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If, when I die, I must be buried, let No cemetery engulph me — no lone grot, Where the great palpitating world comes not, Save when, with heart bowed down and eyelids wet, It pays its last sad melancholy debt To some outjourneying pilgrim. May my lot Be rather to lie in some much-used spot, Where human life, with all its noise and fret, Throbs on about me. Let the roll of wheels, With all earth’s sounds of pleasure, commerce, love, And rush of hurrying feet surge o’er my head. Even in my grave I shall be one who feels Close kinship with the pulsing world above; And too deep silence would distress me, dead.

When I gather my long leaf-colored hair and make of it a stem and twist the handle of my head and join it back to me with metal pins I’m on your lap again my hands are in the air my view is mile upon mile I feel you fashioning the serpent on my head and the thick braid of you inside me I’m ready now to enter a prim public place where I am the teacher the police a saint I turn my back and everyone I command sees what it can be to be commanded

My hat was run over by a trolley yesterday. This morning my coat took a walk to some place far away. This afternoon my shoes happened to get assassinated. — I’m still here? that’s just i t.

“Do it,” yells the man across the street to his motorcycle. We each meet the day in our own way. The aquarium with three unspent goldfish buzzes. Three flies are flying. Coffee, traceable to dark, wet trees in Central America, cools. The black cat on my lap hates poetry, even the sound of it being typed. My skull and the falling stars sing back and forth the songs of magnets in heat. A car with a broken muffler hums along, mumbling answers to questions I haven’t shaped yet. What is a life? Stacks of typing paper wait to be darkened, dented. On my white wall a photograph of the poet James Galvin (cut out from the American Poetry Review). Sometimes I want to be: 1.  an American 2.  a poet 3.  reviewed James looks like a farmboy (Iowa, Iowa, you have more poets than scarecrows these fuse-lit days). How carelessly James sits back on his hips, staring into the camera’s eye. (Imprisoned inside there is the last surviving Cyclops), and I think of W. C. W.’s lines: the beauty of / terrible faces. When my face opens like James’s, it is a year later, years later. Some life is gone. Only poems remain. Perhaps a poem that a magazine wanted to publish before it folded (“folded,” the flight of such a word). And so the poem is stuck on a roll without a player piano. Imagination insists on saving its works as a poem, a tattoo, a quilt, an essay, or an aside, like this one: LOVE’S CHILLY NIGHT an angel’s cold hand irons leaves into this flat romance colors distract us from stems rotting under our own feet an angel burdens our night with its little laughs as a derisive white moon freezes far from a fire Even as I type this my coffee is cold; the peasants who picked the beans are sleeping; bottles of erasing fluids await their inevitable moments. I lose this moment. I’m dancing in the rain with a witch from San Carlos: Botta—is it you? Her red skirt turns like one solid year of sunsets. I almost catch her, but I’m back to this moment. Just in time to send you, my friends, another telegram. Here, Wordsworth’s worthy words. (I know I will have to bear their cost.) CLING (STOP) TOGETHER (STOP) IN (STOP) ONE (STOP) SOCIETY (STOP) RANE (STOP) BUT THE WORDS WON’T STOP and what do I owe? On my desk: a dictionary. All mine, my mine. Words like “lacrimator” wait for me, lak re mat ar which means: 1.  the lake really matters 2.  the lilac reddens into matters of the air 3.  the lack of the red mats in the attic YES! All of the above and below. One of the flies has landed on a photograph of me hiding behind Japanese fans. I stare at the fly staring at the me who no longer exists. I will not exist soon. I’m here, behind the typewriter. Men don’t split into new personae at the command of flashes. We can become fleshless though, like the skeletons in Mexican cathedrals, guardians of empty confessionals. In my room, I stare into a smaller box: “a brooding young man embraces a golden girl whose blue dress has the words ‘forget Xanadu’ stitched into it while dice without numbers float in the air suspended between a far Heaven and a near Earth as a black spider crawls toward the blind moon. A gray feather’s sleep on a blackening hill is a hint of uncompleted journeys” My neighbor comes home on his slow, red motorcycle and enters this poem again. The miles hum between his legs. One of the flies has bitten me. The black cat darkens all the windows by jumping sill to sill. The goldfish haven’t lost their glitter. At last, this is my land. I’ve learned to speak its language: America, I give you the power to break my heart.

I. ENOUGH ! we're tired, my heart and I. We sit beside the headstone thus, And wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly The hard types of the mason's knife, As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life With which we're tired, my heart and I. II. You see we're tired, my heart and I. We dealt with books, we trusted men, And in our own blood drenched the pen, As if such colours could not fly. We walked too straight for fortune's end, We loved too true to keep a friend ; At last we're tired, my heart and I. III. How tired we feel, my heart and I ! We seem of no use in the world ; Our fancies hang grey and uncurled About men's eyes indifferently ; Our voice which thrilled you so, will let You sleep; our tears are only wet : What do we here, my heart and I ? IV. So tired, so tired, my heart and I ! It was not thus in that old time When Ralph sat with me 'neath the lime To watch the sunset from the sky. Dear love, you're looking tired,' he said; I, smiling at him, shook my head : 'Tis now we're tired, my heart and I. V. So tired, so tired, my heart and I ! Though now none takes me on his arm To fold me close and kiss me warm Till each quick breath end in a sigh Of happy languor. Now, alone, We lean upon this graveyard stone, Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I. VI. Tired out we are, my heart and I. Suppose the world brought diadems To tempt us, crusted with loose gems Of powers and pleasures ? Let it try. We scarcely care to look at even A pretty child, or God's blue heaven, We feel so tired, my heart and I. VII. Yet who complains ? My heart and I ? In this abundant earth no doubt Is little room for things worn out : Disdain them, break them, throw them by And if before the days grew rough We once were loved, used, — well enough, I think, we've fared, my heart and I.

