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Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth, are sunk in green light. The low stones like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan. Its set and luminous velocity, long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops strike their light civic stripes on the pavement. Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height a side door is flung open, fire-exits; streaming from lobbies come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops, black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits, one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows; one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic; thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow’s curlicue and the fingers’; elbow-work, heel-work, are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus. Humid sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows’ shadowless yards of mercuric green plate glass. An interspace then, like the slowing of some rural water-mill, a creaking and dipping pause of black-splintered paddles, the irregularly dappled off-lighting—bottle-green—the lucid slim sluice falling back in a stream from the plank edge. It won’t take us altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won’t churn us up altogether. We’ll keep a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self’s self—to reflect the sky. But we won’t (says the bus rider now to herself). Nothing’s left over, really, from labor. They’ve taken it all for the mill-race. In close-ups now, you can see it in every face, despite the roped rain light pouring down the bus-windows— it’s the strain of gravity itself, of life hours cut off and offered to the voice that says “Give me this day your life, that is LABOR, and I’ll give you back one day, then another. For mine are the terms.” It’s gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek-tissue trembling, despite the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves, the army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night ... But even as the rain slackens, labor lengthens itself along Broadway. The night signs come on, that wit has set up to draw money: O’DONNELL’S, BEIRUT CAFE, YONAH’S KNISH

The miller's wife had waited long, The tea was cold, the fire was dead; And there might yet be nothing wrong In how he went and what he said: "There are no millers any more," Was all that she had heard him say; And he had lingered at the door So long that it seemed yesterday. Sick with a fear that had no form She knew that she was there at last; And in the mill there was a warm And mealy fragrance of the past. What else there was would only seem To say again what he had meant; And what was hanging from a beam Would not have heeded where she went. And if she thought it followed her, She may have reasoned in the dark That one way of the few there were Would hide her and would leave no mark: Black water, smooth above the weir Like starry velvet in the night, Though ruffled once, would soon appear The same as ever to the sight.

I. Black swollen fruit dangling on a limb Red forgotten flesh sprayed across the prairie Parched brown vines creeping over the wall Yellow winged pollen, invisible enemies Boluses without homesteads, grubs without a voice Burrowed deeply into this land’s dark, dark heart Someday, our pods and pupae shall turn in the earth And burgeon into our motherlode’s bold beauty II. We’re a seed on the manure, on the sole of your shoe We’re the louse trapped in your hank of golden hair We’re the sliver that haunts beneath your thumbnail We the church mouse you scorched with a match but lived We’re the package wrapped, return address unknown We’re the arm lowered again, again, a bloodied reverie We’ve arrived shoeless, crutchless, tousle-haired, swollen-bellied We shall inherit this earth’s meek glory, as foretold II. (For Leah, my niece) They gave you a title, but you were too proud to wear it They gave you the paterland, but you were too lazy to farm it Your condo is leaking, but you’re too angry to repair it Your dress has moth holes, but you’re too sentimental to toss it You’re too bored to play the lute, it hangs on the wall like an ornament The piano bites you, it’s an eight-legged unfaithful dog Love grows in the garden, but you’re too impudent to tend it A nice Hakka boy from Ogden, so hardworking, so kind The prayer mat is for prayer, not for catamite nipple-piercing The Goddess wags her finger at your beautiful wasteland A dream deferred, well, is a dream deferred IV. (Janie’s retort, on her fortieth birthday) The same stars come around and around and around The same sun pecks her heat at the horizon The same housing tract, the same shopping center The same blunt haircut: Chinese, Parisian, Babylonion The same lipstick: red and it comes off on your coffeecup The same stars come around and around and around The same sun tarries in the late noon sky The same word for mom:Ah ma, madre, mere, majka The same birthbabe: bald, purplish, you slap to make cry The same stench: mother’s milk, shit and vomit The same argument between a man and a woman The same dog, hit by a car, the same escaped canary The same turkey for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year The same three-tiered freeway: Istanbul, Tokyo, San Diego The same hill, the same shanty town, the same lean-to The same skyscraper: Hong Kong, Singapore, Toledo The same soup: chicken, though the veggies may vary The same rice for supper: white, brown or wild The same stars come around and around and around The same sun dips her head into the ocean The same tree in the same poem by the same poet The same old husband: saggy breasts, baggy thighs The same blackness whether we sleep or die V. Whoever abandoned her grandmother at the bus stop Whoever ran in and out the door like a blind wind spinning the upside-down prosperity sign right side up again Whoever lost her virtue    in darkly paneled rooms    with white boys Whoever prayed for round eyes and taped her eyelids in waiting Whoever wore platform shoes blustering taller than her own kind Whoever sold her yellow gold for Jehovah Whoever discarded her jade Buddha for Christ VI. Why are you proud, father, entombed with the other woman? Why are you proud, mother, knitting my shroud in heaven? Why are you proud, fish, you feed the greedy mourners? Why are you proud, peonies, your heads are bowed and weighty? Why are you proud, millennium, the dialect will die with you? Why are you proud, psalm, hammering yourself into light?

