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It is too early for white boughs, too late For snows. From out the hedge the wind lets fall A few last flakes, ragged and delicate. Down the stripped roads the maples start their small, Soft, ’wildering fires. Stained are the meadow stalks A rich and deepening red. The willow tree Is woolly. In deserted garden-walks The lean bush crouching hints old royalty, Feels some June stir in the sharp air and knows Soon ’twill leap up and show the world a rose. The days go out with shouting; nights are loud; Wild, warring shapes the wood lifts in the cold; The moon’s a sword of keen, barbaric gold, Plunged to the hilt into a pitch black cloud.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying— He had always taken funerals in his stride— And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

No one has touched me for weeks yet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late, when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed, as though so wildly desired—passing solo through the garden’s cinnamon, marigolds, famished roses, where a matted shingle of the swept-up human hair I begged from a local beauty shop & spread out fruitlessly among the blooms & canes to keep away the deer might well be a satyr passed out in the palace’s candied gold— that something regnant with a strange, godlike power could not help but reach out from the umbral blue to tap my white arm. It is a day to die, the light autoerotic, theatrical, with an unbearable listing, stalled in cusp, in leonine torpor. Is courage artifice? As though to answer were within my means. Or to even move my mouth.

A STUDY IN AN EMOTION "'Tis but a vague, invarious delight. As gold that rains about some buried king. As the fine flakes, When tourists frolicking Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes And start to inspect some further pyramid; As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath Their transitory step and merriment, Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus Gains yet another crust Of useless riches for the occupant, So I, the fires that lit once dreams Now over and spent, Lie dead within four walls And so now love Rains down and so enriches some stiff case, And strews a mind with precious metaphors, And so the space Of my still consciousness Is full of gilded snow, The which, no cat has eyes enough To see the brightness of."

The surfers beautiful as men can be ride the warm blue green swells and the white sand is alive with girls. Outriggers (double boats) ride the waves back in as the native warriors did. I tried to swim and tried to look, but ended up just going back: a huge, perfect black man at the beach somehow drove me away a block to St. Augustine’s Church. The bodies were giv- ing me a fit and I have come to seek the momentary calm we find sometimes in the musk of Christ (when he was awake and sweat- ing blood as others slept, or like a furious bouncer hustling out the money changers). The bodies of Mary and Christ both still live, we’re told. They’re alive and thus must have dealt with the stress of that long time of turning on to being young. I speak of teens. Fifteen and ten years ago when I first confessed, it was in this same church built then as a gigantic shed where the strange Hawaiian birds (I forgot their names—no matter) flew in and out of the high wood- en rafters like the whimsical winds of grace, and grace gives back to sight what beauty is— as that loveliness at the beach. Now the church has been rebuilt in pointed stone across the street from a much higher new hotel where at lunch I almost spilled and found I could not eat the purple orchid in my drink.

I Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores. “10 April 1800— Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves. Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.” Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann: Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed. Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes.

‘Are you asleep?’ Like a door that always opens on the same empty closet, the old jokey question you can never answer ‘yes’ to is a snap, in comparison to ‘Where are you?’ Moving, wherever you are. Even your stillness on the back seat takes the bent of action, a kicking reach through swells and drifts of afghan. My live question mark, are they salt or sweet, the waters you riddle? Asking gets me as far as ladling water with a net. Though I can catch your small beached foot, and hear soft waves of breath, the mesh of senses isn’t fine enough to land you now. When you come back, you’ll rub the sand from your eyes and know nothing of where you’ve been. Love is like that: the element we breathe and move through, untouchable and always there.

At midnight, he can’t see the white picket fence or the tomato stalks, shriveled, in the garden, though he knows the patio, strewn with willow leaves, plumes of tall grasses, upright and still; and, as he peers into the yard, he senses a moment wicking into flame — walking up an arroyo, they gaze back across the Pojoaque valley, spot the glinting tin roofs, cottonwoods leafing along the curves of the river — a green tide surges in their arteries as well as the trees; tonight, spring infuses fall, and memory’s wick draws the liquefied wax of experience up into flame.

The child is not dead. She is sleeping. Gone from this world Which is broken. The angel of Michael Outside the garden His circle of fire Maddening around the tree. He put the word Back into her: A heavy kind of music. Then she was free. As we all are. All night I stood in the icy wind, Praying for the storm to destroy me. But the wind blew through me Like I was a hologram. If you say I am a mystic, Then fine: I’m a mystic. The trees are not trees, anyway.

Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers & Other Worms look out into the crapulous moonlight: figures of women cascading through the Sunday night; no beer in sight. I remember the Night-blooming Cereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s patron, it hangs in the hall outside the bedroom swaying hungrily like these giant white goddesses of the dark grotto… there are touring cars and men with large guns singing through the woods behind us.