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1 When the loons cry, The night seems blacker, The water deeper. Across the shore: An eyelash-charcoal Fringe of pine trees. 2 The lake reflects Indefinite pewter, And intermittent thunder Lets us know The gods are arriving, One valley over. 3 After the long Melancholy of the fall, One longs for the crisp Brass shout of winter— The blaze of firewood, The window’s spill Of parlor lamplight Across the snow. 4 Flaring like a match Dropped in a dry patch, One sunset tells The spectrum’s story. See the last hunter’s Flashlight dim As he hurries home To his lighted window.

Come to your heaven, you heavenly choirs, Earth hath the heaven of your desires. Remove your dwelling to your God; A stall is now his best abode. Sith men their homage do deny, Come, angels, all their fault supply. His chilling cold doth heat require; Come, seraphins, in lieu of fire. This little ark no cover hath; Let cherubs’ wings his body swathe. Come, Raphael, this babe must eat; Provide our little Toby meat. Let Gabriel be now his groom, That first took up his earthly room. Let Michael stand in his defense, Whom love hath linked to feeble sense. Let graces rock when he doth cry, And angels sing his lullaby. The same you saw in heavenly seat Is he that now sucks Mary’s teat; Agnize your king a mortal wight, His borrowed weed lets not your sight. Come, kiss the manger where he lies, That is your bliss above the skies. This little babe, so few days old, Is come to rifle Satan’s fold; All hell doth at his presence quake. Though he himself for cold do shake, For in this weak unarmèd wise The gates of hell he will surprise. With tears he fights and wins the field; His naked breast stands for a shield; His battering shot are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes, His martial ensigns cold and need, And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed. His camp is pitchèd in a stall, His bulwark but a broken wall, The crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes, Of shepherds he his muster makes; And thus, as sure his foe to wound, The angels’ trumps alarum sound. My soul, with Christ join thou in fight; Stick to the tents that he hath pight; Within his crib is surest ward, This little babe will be thy guard. If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

1 Stars are the campfires of exiles. Language exists to pull things close. * Stop that! Communications are being monitored. Collusion is forbidden. Humanity will be punished with the profusion of new jargons. 2 Inverted in glass, a white cup invents the underworld. * Fog thins to chiffon, nylon, Easter. * In the universe next door, I’m gone and the shadows of the leaves of the elm I had pulled down still make a fuss over the earth.

After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery, a room without theme. For the hour that we spend complacent at the window overlooking the garden, we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green, a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent movements some sentence might explain if we had time or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular. That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp- fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way false birch branches arch and interlace from which hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content to leave the way we found it. I love that about you. I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway. I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence. That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument. I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

I move my hands in these woods to find her sex-parts. We discover our sex-parts make heat and blue light. We become outlines of ourselves— long scratches in the sky. We have a daughter who was never born. She lives in the house we never built, but in this new light, you can almost see its tattered roof.

—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth. You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup. In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your first name. After your next vacation you will come home and discover that your neighbors have redecorated in the style of Iowa trailer court. If you feel like you’re getting old, secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds. Avoid people who iron their sheets or roll their socks & underwear. Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should be going, not the senate or tv news. The next thermos bottle you see will actually be a listening device made in Korea. All the people in this restaurant are glad that they are not you.

