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It is true, that even in the best-run state Such things will happen; it is true, What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue But by the smoke, and not for thought alone It punishes, but for the thing that’s done. And yet there is the horror of the fact, Though we knew not the man. To die in jail, To be beaten to death, to know the act Of personal fury before the eyes can fail And the man die against the cold last wall Of the lonely world—and neither is that all: There is the terror too of each man’s thought, That knows not, but must quietly suspect His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught To take an attitude merely correct; Being frightened of his own cold image in The glass of government, and his own sin, Frightened lest senate house and prison wall Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high Look faintly smiling down and seem to call A crime the welcome chance of liberty, And any man an outlaw who aggrieves The patriotism of a pair of thieves.

swell me a bowl with lusty oil brightest under bis geynest under gore ecce who com inna persian vestment un monodatal voll marines cd not hoist thee whose eyes go seaward   noreaster reeling thrashing at the mouth of the gowanus mischance upbrimmd sludgie helas, aloft sometimes honeysuckle can smell like MURTHER yr shining form to oil hath returned yr helmet now shall make a hive for bees it was no dream   I lay broad waking oil blossomed green, incarnadine s/thing keeps on testing me for tb is politer not to talk about beastly p.o.v. ludic like a succubus vomiting ivy lordly subtler grotesquerie you can bet it smelled like murther creped and crinolinnd along the noggin w/ a victorian western pin till I may see a plumper sludgie swim everlike rotund buddha—smack aghast everlike leo and thir friends marching in lockstep to the sunlit uplands.

I The whole of human history … The whole of human history seems to be the story of men who kill, and of men who are killed; of murderers who light their cigarettes with trembling hands, and of poor, unlucky kids staring into the eyes of those who bring them their deaths. But history is not about murderers, after all. It is just the story of some poor kids. The whole history of the world is just the story of millions of poor kids overwhelmed by the fear of death, or by the fear of bringing death to others. My mother had closed her eyes and was breathing softly. Every so often, her right hand, abandoned on the white sheet, would shift slightly, opening and closing like the hand of a sleeping baby. The nurse came into the room just then, as I had begun to tell the story of Jaco. She opened the door as slowly as possible, but I felt her presence behind my shoulders bending over the bed, looking at my mother. She is sleeping, said the nurse. Don't wake her. I didn't turn around, but continued my story in a low whisper. When I got to the part about the grenade, I heard the nurse tiptoeing out, closing the door behind her, silently. The grenade exploded a few feet away, while Jaco was helping to carry two wounded soldiers down the hill to the hospital tent. By the time I got to him, he was stretched out on the grass, breathing heavily. Everyone around him had been killed. He watched as I approached, and when I was close, he smiled. He had just been promoted to lieutenant, even though he had not yet turned nineteen. Six months ago, when we were getting ready to leave Italy, Ercolani had taken me aside and said:Look out for Jaco. He's like a brother to me. Make sure nothing bad happens to him. I was irritated:War isn't a game. It doesn't play by the rules. If something bad happens to him, tough luck. But from that day on, I kept my eye on Jacoboni: he was about the same age as me, but seemed much younger. In any event, he turned out to be a good officer: he did his duty like all the others, like a good kid. He took war seriously, convinced he would go home in one piece, back to his family in Monterotondo, near Rome. And it was perhaps because of this that he smiled as I sat down next to him. I saw right away that it was hopeless. The grenade had torn open his abdomen and his intestines were cascading down his leg past his knees and coiling onto the ground. We were surrounded by the dead: hundreds of them in the forest around us. Most were Italian, but there were a few Germans: they had advanced this far before we had finally pushed them back. Their dead lay alongside ours. It began to rain. The rain on the oak leaves made a soft music, like women whispering. Every so often, it would intensify as it darted here, and there through the trees, rising and then fading away. The green reflection of the forest washed everything the color of water, gave an extraordinary lightness to things: to the solid trunks of the trees, to the bodies lying in the grass. Glimpsed through the branches of the trees, the sky appeared light and remote: A sky made of silk, luminous and pure, serene, scrubbed of clouds and fog. The rain was coming from who knows where. Or maybe it was not even rain, just the memory of some rain falling from the depths of past summers, falling from some childhood summer long ago.

