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The wooden horses are tired of their courses and plead from head to hoof to be fed to a stove— In leaping lunging flames they’d rise again, flared manes snapping like chains behind them. The smoke would not blind them as do these children’s hands: beyond our cruel commands the fire will free them then as once the artisan when out of the tree they were nagged to this neigh.

1917 They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young, The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave: But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung, Shall they come with years and honour to the grave? They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain In sight of help denied from day to day: But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain, Are they too strong and wise to put away? Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide— Never while the bars of sunset hold. But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died, Shall they thrust for high employments as of old? Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? When the storm is ended shall we find How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power By the favour and contrivance of their kind? Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends, Even while they make a show of fear, Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends, To conform and re-establish each career? Their lives cannot repay us—their death could not undo— The shame that they have laid upon our race. But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew, Shall we leave it unabated in its place?

Today outside your prison I stand and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen; you have relatives outside. And there are thousands of ways to escape. Years ago I bent my skill to keep my cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies, and shouted my plans to jailers; but always new plans occured to me, or the new heavy locks bent hinges off, or some stupid jailer would forget and leave the keys. Inside, I dreamed of constellations— those feeding creatures outlined by stars, their skeletons a darkness between jewels, heroes that exist only where they are not. Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought, just as—often, in light, on the open hills— you can pass an antelope and not know and look back, and then—even before you see— there is something wrong about the grass. And then you see. That’s the way everything in the world is waiting. Now—these few more words, and then I’m gone: Tell everyone just to remember their names, and remind others, later, when we find each other. Tell the little ones to cry and then go to sleep, curled up where they can. And if any of us get lost, if any of us cannot come all the way— remember: there will come a time when all we have said and all we have hoped will be all right. There will be that form in the grass.

i would sit in the center of the world, the Black Hills hooped around me and dream of my dancing horse. my wife was Black Shawl who gave me the daughter i called They Are Afraid Of Her. i was afraid of nothing except Black Buffalo Woman. my love for her i wore instead of feathers. i did not dance i dreamed. i am dreaming now across the worlds. my medicine is strong. my medicine is strong in the Black basket of these fingers. i come again through this Black Buffalo woman. hear me; the hoop of the world is breaking. fire burns in the four directions. the dreamers are running away from the hills. i have seen it. i am crazy horse.

“I cannot quite remember.... There were five Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three Whispered their dying messages to me....” Back from the trenches, more dead than alive, Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee, He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly: “I cannot quite remember.... There were five Dropt dead beside me in the trench, and three Whispered their dying messages to me.... “Their friends are waiting, wondering how they thrive— Waiting a word in silence patiently.... But what they said, or who their friends may be “I cannot quite remember.... There where five Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three Whispered their dying messages to me....”

for John Gardner It was not kindness, but I was only buckle-high in the door. I let him in because the knock had come, the rain clawed each window and wall. I was afraid. Climbing down the stairs I did not know how my country, cunningly, had rotted, but hear, now, my steps creak in memory and the rocks let go in the blind nightglass where you get up, frightened, to reenact the irrational logic of flesh. Even now I can’t see why it happens, the moment of change, but must try to witness each particular index of landscape and irony of promise. I know I was a child when the banging began, sleepless with every light in the house blazing. Then the man whose speech entangled me came in from the mud-world. He could not put together the clear words of hope we dream, only the surge of a river. He, who said it wasn’t a fit thing for anyone, half-grown, to have to imagine in this godforsaken life, said there was a message, the river high, no chance. I remember the wind at that door breaking like a father’s hand on my face. Such hurting does not cease and maybe that is why the man went on fumbling for love, for the loving words that might be knowledge. He gave me this message. I took it, and took, without warning, grief’s language that piece by piece has shown me how to connect dreamed moments skidding like rocks in the silence of a Wyoming midnight. Each of his rainy words, fragments of the old sickness, passed into me, then he was gone, miserable and emptied, and I had no home but the heart’s hut, the blistering walls of loneliness, the world’s blue skymiles of longing. Common with drowned fir and uncoiling crocus, then, I walked in ignorance and entered this terrible life that was always a dream of the future in the relentless unsleep of those who cannot remember the last thing they wanted to say: that love exists. And in darkness you have dreamed me into your world with their message, their words whispering an hour before black, sudden knocking that, even as I recall it, begins in your heart’s meat to reverberate, oh, its noise is going to wake you like a dove’s desire. This is the dream of the soft buckling of flesh, the beautiful last erosions, and I swear I would give up these words if I could, I would stop the code of that streetlight just beyond your bed— but it is too late, for the secret of hope swells in you and who can stop the news that already screams like the roof’s edge leaving its nails over your child’s bed that is, now, splintered and empty as every moment skidding at the back of your neck? Leaves not a month old hurl out of the storm and steady splatter of time, and tomorrow will lie still ripening, but only long enough for you to catalog, in dream, what was possible before the rake must drag its scritch-scratch over ground. All I ask is that you turn to the child inside, those words dreaming and changeless as love’s last chance—let them be said against whatever, crying in the night, we still think may be stopped, the black historical fact of life’s event crashing, like a wall of water, over the actuary’s lawn and yours. You have seen me before and would not hear, stung by your wife’s fierce beauty, when I called your name, and the day your mother died I begged your attention and got your dollar. I followed you once, in New York, like truth, always to give you the message, and now on your porch, mud-spattered, I am knocking to make you see what love is. Call your wife, the police, anyone you like, for everyone is waiting. We don’t mean to be unkind but are compelled to deliver, faithfully, the words that have been fluttering in your ear like a scream. It is not the wind waking you, but the low roar of years fumbling to tell you what has happened, or will, when the door flies open and the naked message of love stands there stuttering in your face, alive, crying, leaving nothing out.