It is the miller’s daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel That trembles at her ear: For hid in ringlets day and night, I’d touch her neck so warm and white. And I would be the girdle About her dainty, dainty waist, And her heart would beat against me, In sorrow and in rest: And I should know if it beat right, I’d clasp it round so close and tight. And I would be the necklace, And all day long to fall and rise Upon her balmy bosom, With her laughter or her sighs: And I would lie so light, so light, I scarce should be unclasped at night.

It never looks warm or properly daytime in black-and-white photographs the sheer cliff- face of the ship still enveloped in its scaffolding backside against the launching cradle ladies lining the quay in their layered drapery touching their gloves to their lips and just as They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships rises from choirboys’ mouths in wisps and snatches and evil skitters off and looks askance for now a switch is flicked at a distance and the moment swollen with catgut- about-to-snap with ice picks hawks’ wings pine needles eggshells bursts and it starts grandstand of iron palace of rivets starts moving starts slippery-sliding down slow as a snail at first in its viscous passage taking on slither and speed gathering in the Atlas-capable weight of its own momentum tonnage of grease beneath to get it waterborne tallow soft soap train oil a rendered whale this last the only millihelen her beauty slathered all over the slipway faster than a boy with a ticket in his pocket might run alongside it the bright sheet of the Lough advancing faster than a tram heavy chains and anchors kicking in lest it outdoes itself straining up to a riot of squeals and sparks lest it capsizes before its beginning lest it drenches the aldermen and the ship sits back in the sea as though it were ordinary and wobbles ever so slightly and then it and the sun-splashed tilted hills the railings the pin-striped awning in fact everything regains its equilibrium.

I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold How the voluminous billows roll and run, Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled, And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold All its loose-flowing garments into one, Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold. So in majestic cadence rise and fall The mighty undulations of thy song, O sightless bard, England's Mæonides! And ever and anon, high over all Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong, Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.

Piute Creek, August 1955 “O hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?” Working with an old Singlejack miner, who can sense The vein and cleavage In the very guts of rock, can Blast granite, build Switchbacks that last for years Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves. What use, Milton, a silly story Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit? The Indian, the chainsaw boy, And a string of six mules Came riding down to camp Hungry for tomatoes and green apples. Sleeping in saddle-blankets Under a bright night-sky Han River slantwise by morning. Jays squall Coffee boils In ten thousand years the Sierras Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion. Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, Only the weathering land The wheeling sky, Man, with his Satan Scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh Hell! Fire down Too dark to read, miles from a road The bell-mare clangs in the meadow That packed dirt for a fill-in Scrambling through loose rocks On an old trail All of a summer’s day.

Where i -95 meets the Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered; stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright

My daughter wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you’d get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it?

For Francisco X. Alarcón, RIP It considers those men that ambled & Flushed their swords & cut off the neck Of the blue horses & scraped off death Dust from the carcass — rape of women Tresses in boilers — the tin-colored animals On the viridian grasses in particular the Howler Monkey let the word shoot up To the spheres — later we charged our Blood with these accounts we hid the arms Unforgiving texts & designs sewn into Our tiny alabaster lockets. We visited The last ridge where Victor Jara Denounced the paramilitary — from La Obrera in the heights of  Tijuana we Sketched the reddish moon & scratched Poems those things that could carry The letters we hauled on our backs. We were separated from something we Could not describe yet we were in The totality in the long winding turquoise That broke us & put us back together Again. What was that totality? It could Not be written —Green moon, green blood— We wrote. We marched to the ends of Lacanjá Chansayab & the heights Of El Colorín Central México. We were too Late — the waters in which people bathed Were cloudy & malignant — bellies Bloated children leaned on the twig House women stood up some sat cross- Legged under the fire rays of noon — We knew they knew the rubble land Was not theirs or ours it was stuffed into The cigarette packs of the Ladino Hacendados who kicked up their short Boots in the City of Bones below. With our faces in new faces we rolled Back to LA. Do you change it? Do you Leave it the same? Words — what are they? A new cognition was required — then With the ecstasy of the unleashed Other things pulled us apart. Other things Reassembled us. Now we are here.