Oh, Homer! Your village sleeps near the Missouri River With your cousin Winnebago, both children of Lakotaland. You kept your town at two stories, as flat as the surrounding prairie. You taught the Iliad and Odyssey in honor of your namesake poet. Your spirit outlasted the bleached fields of the Depression, and Bravely swam against the raging Omaha Creek floods. On warm, wet spring Saturday nights, You provided dark places for your young To launch your next generation In pickups, unlighted.

A vine drapes the fence in its cool enthusiasm, stemmed cascade. My skin has collapsed in flounces, in anticipation. • Look how I change the subject without changing, I appear to say — which seems like nothing but is practice for the bigger change to come. • My mind is just like the stance and disposition of these trees — dense, sparse, conical, lopsided, frilly (as was the mind of the tenant before me

My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy strips of fat. Just ask him. He doesn’t have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter—he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs.

He said he buried his right eye in South Georgia — on a dare, he said, when he was little, beneath one green ash of two that mark the end of a road whose name he’s by now forgotten:Lonesome something, maybe Dog or Cricket. He said he couldn’t love me, not really, not without his old right eye, and anyway he’d left his tongue as a tip slid under a mug at a small North Florida diner, would collect it too along the way, seeing as he’d asked the server to save it, and she had kindly agreed. Three of his ribs were further gone — one in Wisconsin, where he’d planted it like a tree though he believed even then nothing would bloom on it. Another he pawned in Manitoba for a silver bracelet, which he wore only when he was very sad, and his last rib he’d been keeping in a safe deposit box in a credit union on the alien Oregon coast where he’d visit sometimes, stopping often at vantages to take in expanses of pines covered in moss and something else, like brine, and the pines were tall, tall and uncommunicating, as if they had been designed only to listen. His ears he’d left with me, I told them everything — words I had invented for the color of new moons, city names I had given to four slender ant colonies that had since emerged on the lawn. I told the ears Come back to me, but they were unable to relay these types of things, and anyway there was nothing else to do. I took all my littlest veins and pitched them as a woven tightrope out of the kitchen window and hooked, with a makeshift grapple, the cheek of the visible moon, which carried me away, and I was sorry to have wounded it like that and I was sorry to be carried by what I had wounded.

1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house I “I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!” That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father’s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. ... Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound.... Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather’s farm. Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, its alley of poplars paraded from Grandmother’s rose garden to a scary stand of virgin pine, scrub, and paths forever pioneering. One afternoon in 1922, I sat on the stone porch, looking through screens as black-grained as drifting coal. Tockytock, tockytock clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, slung with strangled, wooden game. Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill. One of my hands was cool on a pile of black earth, the other warm on a pile of lime. All about me were the works of my Grandfather’s hands: snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine; his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar; stogie-brown beams; fools’-gold nuggets; octagonal red tiles, sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; a Rocky Mountain chaise longue, its legs, shellacked saplings. A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn fished with a broom straw in a basin hollowed out of a millstone. Like my Grandfather, the d é cor was manly, comfortable, overbearing, disproportioned. What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high? It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie bearing pitchers of ice-tea, oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints, and the jug of shandygaff, which Grandpa made by blending half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. The farm, entitled Char-de-sa in the Social Register, was named for my Grandfather’s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. No one had died there in my lifetime ... Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy paralyzed from gobbling toads. I sat mixing black earth and lime. II I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. My perfection was the Olympian poise of my models in the imperishable autumn display windows of Rogers Peet’s boys’ store below the State House in Boston. Distorting drops of water pinpricked my face in the basin’s mirror. I was a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak. III Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room, lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah. She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, with gauze curtains like a boudoir table, accordionlike yet soundless. It had been bought to spare the nerves of my Grandmother, tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, now needing a fourth for “Auction,” and casting a thirsty eye on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed, grasshopper notes of genius! Family gossip says Aunt Sarah tilted her archaic Athenian nose and jilted an Astor. Each morning she practiced on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, deathlike in the off-season summer— its naked Greek statues draped with purple like the saints in Holy Week.... On the recital day, she failed to appear. IV I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing? ... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ... A fluff of the west wind puffing my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, troubling the waters.... As small as sapphires were the ponds:Quittacus, Snippituit, and Assawompset, halved by “the Island,” where my Uncle’s duck blind floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. Double-barreled shotguns stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak was quacking to the decoys.... At the cabin between the waters, the nearest windows were already boarded. Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter. As if posed for “the engagement photograph,” he was wearing his severe war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters, tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk. Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights, was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga was accepting the arm of her “protector,” the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. The pre-war music hall belles had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles, and coils of hair like rooster tails. The finest poster was two or three young men in khaki kilts being bushwhacked on the veldt— They were almost life-size.... My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine. “You are behaving like children,” said my Grandfather, when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters, and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon ... I cowered in terror. I wasn’t a child at all— unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina in the Golden House of Nero.... Near me was the white measuring-door my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle’s heights. In 1911, he had stopped growing at just six feet. While I sat on the tiles, and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse, Uncle Devereux stood behind me. He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse. His face was putty. His blue coat and white trousers grew sharper and straighter. His coat was a blue jay’s tail, his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle. He was animated, hierarchical, like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease.... My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles of earth and lime, a black pile and a white pile.... Come winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.