Looks to me like you’ve been disinherited, mute-chanting     while sirens scatter the will into a dull blade that can be attached to the muzzle of a rifle like a shadow     or   braid joke.    Stray dreadlock at the bus stop/ black stranded on blue/ and grape flavored bayonet that’s the word, French, daisy-hued lemon enunciation of when. I heard you were leaving this country     and     you tried   holding Rockefeller to daddy’s     promise     in the corridor of  being reasonable     and that he who could not sing should be made to sing     and the crow   pecking at synthetic kinky reggae would stow ’way home     If we   start thinking about the things   that keep us   in   a   place     we know we shouldn’t be in      and as the gates swing   open   jump rope like boxers training in velour short-shorts   and spitfire   just to keep brides in the jungle     sequestered /  the sore lavender nipples of the dairy cows add a rude dimension to the tasting menu   but that’s   what feeds you this sour mold juice, like the tiny yelling hands that piece together these machines   american dolls   and   darn that     charming cardigan made in Stanley Cowell’s   incantatory   shroud of a   winter power outage  ,  every shimmering object settles   in cold blood but I will not be interrupted of it .I’m sending you two black babies the greeting card reads     the wood of the reed splits     like the chief’s prophecy/ mask ,     Ma     remembers     the one that sold   her first was   it her father     what is   a   father   bath on   netted   lots .  of stray turtle doves   in this tribe,   ruler and thundering     Bula gnawing on the missing leg     of a queen’s   stool, hers, m aa fa s nursing trumpet was   she her father     I will not be interrupted   even to be my own father   watching me   dance   and earn him   a village .  even by Black Christ of the Tropics   begging to learn his name   in silver verses     I will not be interrupted     I     will   not   be interrupted

I Land of Refuge A mountain of white ice standing still in the water here forty fathoms deep and flowing swiftly from the north; grampuses and whales going by in companies, spouting up water in streams (these wonders of the Lord, I, Francis Higginson, saw on the way to Salem); a fair morning, and still many leagues from land, but the air warm and spiced— yellow flowers on the sea, sometimes singly, sometimes in sheets; high trees on every hill and in every dale, on every island, and even on the stony cliffs; banks of earth on which are groves of trees, and no undergrowth of bush or brambles; the sandy shore overrun with vines of melons and of grapes which the beat and surging of the sea overflows (this I, Arthur Barlowe, saw); trees of sweet-smelling wood with rind and leaves sweet-smelling as the bark of cinnamon and leaves of bay; soil dark and soft, strawberries everywhere, hickory nuts and sassafras; here are grapes white and red, very sweet and strong, and plums, black and red, and single roses, white and red and damask; we have eaten venison with the Indians, and drunk water with spice in it— Indian corn, even the coarsest, makes as pleasant a meat as rice. (Without any show of anger the Iroquois crunched our fingers in their mouths, and with their teeth tore off the nails; then hacked our fingers off, joint by joint, with stone hatchets, or with a shell too dull to cut the sinews; and in the stumps of our thumbs drove up spikes until the elbow; but so great the help of Jesus, with this maimed hand I, Isaac Jogues, Jesuit and priest, baptised an Indian among the captives, using the raindrops on a long leaf of corn.) Let others cry, “New lands! where Indians shall bring kernels of gold, wagons full of gold; whatever spills upon the way we shall tread carelessly, for we shall have so much of gold— so many pearls to sew upon our clothes; away, unthrifty gentlemen, to the forests of Virginia! There are lands to feed all the poor of England, trees to build each a home; give us but axes, shovels, and ploughshares, and away then to America, all you poor!” In England a watch is set about us and we are clapt in jails, and Holland is a dear place, for there they live by trading— but we are a plain country people whose trade is husbandry, and we would worship God as simply as the shepherds and Galilean fishermen, live as plainly; away, dissenters, to New England! A great wind is blowing, heavy rain— thick darkness; the sailors running here and there, shouting at one another to pull at this and at that rope, and the waves pouring over the ship; landing in the rain— the cold rain falling steadily; the ground wet, all the leaves dripping, and the rocks running with water; the sky is cloud on cloud in which the brief sun barely shines, the ground snow on snow, the cold air wind and blast; we have followed our God into this wilderness of trees heavy with snow, rocks seamed with ice, that in the freezing blasts the remnant of this remnant kindle so bright, so lasting a fire on this continent, prisoners of ice and darkness everywhere will turn and come to it to warm their hands and hearts. II Brief History Glaciers pushing so far and surely thaw and withdraw; even the deep, while the explosion of its waves dynamites the cliffs, leaves new lands, new groves and habitations beside the glittering currents flowing quickly into the silver waters of the sun. Here are men who find a comfortable bed among the rocks, who wrap themselves in their coats to sleep upon the ground while their horse feeds in the grass beside the lake; who catch trout in the brook and roast them on the ashes; eat the flesh of bear for meat, the white meat of turkeys for their bread, and whose salt is brought in an iron pot across the mountains; who live where two hundred acres may be had for a calf and a wool hat; or walk where there is no road nor any man, except the savage. All the bells of Boston are tolling a solemn peal; the market men will take no more paper money— hard money only; soldiers with bare feet showing through their shoes in the snow, the smoke of the camp-fires blowing into their eyes; for food a bowl of beef soup full of burnt leaves; no house or hut, and even the sick in tents. The rays of your light, like the sun’s, Republic of France, shone first in the west; the eater shall give meat, and out of the strong sweetness— out of the bones of the French monarchy the honey of freedom; the bells of Philadelphia are ringing as if for a fire, and the crowds, shouting and hallooing, fill the streets; ring, bells, throughout the night, let no one sleep; ring, clash, and peal until the log cabins and cottages of cedar shingles, the houses of grey stone or of brick, tremble, and the listeners feel in their flesh the vibrations of your metal voices ringing, Proclaim liberty, proclaim liberty throughout the land! Wrongs, like molecules of gas that seep into a house, explode in particles of fire! A captain gallops down the street, wheels, and the hoof of his horse sends the pie plates shining in the sun, his horse stops at what is flowing from the battlefield, sniffs at it, and will not cross; this is not water— it is blood in a thick and ropy stream. (The dying Negress says, I cannot eat dry hominy: I lived in Massa’s house, and used to have white bread and coffee; and I want something sweet in my mouth.) On the lawn the Negroes dance and clap their hands, So glad! so glad! Bless the Lord for freedom! So glad! so glad! Do not mourn the dandelions— that their golden heads become grey in no time at all and are blown about in the wind; each season shall bring them again to the lawns; but how long the seeds of justice stay underground, how much blood and ashes of precious things to manure so rare and brief a growth. Currents of waste wind along the river between the factories— the colonnades and sacred groves of chimneys; where once the road in ruts and ridges—lines of rails hold to a gleaming purpose, come wind, come rain, come winter or the night; build storey on storey out of glass; light electric lights, row after row, whose shining wires will not flicker in the wind; let the streets sound with the horns and hosannahs of motor cars! Man, you need no longer drudge at plow or oar, no longer trudge; proclaim this liberty to all! If bread may be as plentiful, shall we not share it as we share water?

