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my shoes rest all night under my bed tired they stretch and loosen their laces wide open they fall asleep and dream of walking they revisit the places they went to during the day and wake up cheerful relaxed so soft

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear: Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes? I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet, scarce espied: Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass; Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love: The winged boy I knew; But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? His Psyche true! O latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap'd with flowers; Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. O brightest! though too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water, and the fire; Yet even in these days so far retir'd From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours; Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!

Six o'clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister Your dark, your housewives starting to nose Out each other's day, the claustrophobia Of your back gardens varicose With shrubs, make an ugly sister Of you suburbia. How long ago did the glass in your windows subtly Silver into mirrors which again And again show the same woman Shriek at a child? Which multiply A dish, a brush, ash, The gape of a fish. In the kitchen, the gape of a child in the cot? You swelled so that when you tried The silver slipper on your foot It pinched your instep and the common Hurt which touched you made You human. No creature of the streets will feel the touch Of a wand turning the wet sinews Of fruit suddenly to a coach, While this rat without leather reins Or a whip or britches continues Sliming your drains. No magic here. Yet you encroach until The shy countryside, fooled By your plainness falls, then rises From your bed changed, schooled Forever by your skill, Your compromises. Midnight and your metamorphosis Is now complete, although the mind Which spinstered you might still miss Your mystery now, might still fail To see your power defined By this detail. By this creature drowsing now in every house— The same lion who tore stripes Once off zebras. Who now sleeps, Small beside the coals. And may, On a red letter day, Catch a mouse.

I remember the first day, how I looked down, hoping you wouldn't see me, and when I glanced up, I saw your smile shining like a soft light from deep inside you. “I'm listening,” you encourage us. “Come on! Join our conversation, let us hear your neon certainties, thorny doubts, tangled angers,” but for weeks I hid inside. I read and reread your notes praising my writing, and you whispered, “We need you and your stories and questions that like a fresh path will take us to new vistas.” Slowly, your faith grew into my courage and for you— instead of handing you a note or apple or flowers— I raised my hand. I carry your smile and faith inside like I carry my dog's face, my sister's laugh, creamy melodies, the softness of sunrise, steady blessings of stars, autumn smell of gingerbread, the security of a sweater on a chilly day.

which regenerate their tails and also eat only the tails of other electric eels, presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ... Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels are fish — I defer to biology’s genius. I know little of their numbers and habitat, other than they are river dwellers. Guess which river. I have only a note, a note taken in reading or fever — I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All I know is it seems sensible, sustainable: no fish dies, nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more than a tail; the sting, the trauma keeps the bitten fish lean and alert. The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile. They’ll eat smaller tails for a while. These eels, these eels themselves are odes!

gain — a bevel cut into plank ends in traditional lapstrake boat construction that allows otherwise lapped planks to lay flush at stem and transom. There’s the paring chisel’s purpose in the steamed cedar strake, its long warp laid strong against the bench, whose pocked surface is the book of what has already been made, or marred in learning’s wake —& clamped now in the jaws one is waiting for its match, for the chisel to elaborate the pencil’s scribed hypothesis, under which lies another path,& through a tilting eye the curving bevel’s made, the chisel rolling back tight scrolls of thinnest grain & what bright sleeves begin to fleece the floor; there is a lack given to the wood, some short song cut loose from the lignin’s name, that a longer & more buoyant melody be made.

The country I come from Is called the Midwest —Bob Dylan I want to be doused in cheese & fried. I want to wander the aisles, my heart's supermarket stocked high as cholesterol. I want to die wearing a sweatsuit— I want to live forever in a Christmas sweater, a teddy bear nursing off the front. I want to write a check in the express lane. I want to scrape my driveway clean myself, early, before anyone's awake— that'll put em to shame— I want to see what the sun sees before it tells the snow to go. I want to be the only black person I know. I want to throw out my back & not complain about it. I wanta drive two blocks. Why walk— I want love, n stuff— I want to cut my sutures myself. I want to jog down to the river & make it my bed— I want to walk its muddy banks & make me a withdrawal. I tried jumping in, found it frozen— I'll go home, I guess, to my rooms where the moon changes & shines like television.

The steam box is used for bending   frames and planks in traditional boatbuilding. With a match I became a man who summoned diesel from the yellow caverns of a ten-gallon jug, called the flame now hissing out the hose at the small house of  water, that rusted drum from which travels an excruciating wetness — this is what makes the body otherwise, what makes it sing. To take that which has decided on a shape, and bend, without breaking, the lengthening fibers. To give the straight thing curve. To make of  the tree a song grown long in a linseed skin, the slick hot strake waiting to become parcel of  the round world again.

In a new translator’s version of Genesis, there’s no Adam. No serpent. In paradise, I don’t bleed. Fig leaf-free girl, dear God, I say as we converse fluently without tongues, joined as two spice-drenched beloveds in a song of songs, could we please ask the gardener to plant a pomegranate grove by a stand of non-fruiting olive cultivars, which don’t bloom and aren’t so messy?

I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?