IV So it did not come as a surprise—a relief, almost—when we heard the tac-tac-tac of machine guns and the thud of grenades rising up from the woods below. The Germans were advancing again through the tangle of bomb-shattered branches, clearing a path with axe-blows, foreheads crushed beneath the overhang of great steel helmets, gleaming eyes fixed dead ahead. The rest of that day was bitter, and many of us fell forever headlong in the grass. But toward evening the voice of battle began to diminish, and then from the depths of the forest we could hear the song of the wounded: the serene, monotonous, sad-hopeful song of the wounded, joining the chorus of birds hidden in the foliage as they welcomed the return of the moon. It was still daylight, but the moon was rising sweetly from behind the forested mountains of Reims. It was green against a white and tender sky… A moon from the forest of Ardennes, a moon from the country of Rimbaud, of Verlaine, a delicate green moon, round and light, entering the room of the sky from behind a screen of branches as if stepping delicately out of the earth, rising up from the grass, causing the tree-branches to blush transparent and sweet. Like startled birds, we had settled again around Jaco: I can't stand it any more, he smiled. Don't let me suffer. But now his smile was tired: a tired smile in a face clenched like a fist. Jaco's suffering gnawed away at us, sinking into our bones. There is nothing so terrible, or so sweet, so touching, as that animal, man, when he gives over to death. I felt my shirt sticking to my back. My face and the faces of the others were beaded with sweat, like the sweet face of Nazzareno Jacoboni. And little by little I became aware that everyone had slowly turned toward me, pinning me down with their eyes. Along with Jaco's terrible, unbearable suffering, something else was sinking into us, little by little, something which was not ours. Something strong, strange, insistent, was slowly being born within us. Jaco stared at me, even he now stared at me, expecting something, and I felt a new idea forming inside me, and inside the others. I can't go on, said Jaco. I looked away to the green moon hanging behind the trees: It had taken on the round shapeliness of a fragrant leaf: a laurel leaf, perhaps, or sage, or mint, a great green leaf, transparent with evening daylight. The sun had not yet settled into the forest, and his last warm rays struck the trunks of the trees leaving some of them wounded, bleeding. Others—the oaks, the beeches, poplars and birches— reflected the light in a strange way, as if they were made of glass. That glassy light, which the sun, just before it sets, draws from the earth's waters, drinks from its grass, from its leaves, from the trunks of its trees, to slake its thirst. All of them stared at me, but I was not aware of what I was doing. I felt my hands moving, but I did not know what I was doing until I found myself standing and saw them looking up at me, and Jacoboni smiling at me strangely, and felt something cold and smooth in my hands. And finally I was aware that I was standing with a rifle in my hands. I closed my eyes, and fired. I fired with my eyes closed, one shot after another. And then, when the echo of the shots had melted into the woods, there was a great silence. With my eyes still closed, rifle still in hand, I turned and took a few steps. Suddenly I heard:Murderer! Murderer! It was the voice of woman, terrible, the voice of a sister, desperate, the voice of a mother, of a lover. And at that moment nothing could have been more terrible than that voice of a woman, that voice of a mother, of a sister, of a lover, crying: Murderer! I opened my eyes and saw one of the girls running toward me, her hands like claws, as if she intended to tear me apart. She screamed again:Murderer! and then stopped abruptly a few paces away, filthy, disheveled, with a great bewilderment, spreading across her face, a wondrous pity. I stood in front of her, rifle in my hands, tears in my eyes. And they were certainly a marvelous thing, those tears, not only for her, but for me as well. My mother . . . My mother was lying on her back, her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be asleep; Even her hand, abandoned on the sheets, had dozed off. I fell silent, looking at the moon rising inch by inch over the olive trees of Settignano. It gave me great solace, that moon and those trees. That bright silver moon over silvery trees, that moon in the shape of an olive leaf, clean and transparent, shining like a vein of silver, pulsing through green marble in the incensed darkness of a church.

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters, from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot. We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down where water has not run for sixty years. Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from the abandoned iron-black mill. Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten colors. Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock. Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots. You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat. You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green; The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of accretions A beach of dream before the smoking mirror. You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon, Everywhere your own silence, who drink from the crater, the nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

It’s not the sharks Sliding mere inches from his upturned face Through warps of water where the tunnel arcs Transparent overhead, Their lipless jaws clamped shut, extruding teeth, Their eyes that stare at nothing, like the dead, Staring at him; it’s not the eerie grace Of rays he stood beneath, Gaping at their entranced slow-motion chase That is unending; It’s not the ultra-auditory hum Of ET cuttlefish superintending The iridescent craft Of their lit selves, as messages were sent, Turning the sight of him they photographed To code: it is not this that left him dumb With schoolboy wonderment Those hours he wandered the aquarium. It is that room, That room of Murray River they had walled In glass and, deep within the shifting gloom And subtle drifts of sky That filtered down, it seemed, from the real day Of trees and bird light many fathoms high, The giant Murray cod that was installed In stillness to delay All that would pass. The boy stood there enthralled. Out in the day Again, he saw the famous streets expound Their theories about speed, the cars obey, Racing to catch the sun, The loud fast-forward crowds, and thought it odd That in the multitudes not everyone Should understand as he did the profound Profession of the cod, That held time, motionless, unknown to sound. In bed at night, Are his eyes open or is this a dream? The room is all dark water, ghosted light, And midway to the ceiling The great fish with its working fins and gills Suspended, while before it glide the reeling And see-through scenes of day, faintly agleam, Until their passage stills And merges with the deep unmoving stream.

peach of a grape in his fingertips like holding home he noses its musk Taste, he says and parts my lips with a globe and a thumb I lick I bite the thick skin His Arkansas aches sweet on my tongue His hand vines my chin my throat My face flames To the lady on the bus he brags Her blush comes from my touch.