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?

1 We travel upon the Ark, in mud and rain, Our oars promises from God. We live—and the rest of Humanity dies. We travel upon the waves, fastening Our lives to the ropes of corpses filling the skies. But between Heaven and us is an opening, A porthole for a supplication. "Why, Lord, have you saved us alone From among all the people and creatures? And where are you casting us now? To your other Land, to our First Home? Into the leaves of Death, into the wind of Life? In us, in our arteries, flows a fear of the Sun. We despair of the Light, We despair, Lord, of a tomorrow In which to start Life anew. If only we were not that seedling of Creation, Of Earth and its generations, If only we had remained simple Clay or Ember, Or something in between, Then we would not have to see This World, its Lord, and its Hell, twice over." 2 If time started anew, and waters submerged the face of life, and the earth convulsed, and that god rushed to me, beseeching, "Noah, save the living!" I would not concern myself with his request. I would travel upon my ark, removing clay and pebbles from the eyes of the dead. I would open the depths of their being to the flood, and whisper in their veins that we have returned from the wilderness, that we have emerged from the cave, that we have changed the sky of years, that we sail without giving in to our fears— that we do not heed the word of that god. Our appointment is with death. Our shores are a familiar and pleasing despair, a gelid sea of iron water that we ford to its very ends, undeterred, heedless of that god and his word, longing for a different, a new, lord.