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We had a grief we didn't understand while standing at the edge of some low scrub hills as if humans were extra or already gone;— what had been in us before? a life that asks for mostly wanting freedom to get things done in order to feel less helpless about the end of things alone—; when i think of time on earth, i feel the angle of gray minutes entering the medium days yet not "built-up":: our work together: groups, the willing burden of an old belief, & beyond them love, as of a great life going like fast creatures peeling back marked seeds, gold-brown integuments the color time will be when we are gone—

Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee, With promise of strength and manhood full and fair! Though cold and stark and bare, The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee. Thy mother’s treasure wert thou;—alas! no longer To visit her heart with wondrous joy; to be Thy father’s pride;—ah, he Must gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger. To me, as I move thee now in the last duty, Dost thou with a turn or gesture anon respond; Startling my fancy fond With a chance attitude of the head, a freak of beauty. Thy hand clasps, as ’twas wont, my finger, and holds it: But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff; Yet feels to my hand as if ’Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust that enfolds it. So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing,— Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed!— Propping thy wise, sad head, Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing. So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither hath he taken thee? To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this? The vision of which I miss, Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee? Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark, Unwilling, alone we embark, And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.

Eat all you want but don’t swallow it . —Archie Moore The ruth of soups and balm of sauces I renounce equally. What Rorschach saw in ink I find in the buttery frizzle in the sauté pan, and I leave it behind, and the sweet peat-smoke tang of bananas, and cream in clots, and chocolate. I give away the satisfactions of food and take desire for food: I’ll be travelling light to the heaven of revisions. Why be adipose: an expense, etc., in a waste, etc.? Something like the body of the poet’s work, with its pale shadows, begins to pare and replace the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?

See how the orient dew, Shed from the bosom of the morn Into the blowing roses, Yet careless of its mansion new, For the clear region where ’twas born Round in itself incloses: And in its little globe’s extent, Frames as it can its native element. How it the purple flow’r does slight, Scarce touching where it lies, But gazing back upon the skies, Shines with a mournful light, Like its own tear, Because so long divided from the sphere. Restless it rolls and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure, Till the warm sun pity its pain, And to the skies exhale it back again. So the soul, that drop, that ray Of the clear fountain of eternal day, Could it within the human flow’r be seen, Remembering still its former height, Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green, And recollecting its own light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater heaven in an heaven less. In how coy a figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the world excluding round, Yet receiving in the day, Dark beneath, but bright above, Here disdaining, there in love. How loose and easy hence to go, How girt and ready to ascend, Moving but on a point below, It all about does upwards bend. Such did the manna’s sacred dew distill, White and entire, though congealed and chill, Congealed on earth : but does, dissolving, run Into the glories of th’ almighty sun.

That which her slender waist confin’d, Shall now my joyful temples bind; No monarch but would give his crown, His arms might do what this has done. It was my heaven’s extremest sphere, The pale which held that lovely deer, My joy, my grief, my hope, my love, Did all within this circle move. A narrow compass, and yet there Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair; Give me but what this ribbon bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round.

