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Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee, The shooting stars attend thee; And the elves also, Whose little eyes glow Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. No Will-o'-th'-Wisp mis-light thee, Nor snake or slow-worm bite thee; But on, on thy way, Not making a stay, Since ghost there's none to affright thee. Let not the dark thee cumber; What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light, Like tapers clear without number. Then Julia let me woo thee, Thus, thus to come unto me; And when I shall meet Thy silv'ry feet, My soul I'll pour into thee.

1. deathbed There is a word that is not water, has nothing to do with heat or light, is unrelated to any one pain though the torn body tears itself further trying to speak it. There is a sound beyond all the sounds that I have made, the needs that one by one I've tried to name. It burns clear in the eyes searching mine, the lips beginning to bleed again, her hand squeezing my hand, pleading and pleading that I understand. 2. living will All afternoon in the afterlife of little things that love, or pain, or need could not let go of I hunt for the will that will let me let you go. I am distracted and slow— all the grainy faces in old photographs, letters from the dead, deeds to places that are only air, some bright nowhere of broad fields and sunlight that was my idea of heaven one long afternoon of clouds and steady rain when you sat and explained where a garden was, a well, excited by it, the hell ahead of you just a brief tightness at your heart. Outside in the yard, crickets start, cry here and here and here, night's thousand shadows growing tall. And now I have it, formal, final. I touch each keepsake like a wall. 3. going In the hard light and hum of the room to which I've come to stay, I watch the clock, and wait, and hour by hour begin to disappear. Movements, mutterings: the brain darkens like a landscape. Pain in the pale arterial hills flashes and vanishes, takes with it one whole year. Cotton and killdeer, a cloud looks down, something's happened in the wellhouse, someone runs through tall trees, breathe and breathe, is it my hand you hold? The fever climbs. You grow cold, then warm, now cold again, a hive of nerves in the skin. Some glimmer breaks through and I bend whispering as fear like a wind shakes you, I'm right here, I'm right here... Midnight, moonlight gauzing the walls, the iron and umber of intensive care: I watch as it swells and falls the puttied scar at your heart, and read each beat and falter on a screen and match my breathing to the breathing of a machine to know this time as it passes, each moment as it goes— until, early, you shudder and quieten, blood gases begin to rapidly rise and somewhere behind your eyes I fall in fragments away: a child surprised at his play, encroached upon by air, a shattered man near dawn, something about the way he holds so still, his hair.

for Lily Mae The job was easy: I tucked them in, kicked off my shoes, listened for the floor to go quiet. Everyone slept except one: outside her door, she paced, she hummed, holding the edge of her torn nightgown. Pointing, I told her: to bed.Your bed. But she would not stay there. She was old, older than my mother: manic, caught up in gibberish, determined to sleep on my cot— At first it was just to quiet her. I could only sleep if she slept, and I needed relief from myself. That is how she became a body next to mine whether or not I wanted there to be a body. She climbed into my bed. I let her sleep hot and damp against my spine. All night she rocked, she turned, she poked her spastic elbows into my calves and slurred her broken noises in the dark. All the old fans went round in clicks those summer nights—and she rolled in bed and kicked me in the head and I was happy. No words, no tricks, I just didn't love my loneliness. My mind felt cooler with her there. Beside her, I could have been anyone. She had no word for me and not the kind of mind to keep one. And if she kicked me, some nights, just for the fun of it—who was I to disappoint my one? Sometimes I imagine I was someone she won at a fair as the wheel spun under the floating, unfaltering sun and clicked each lucky one and one until I was happily undone.

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers after the name has become slightly embarrassing and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all for me to say one nightingale is singing nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its unknown star on on on never returning never the same never caught while through the small leaves of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains it had never happened before and there were so many things to tell that she had just seen and would never have imagined now a field away I hear another voice beginning and on the slope there is a third not echoing but varying after the lives after the goodbyes after the faces and the light after the recognitions and the touching and tears those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen

My bones tied up with his bones at night, him falling asleep in my arm after wrasslin me, calling it love in some kind of low whisper no dog would believe. I know his every smell, every way the littlest corner of him be stinkin underneath me, on top of me, while our children snore in the corner, then he creep out the way he creep in, before the cock crow at the sun. In daylight he act like we strangers, on the edge of the field, his little tan children of mine turning brown, playing more than working cause they his children, Missy look over at me while I look over at her, both of us got some kind of papers on this same man that say he own both of us, the man who owes us even we he die cause the Bible say you gotta look after the widow. But when he die it will be cause Missy and me locked eyes many days and hated him like one wronged woman made out of two, him standing up there on the porch studyin everything— his eyes lit up like he the Lord of all creation. hush now, night wind on my skin, hush now bird lost in trees, hush now, hungry moon

The backyard apple tree gets sad so soon, takes on a used-up, feather-duster look within a week. The ivy’s spring reconnaissance campaign sends red feelers out and up and down to find the sun. Ivy from last summer clogs the pool, brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf mulch soft to the touch and rank with interface of rut and rot. The month after the month they say is cruel is and is not.

They go, the early flags, the gory maples— so too the daffodils & Lenten roses. Other petals swirl & nights warm. Buds thicken and cast shadows: in a thunderstorm I almost forget the ice that was. Narcissi suckle watery paths; meadows heap up emerald masses. How green & I want to delight except this undertow—it pulls so fast passing before I recognize it— like souls in Dante who can’t see the present, white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat. The parade I barely noticed was beginning is already halfway down the street.

May I ask you who your grandmother died Her blackness you pretended we’d assume a servant’s      in the photograph May I ask did she die herself? I know you all light under an umbrella     don’t tan and she could be seen as she had been made too dark for what the son do. I saw her years ago after she died And again today in the market I asked her     I had to know if she was who I knew    ... “Only two things you really has to— tha’s to stay black and die.” Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretend that you have died except you’re black and alive who are you? She is as hundreds of years old as the stories of the lies of grandmothers in the cellar    ... May I ask who your grandmother      died if she died herself?

March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides into rain. The imperceptible change begins out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new craving, spring. May your desire always overcome your need; your story that you have to tell, enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I vigilant.

1 My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing! then I can put on my clothes I guess, and walk the streets. 2 I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. Words! be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your eyes, a pool, and I’ll stare down at my wounded beauty which at best is only a talent for poetry. Cannot please, cannot charm or win what a poet! and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head. I embrace a cloud, but when I soared it rained. 3 That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks what a funny place to rupture! and now it is raining on the ailanthus as I step out onto the window ledge the tracks below me are smoky and glistening with a passion for running I leap into the leaves, green like the sea 4 Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.