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They made a myth of you, professor, you of the gentle voice, the books, the specs, the furitive rabbit manners in the mortar-board cap and the medieval gown. They didn’t think it, eh professor? On account of you’re so absent-minded, you bumping into the tree and saying, “Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,” passing on again blank and absent-minded. Now it’s “Mr. Attila, how do you do?” Do you pack wallops of wholesale death? Are you the practical dynamic son-of-a-gun? Have you come through with a few abstractions? Is it you Mr. Attila we hear saying, “I beg your pardon but we believe we have made some degree of progress on the residual qualities of the atom”? [August, 1945]

Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army, And he drew six dollars a month as a pension, And stood on the corner talking politics, Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs; And I supported the family by washing, Learning the secrets of all the people From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts. For things that are new grow old at length, They’re replaced with better or none at all: People are prospering or falling back. And rents and patches widen with time; No thread or needle can pace decay, And there are stains that baffle soap, And there are colors that run in spite of you, Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress. Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets The laundress, Life, knows all about it. And I, who went to all the funerals Held in Spoon River, swear I never Saw a dead face without thinking it looked Like something washed and ironed.

Amid the iris and the rose, The honeysuckle and the bay, The wild earth for a moment goes In dust or weed another way. Small though its corner be, the weed Will yet intrude its creeping beard; The harsh blade and the hairy seed Recall the brutal earth we feared. And if no water touch the dust In some far corner, and one dare To breathe upon it, one may trust The spectre on the summer air: The risen dust alive with fire, The fire made visible, a blur Interrate, the pervasive ire Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

When they told us Don’t speak until spoken to, we grew ears the size of corn. When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed their hurt whole. When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted doors that opened behind curtains. For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to save us—not knowing how. & all the while we found love in unlikely places: In the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces, refracted in their long faces.

1. Language must suffice. Years ago, under a sweet June sky stung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, a beautiful woman nearly killed me. Listen, she said, and turned her lovely face to the stars, the wild sky.... 2. No. No: years ago, under a sweet, June sky strung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, under this sky broad, bright, all rung around with rustling elders—or intoxicating willows, or oaks, I forget— under this sky, a beautiful woman killed me, nearly. I say beautiful. You had to see her. Listen, she said, and turned a lovely shell of her ear to the swirl of stars and the moon smudged as a wingtip in one tree, not far. 3. Yes: she scraped my back bloody against a rough trunk. Yes: she flung back her lovely face and her hair, holding me down, and the tree shook slowly, as in a mild, persistent laugh or wind, and the moon high in that black tree swung to and fro ... there were millions of stars up where she stared past us, and one moon, I think. 4. Excuse me. My friend, who loves poetry truly, says too much nature taints my work. Yes. Yes. Yes. Too many birds, stars— too much rain, too much grass— so many wild, bowing limbs howling or groaning into the natural night ... and he might be right. Even here. That is, if tree were a tree. That is, if star or moon or even beautiful woman craning the shell of her ear were what they were. They are, I think, not. No: and a poem about nature contains anything but. 5. When they descended to us, they were a cloud of stars sweeping lightly. They sang to us urgently about our lives, they touched us with a hundred thousand hair-soft, small legs— and held down by such hungers, we let them cover us, this beautiful woman, this me, who couldn’t move, who were stung—do you hear?— who were stung again, were covered that quickly, crying to each other to fly away! 6. ... I just can’t erase the exquisite, weeping language of the wasps, nor her face in starlight and so tranquil under that false, papery, bobbing moon just minutes before, saying listen, listen, nor then the weight of her whole natural body pinning down mine until we both cried out for fear, and pain, and still couldn’t move. 7. Language must suffice. First, it doesn’t. Then, of course, it does.Listen, listen. What do you hear? This nearly killed me. I’ll never know why she didn’t just whisper Here they come, warn Move! cry They’ll kill us! Yes:I will save you ... Yes:I love you too much to watch you suffer! But it’s all I recall, or now need. And, anyway, I loved her, she was so beautiful. And that is what I have had to say before it’s too late, before they have killed me, before they have killed you, too, or before we have all become something else entirely, which is to say before we are only language.