July 1965 As the sheriff remarked: I had no business being there. He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Among that odd crew of volunteers from the North, I was by far the most inept and least effective. I couldn’t have inspired or assisted a woodchuck to vote. In fact, when the sheriff’s buddies nabbed me on the highway east of Selma, I’d just been released from ten days of jail in Mississippi. I was fed up and terrified; I was actually fleeing north and glad to go. - In Jackson, they’d been ready for the demonstration. After the peaceful arrests, after the news cameras recorded us being quietly ushered onto trucks, the doors were closed and we headed for the county fairgrounds. Once we passed its gates, it was a different story: the truck doors opened on a crowd of state troopers waiting to greet us with their nightsticks out. Smiles beneath mirrored sunglasses and blue riot helmets; smiles above badges taped so numbers didn’t show. For the next twenty minutes, they clubbed us, and it kept up at intervals, more or less at random, all that afternoon and into the evening. Next morning we woke to new guards who did not need to conceal their names or faces. A little later, the fbi arrived to ask if anyone had specific complaints about how they’d been treated and by whom. But late that first night, as we sat bolt upright in rows on the concrete floor of the cattle barn waiting for mattresses to arrive, one last precise event: A guard stopped in front of the ten-year-old black kid next to me. He pulled a freedom now pin from the kid’s shirt, made him put it in his mouth, then ordered him to swallow. - That stakeout at dusk on Route 80 east of Selma was intended for someone else, some imaginary organizer rumored to be headed toward their dismal, godforsaken town. Why did they stop me? The New York plates, perhaps, and that little bit of stupidity: the straw hat I wore, a souvenir of Mississippi. Siren-wail from an unmarked car behind me—why should I think they were cops? I hesitated, then pulled to the shoulder. The two who jumped out waved pistols, but wore no uniforms or badges. By then, my doors were locked, my windows rolled. Absurd sound of a pistol barrel rapping the glass three inches from my face: “Get out, you son of a bitch, or we’ll blow your head off.” When they found pamphlets on the backseat they were sure they’d got the right guy. The fat one started poking my stomach with his gun, saying, “Boy, we’re gonna dump you in the swamp.” - It was a long ride through the dark, a ride full of believable threats, before they arrived at that hamlet with its cinderblock jail. He was very glad to see it, that adolescent I was twenty years ago. For eight days he cowered in his solitary cell, stinking of dirt and fear. He’s cowering there still, waiting for me to come back and release him by turning his terror into art. But consciously or not, he made his choice and he’s caught in history. And if I reach back now, it’s only to hug him and tell him to be brave, to remember that black kid who sat beside him in the Mississippi darkness. And to remember that silence shared by guards and prisoners alike as they watched in disbelief the darkness deepening around the small shape in his mouth, the taste of metal, the feel of the pin against his tongue. It’s too dark for it to matter what’s printed on the pin; it’s too dark for anything but the brute fact that someone wants him to choke to death on its hard shape. And still he refuses to swallow.

The sheep-killing dogs saunter home, wool scraps in their teeth. From the den of the moon ancestral wolves howl their approval. The farm boys, asleep in their beds, live the same wildness under their lids; every morning they come back through the whites of their eyes to do their chores, their hands pausing to pet the dog, to press its ears back, over the skull, to quiet that other world.

There’s no description in the braided stone, the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark, bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth. The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone, snarls a mountainside into lavender and green. In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all. Element of pitcher, sky, rockface, blank canvas plastic and vast in one off-center patch. To copy what’s invisible, to improvise a soul of things and remake solid life into fresh anxious unlifelike form.

Hold high the woof, dear friends, that we may see The cunning mixture of its colours rare. Nothing in nature purposely is fair,— Her beauties in their freedom disagree; But here all vivid dyes that garish be, To that tint mellowed which the sense will bear, Glow, and not wound the eye that, resting there, Lingers to feed its gentle ecstacy. Crimson and purple and all hues of wine, Saffron and russet, brown and sober green Are rich the shadowy depths of blue between; While silver threads with golden intertwine, To catch the glimmer of a fickle sheen,— All the long labour of some captive queen.

She that but little patience knew, From childhood on, had now so much A grey gull lost its fear and flew Down to her cell and there alit, And there endured her fingers' touch And from her fingers ate its bit. Did she in touching that lone wing Recall the years before her mind Became a bitter, an abstract thing, Her thought some popular enmity: Blind and leader of the blind Drinking the foul ditch where they lie? When long ago I saw her ride Under Ben Bulben to the meet, The beauty of her country-side With all youth's lonely wildness stirred, She seemed to have grown clean and sweet Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird: Sea-borne, or balanced in the air When first it sprang out of the nest Upon some lofty rock to stare Upon the cloudy canopy, While under its storm-beaten breast Cried out the hollows of the sea.