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. Two nights he came to me, mute, on fire, no dream. I woke to find the window embered and fog filling the willows. The third time he was milder and early, his gray form all ash. He said to me at bedside, kneeling, “You must say your life to save it.” Midnight, hoarfrost. I was not yet ten and didn’t know what to make of so brief a bedtime story. His features were simple and familiar—the smile, both eyes shut in bliss, I guessed, head and torso echoing an antique keyhole. From sleep’s icy edge I asked, “How?” But he was gone, the room all hazed. The air smelled of struck matches, scuppernong, a copperhead’s musk. What next? The moon was new in the budding bird cherry and Venus startling overhead. Dizzy for water, I followed my flashlight down the stairs where the black mantel clock was bonging. Beside it sat the twin of my herald, a stone bookend from Kildare and no more able to speak or take wing than a weathercock. His closed eyes told me, “Look inside,” but I ached to see him blaze again and say aloud how change could shake me to a shining. “But I must be the key,” I thought, and stepped over the sparkling threshold. My nightshirt floated ghostly across the scalded lawn, under the arbor, beside the barn, my soles not troubled by white grass crackling all the way to the well shed, the burning that must have been coming from me.

She took the words for a stroll and the words bit the children and the children told their parents and the parents loaded their guns and the words wailed, howled slowly licked their blind wounds until they fell flat on their faces onto the bloody earth and death came then dressed in its Sunday best to stop by the poet’s house and call to him with desperate cries and the poet opened the door not knowing what had happened and he saw death hanging from its shadow and sobbing it told him, “Come with me today we’re in mourning” “Who died,” asked the poet “Well, you,” replied death and death extended its arms to him to offer condolences Translated from the Spanish

The messenger runs, not carrying the news of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting, has always been running, the wind before and behind him, across the turning back of earth, leaving his tracks across the plains, his ropes hanging from the ledges of mountains; for centuries, millennia, he has been running carrying whatever it is that cannot be put down: it is rolled in a tube made of hide, carefully, to keep it dry as he runs, through storms and monsoons, sometimes on foot, sometimes poling a boat through a flooded mangrove swamp, or setting stiff sails to cross from island to island running before the wind. In some ages, peasants have helped him—bringing him small cakes of rice wrapped in the weeds of the sea and new sandals woven of hemp for his torn bleeding feet; sometimes in the heat of noon they would offer a drink of rosewater, sometimes a coat of fur against the winter snows; and sometimes at night, he would rest by a fire where voices wove with the music of gut-strings, or with mountain pipes whose sound was like wind through the bones of creation—and he would be cheered by the company of others, the firelit glow of their faces like a bright raft afloat in the dark; at times, rumors spread of his death, scholars analyzed his obsession, dated his bones, his prayer bundle; but at dawn, he always arose, in the mists, in the blur of so many mornings, so many shoes worn into scraps and discarded, so many the cities that burned as he passed them, so many the skulls abandoned by armies, so many whose blood stained the threads of their prayer rugs, so many, so many, so many— oh, and that green, sunlit hill that kept rising from the dark waters of flood, outlined bright against the sky, the odds, the evidence— and he, the messenger, running through history, carries this small tube, its durable hide—carries it, not like a torch, no, nothing so blazing; not like the brass lamp that summons a genie, no magic wishes; not like the candles that hope sets aflame and a breath can extinguish ... no. He carried it like what has no likeness, what is curled up inside and he swore he could feel it, though perhaps he had dreamed it, still at times, stopping under some tree or other, when the night was warm, so close the stars seemed to breathe in the branches, he would lie quiet, then it would seem that whatever it was in there would pulse softly with light, a code only the heart could break (but of course he couldn’t say for he was only the messenger)— and at sunrise, wearily, he would rise to his feet and trudge on, sometimes running, sometimes stumbling, carrying whatever it was that could not be put down, would not be cast aside— and besides, he would chide himself, weren’t they all as tired as he, and hadn’t they helped him, time and again, on his way?

I write my God in blue. I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts. I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight. I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath, or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade, at twilight, on the desert's steps. Brown by day and black by night, my God has wings that open to no reason. He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes, scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb of light leaping from a fire. Press him he bleeds. When you take your hand to sacred water, there is no sign of any wound. And so I call him supreme, great artist, judge of time, scholar of all living event, the possible prophet of the possible event. Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars, blind men with their scars dulled by kola, blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop, blind men in corn, blind men in steel, reason by their lights that our tongues are free, our tongues will redeem us. Speech is the fact, and the fact is true. What is moves, and what is moving is. We cling to these contradictions. We know we will become our contradictions, our complex body's own desire. Yet speech is not the limit of our vision. The ear entices itself with any sound. The skin will caress whatever tone or temperament that rises or descends. The bones will set themselves to a dance. The blood will argue with a bird in flight. The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice, brush and thrill to an old bone. And yet there is no sign to arrest us from the possible. We remain at rest there, in transit from our knowing to our knowledge. So I would set a limit where I meet my logic. I would clamber from my own cave into the curve of sign, an alphabet of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. I am good when I am in motion, when I think of myself at rest in the knowledge of my moving, when I have the vision of my mother at rest, in moonlight, her lap the cradle of my father's head. I am good when I trade my shells, and walk from boundary to boundary, unarmed and unafraid of another's speech. I am good when I learn the world through the touch of my present body. I am good when I take the cove of a cub into my care. I am good when I hear the changes in my body echo all my changes down the years, when what I know indeed is what I would know in deed. I am good when I know the darkness of all light, and accept the darkness, not as sign, but as my body. This is the A of absolutes, the logbook of judgments, the good sign.