"If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps." If you knock out my teeth, I'll still go down on you, conscientiously, vine along a trellis, and suck you with my gums. If you smash my toes, employing an ice crusher, one by one, I'll heal myself with such truancy that someday I'll run on my knees. "If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps," and orchestrate a standing ovation with the memory of my hands representing each that are dying, each that are dead, each forgotten that we refuse to remember like the lost hands of stumps. So much misery in plain sight like tears streaming down a face; so much misery hidden like the eventuality of the anti-Christ; and so much incognito like the accompanying instruments of a torch song: like the fire in the torch itself, like the torched interior of the song. If you cut off my ears, I will listen with my eyes to the spitting death of cavalrymen as they're roasted over an open fire; to the smallest bones snap, dry as sun-seasoned kindling of the young and truant witch when she's pressed by a thousand stones; to the brave convulsions of the communist strapped in the electric chair, dying by degree...not unlike the commonfolk plucked from the village, arbitrarily, one last December night, stripped to the flesh and heaved high into the freezing air upon a whittled stave, tall and sharp, thrust deep into the asshole they die by degree, ever so slowly and often only (if not by freezing first, which, if merciful, God deems) when the wooden point finally pierces the brain, brain-dead already from the mauve anticipation and ear-splitting prerequisite of pain. If you cut out my tongue, I will write you a letter, a love letter lovelorn for that taste of your tongue. If you fuck me hard I can never make love again, I'll plant hyacinth bulbs in an effort to replace my abolished fecundity. I will turn eternally on my side and pull down my pants and listen to your masturbate while fantasizing about my ass. I'll admire the willow out the window when I hear you come and allow as if in tribute to the times I used to participate, a vague expression of pleasure, albeit contrived to wash across my face the way my desire for you, real as a willow, once had done.

Han-Shan sits on a flat stone In his garden and plays the flute, Mimicking the birds singing among The gourd vines or from the top Of the blue pine tree. Or he constructs a new trellis For the rambling rose over his front Gate or works at the great loom in his porch, Weaving his own coverlets. Sometimes, he paints drinking gourds To hang at his cold spring. His poems, delicate but strong, Paper the ceiling above his bed, So he can lie and read His own masterpieces. No man, he avers, can catch Such fish in one basket.

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously from the water clock the drops unfold in lazy honey or ethereal gold that over time reiterates a weave eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright. I fear that every one will be the last. They are a yesterday come from the past. But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight garden, what vigils by an unknown sea, and from what modest melancholy, from what lost and rediscovered afternoon do they arrive at their far future: me? Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play I am. I want to be. I bleed away.

Always the caravan of sound made us halt to admire the swinging and the swift go-by of beasts with enormous hooves and heads beating the earth or reared against the sky. Do not reread, I mean glance ahead to see what has become of the colossal forms: everything happened at the instant of passing: the hoof-beat, the whinny, the bells on the harness, the creak of the wheels, the monkey’s fandango in double time over the elephant’s back. When the marching was over and we were free to go on there was never before us a dungfall or a track on the road-sands of any kind: only the motion of footprints being made crossing and recrossing in the trampled mind.

He was calling in the bulls from the street. They came like a dark river — a blur of chest and hoof — everything moving, under, splinter — hooked their horns through the walls. Light hummed the holes like yellow jackets. My mouth was a nest torn empty. Then, he was at the table. Then, in the pig’s jaws — he was not hungry. He was stop. He was bad apple. He was choking. So I punched my fists against his stomach. Mars flew out and broke open or bloomed — how many small red eyes shut in that husk? He said,Look. Look. And they did. He said,Lift up your shirt. And I did. He slid his fork beneath my ribs — Yes, he sang.A Jesus side wound. It wouldn’t stop bleeding. He reached inside and turned on the lamp — I never knew I was also a lamp — until the light fell out of me, dripped down my thigh, flew up in me, caught in my throat like a canary. Canaries really means dogs, he said. He put on his shoes. You started this with your mouth, he pointed. Where are you going? I asked. To ride the Ferris wheel, he answered, and climbed inside me like a window.