The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, so I’m told — that I used to live with, she’d follow me everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s more the truth. It is the truth. And now this dog — that I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty, like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s taken me, just to half-understand that. Pretty much my whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably, gets stripped away: what hope, otherwise, for suffering? When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay inside of, I’m not saying forever, I could last a fair time on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose command through a summer garden. Let those plants that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.

“There is no muse of translation,” the translator reminds as he struggles with Pindar’s victory odes, and what he means is that the imagery is overwhelming: the hissing of snakes as Medusa’s sisters mourn her death, the baby Iamos “lying on a bed of yellow and purple violets,” Heracles with his baby hands strangling the two serpents sent “to devour him on the day of his birth” so every translator must beware of “rank transplantation.” Just imagine, if one were to translate the line as “Forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.” How ridiculous that admonition to a king. Better to transpose to the vague modern, though Pindar “perversely, from our point of view—often seems to relish... the concrete image,” and it’s just there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into my father, my father into my mother; each one’s “inviolate honey” becoming the “blameless venom” of the other. So now I too prefer the naked tongue, even pained and writing, caught in hammer and tongs, flexed and torqued upon the anvil, until the metal turns mercurial, quick, spilling into and out of the shape of everything that is. For all day, while that pair of grey-eyed serpents feeds the abandoned child on honey, and the e-mail box fills with a multitude of voices debating the distinctions of the hoaxes of authorship—the pseudonym, the heteronym, all the masks we can put on—I have trembled because of my tongue. Because it insisted upon saying I love you. So it waits and waits for some word from you. It’s late in the afternoon when you finally reply and then to the quote I sent to a list. I read obliquely, wondering if I should hope because you say you’re thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the beloved and the lover’s love) or if I’m lost to the shadows you’re going off to dispel with a cup of coffee, that “best” at the end of your letter, my allotment from now on. Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now I’m mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil that the tongue itself has made.

We who must act as handmaidens To our own goddess, turn too fast, Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse Gliding below her lake or sea, Are left, long-staring after her, Narcissists by necessity; Or water-carriers of our young Till waters burst, and white streams flow Artesian, from the lifted breast: Cupbearers then, to tiny gods, Imperious table-pounders, who Are final arbiters of thirst. Fasten the blouse, and mount the steps From kitchen taps to Royal Barge, Assume the trident, don the crown, Command the Water Music now That men bestow on Virgin Queens; Or goddessing above the waist, Appear as swan on Thames or Charles Where iridescent foam conceals The paddle-stroke beneath the glide: Immortal feathers preened in poems! Not our true, intimate nature, stained By labor, and the casual tide. Masters of civilization, you Who moved to riverbank from cave, Putting up tents, and deities, Though every rivulet wander through The final, unpolluted glades To cinder-bank and culvert-lip, And all the pretty chatterers Still round the pebbles as they pass Lightly over their watercourse, And even the calm rivers flow, We have, while springs and skies renew, Dry wells, dead seas, and lingering drouth. Water itself is not enough. Harness her turbulence to work For man: fill his reflecting pools. Drained for his cofferdams, or stored In reservoirs for his personal use: Turn switches! Let the fountains play! And yet these buccaneers still kneel Trembling at the water's verge: “Cool River-Goddess, sweet ravine, Spirit of pool and shade, inspire!” So he needs poultice for his flesh. So he needs water for his fire. We rose in mists and died in clouds Or sank below the trammeled soil To silent conduits underground, Joining the blindfish, and the mole. A gleam of silver in the shale: Lost murmur! Subterranean moan! So flows in dark caves, dries away, What would have brimmed from bank to bank, Kissing the fields you turned to stone, Under the boughs your axes broke. And you blame streams for thinning out, plundered by man’s insatiate want? Rejoice when a faint music rises Out of a brackish clump of weeds, Out of the marsh at ocean-side, Out of the oil-stained river’s gleam, By the long causeways and gray piers Your civilizing lusts have made. Discover the deserted beach Where ghosts of curlews safely wade: Here the warm shallows lave your feet Like tawny hair of magdalens. Here, if you care, and lie full-length, Is water deep enough to drown.