor, lie the great floral wreaths from the Swedish academy, the wreaths from Paris, South Asia, the whole world over. And the bells toll on… Then I tell Barbara to hang up the phone. She dials the number again, then turns to me, smiling, smiling like an angel: “He is there.” Trembling, I take the phone from her, and hear your voice, Nicanor, sad, humorous, infinitely disillusioned, infinitely consoling: “Dear Carolyn…” It is Nicanor! And the connection is broken, because I wake up, in this white room, in this white silence, in this backwater of silence on this Isla Blanca: Nicanor, Nicanor, are you, too, silent under the earth, Brother, Brother?

Steel horses nodding In the petroleum field are beasts That suck The crude of earth. They have lived here for as long as I Remember. This moment, I smell wild incense: Heather, abducted by a desert wind. Its growth hides The rain-carved ribs of the foothills. Evening swallows The city fasting on late fall. Years ago, after hearing the story About a boy who lost Both legs while playing on an oil pump, I was dared to straddle one. All my friends were there to watch The Pacific behind me burning with dusk. The brute lifted me to the sky, Where I merged with the twilight, A warm breeze embracing my back. None of them noticed The world stopped to breathe. When I looked, they disappeared. Nearby in pink-flowered bushes Someone found The girl who’d been missing for weeks. They stood in awe, the body Decomposing, while I rode The slow bucking animal. Two months later, off the same pump, A man dove, An imperfect swan into night. He landed in the dirt gully Breaking the soft, white wings He never had. Today, I catch in my hand An insect charged with lightning. It tickles The obscure scoop of my palm As I hold it to my mouth and explain A wish so simple By morning I will have forgotten it. I release The bug to a desert wind That is racing toward the sea, A brutal dryness in its wake. Fire in the hills everywhere.

Ice glitters like it’s good. The whole world glitters, sped towards ends, we all fall in. Under the ice is water. But under the world, between you and the everything of your vanishing . . .

A car is idling on the cliff. Its top is down. Its headlights throw A faint, bright ghost-shadow glow On the pale air. On the shore, so far Below that the waves' push and drag Is dwindled to a hush—a kind Of oceanic idle—the sea Among the boulders plays a blind- Fold game of hide and seek, Or capture the flag. The flag Swells and sways. The car Is empty. A Friday, the first week Of June. Nineteen fifty-three. A car's idling on the cliff, But surely it won't be long before Somebody stops to investigate And things begin to happen fast: Men, troops of men will come, Arrive with blazing lights, a blast Of sirens, followed by still more Men. Though not a soul's in sight, The peace of the end of the late Afternoon—the sun down, but enough light Even so to bathe the heavens from Horizon to shore in a deep And delicate blue—will not keep. Confronted with such an overload Of questions (most beginning,Why would she... So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three), Attention will come to fix upon This odd last thing she did: leaving The car running, the headlights on. She stopped—it will transpire—to fill The tank a mere two miles down the road. (Just sixteen, the kid at the station will Quote her as saying, "What a pity You have to work today! It's not right... What weather! Goodness, what a night It'll be!" He'll add: "She sure was pretty.") Was there a change of plan? Why the stop for gas? Possibly She'd not yet made up her mind? Or Had made it up but not yet settled On a place? Or could it be she knew Where she was headed, what she would do— And wanted to make sure the car ran For hours afterward? Might the car not be, Then, a sort of beacon, a lighthouse- In-reverse, meant to direct one not Away from but toward the shore And its broken boulders, there to spot The bobbing white flag of a blouse? Her brief note, which will appear In the local Leader, contains a phrase ("She chanted snatches of old lands") That will muddle the town for three days, Until a Professor E. H. Wade Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands The police, who, this but goes to show, Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare, Else would never have misread "lauds" As "lands." A Detective Gregg Messing Will answer, tersely, "Afraid It's not our bailiwick. Missing Persons, yes; missing poems, no." (What's truly tragic's never allowed To stand alone for long, of course. At each moment there's a crowd Of clowns pressing in: the booming ass At every wake who, angling a loud Necktie in the chip dip, Airs his problems with intestinal gas, Or the blow-dried bonehead out to sell Siding to the grieving mother . . . . Well, Wade sent the Leader another briefword: "Decades of service to the Bard now force Me to amend the girl's little slip. 'Chaunted' not 'chanted' is the preferred . . .") Yet none of her unshakeable entourage —Pedants, pundits, cops without a clue, And a yearning young grease-monkey—are Alerted yet. Still the empty car Idles, idles on the cliff, and night Isn't falling so much as day Is floating out to sea . . . . Soon, whether She's found or not, her lights will draw Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might Be dirt-clumps, ashes. Come what may, The night will be lovely, as she foresaw, The first stars easing through the blue, Engine and ocean breathing together.

Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S. C., 1866 Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!— Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurels in the earth, The garlands of your fame are sown; And, somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone. Meanwhile, your sisters for the years Which hold in trust your storied tombs, Bring all they now can give you—tears, And these memorial blooms. Small tributes, but your shades will smile As proudly on these wreaths to-day, As when some cannon-moulded pile Shall overlook this Bay. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground, Than where defeated valor lies By mourning beauty crowned.

How glorious is this strange muscle in my mouth. Child’s tease, lips’ balm, baton of speech unless it’s tied. What’s forgotten is on the tip. Sides slip out the truth. The root is how far a kiss can go. One can lose it when guilty. Be lashed by another’s. Feel it twisting over rooky woods and wordless hear it swinging in a bell, sliding through a groove or placed firmly in a cheek. Beware it should be held most often for most often a forked one has no friend.

People in the middle ages didn't think they were living Between two more important and enlightened eras; Nor did they see themselves as the players In act three of a tragedy in five acts. It was not always late winter in the middle ages. People in the middle ages were not all middle-aged Though it is enjoyable on occasion to assume that they were. The sun was as bright in the dark ages As it is now—maybe a fraction brighter, in fact. Think of the middle ages and what do you see: Gloomy cathedrals, students dressed like monks in the rain, Or a band of drunken pilgrims telling obscene jokes, Or heroes embarking for the nearest wilderness come April? Your answer will reveal yourself to yourself But you may not know it—may choose to hide In hazy visions of a serene and indescribable paradise. And paradise, as we all know, may be paradise when we’re dead, But is boredom on earth, alas. We never think of ennui in relation to the middle ages. Should we? Did Thomas Aquinas never get bored Cooking up elaborate refutations of diminutive heresies? No, and you shouldn’t either. Nor did the clerks of Oxford tire of the sin against the Holy Ghost, Trying to figure out what it was. On chill September mornings when I smoked too much the night before And I drank too much the night before And a sinister cough rises up From the depths of the belly of my being, I like to imagine living in Provence Or even in Rheims during the middle ages.

We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers And sitting by desolate streams; World losers and world forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world’s great cities. And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire’s glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song’s measure Can trample an empire down. We, in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself with our mirth; And o’erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world’s worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.

And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin, light snow torn under wheels, car bang metally grenading, and the wood poles, whipping, loom— ¤ I have always wanted to sing a song of praise for the unscathed: myself stepping from the fractured car whose black axle’s one inch from gone; slim pole slicing cable up to sheet metal, seat foam, corduroy (like butter, the mechanic will later tell me, poking a stiff finger through the cloth), to pierce the exact point I was supposed to sit, stopping because praise begins where pain transfigures itself, stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I transfigure myself from driver to survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure bolting up and opening her eyes. And here are the thousand wrecks from a life configured in snow before me: myself, at five, pulled from the burning car seat; at twelve, bleeding from the scalp after the car throws me from my bike; at fourteen, tumbling over the slick hood rushing; sockets of windows with glass bashed out into a translucent, toothy ring; lights and bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer gravitationally hurled through my windshield; brakes given out and worse, the icy loop de loops on roads, the trucker’s 18 fat wheels squealing— All the ways technology should have killed me and didn’t. Praise for my death-hungry luck! And all the manner in which I’ve failed it— marriage lost, buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude at the Greyhound station knowing no one to retrieve me, carless among the other pressed tight to their own disaster or boredom— unbearably young mothers, drifters, boy soldiers shoulder to shoulder with the insane, weaving the same thread of conversation back and forth between ourselves. How could this happen to me at this age, at this stage, how did I not notice, and will you put this seat up? and will you lend me this quarter? and will you call me a cab when we get back home? The young man in the seat before me, head full of zigzagging tight braids says, Sure you can dig up that ballot box in Florida and while you’re at it look up all the bones buried in the Everglades, repeats it for the amusement of the woman across from him, who knows a presidential failure like she knows herself, and when we pass my accident on the road points and whistles, snickers:Bet you no one walked away from that one. For this, and for all these things: praise to the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled like a length of rime-colored rope; to snow broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape takes on a nuclear glow, so bright we have to shield our eyes from it. Praise for myself playing at morbidity because I thought I had a right to it as if flesh had to follow spirit to such a pure depth the bones themselves could not rest but must be broken, nerves singed then ripped out, the heart clenched madly in its chest. As if I had nothing except this white earth, this smashed car to praise what I knew before and know even better now, the hills cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise to my youth and to my age, praise to ambition and small-mindedness, the kind I recognize and the kind I am soon to recognize; praise to self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise for the splinters of delight that can pierce it. Praise for wood pole, praise for glass. Praise for muscle, praise for bone. The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table today. And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by, the light of us a wash of gold illuminating bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming like my heart here, on this earth, bloody and still beating.

Last night, as half asleep I dreaming lay, Half naked came she in her little shift, With tilted glass, and verses on her lips; Narcissus-eyes all shining for the fray, Filled full of frolic to her wine-red lips, Warm as a dewy rose, sudden she slips Into my bed – just in her little shift. Said she, half naked, half asleep, half heard, With a soft sigh betwixt each lazy word, ‘Oh my old lover, do you sleep or wake!’ And instant I sat upright for her sake, And drank whatever wine she poured for me – Wine of the tavern, or vintage it might be Of Heaven’s own vine: he surely were a churl Who refused wine poured out by such a girl, A double traitor he to wine and love. Go to, thou puritan! the gods above Ordained this wine for us, but not for thee; Drunkards we are by a divine decree, Yea, by the special privilege of heaven Foredoomed to drink and foreordained forgiven. Ah! HAFIZ, you are not the only man Who promised penitence and broke down after; For who can keep so hard a promise, man, With wine and woman brimming o’er with laughter! O knotted locks, filled like a flower with scent, How have you ravished this poor penitent!