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I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that was how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar, casting beer money from a thin reel of ones, the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two other things, but they were wrong, as it happened. So I made him look at the poem. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said, and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do. If they were baseball executives they’d plot to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game could be saved from children.   Of course later that night he fired his pianist in mid-number and flurried him from the stand. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,” he explained, and the band played on.

You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out, like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus. He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo, stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8), “I just ruined my body.” And there, Exhibit A, it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music. Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know rises but to the edge of the atmosphere. You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker carried without great thought of it from home to the shop and back for decades, and know what bassists before you have played, and know how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy in a spring and know how much you must coax out. How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword from a stone. But what’s inside the bass wants out, the way one day you will. Religious stories are rich in symmetry. You must release as much of this hoard as you can, little by little, in perfect time, as the work of the body becomes a body of work.

My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other's cigarettes as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs at being a mother and son, just ten minutes to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats, washing our hands twice and then standing behind the counter again, hoping for tips, hoping the customers will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool front yard before us and the dogs in the backyard shitting on everything. We are hunched over, two extras on the set of The Night of the Hunter. I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will go back inside and sit in the yellow kitchen and drink the rest of the coffee and what is coming to kill us will pour milk into mine and sugar into hers.

The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing hap-pens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away—the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, “Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay.”

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons. Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing. Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam’s neighbors. Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town, And Art, a vagrant. Miniver loved the Medici, Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly Could he have been one. Miniver cursed the commonplace And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the mediæval grace Of iron clothing. Miniver scorned the gold he sought, But sore annoyed was he without it; Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, And thought about it. Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.

When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched black parabolas, I thought sine and cosine, but no — the movement never dips below the line. The creature vanished into barberries. Absolute predator who cracks a rabbit’s spine in one bite. And my mind leapt along a track to a summer field where I walked years ago to a stony spit out into the North Atlantic with a young man I hardly knew, and his sister. He was bald, dying of a brain tumor. I ignored his illness and we spoke of history. He was gentle, scholarly. Why do I remember him when it was his sister I painted seated in tall grass, her forehead wide, brown hair framing her face, ocean a cobalt swatch behind? Islands humped in little arcs across the bay. That canvas is stacked in a closet. But it’s the dead boy I’ve stored inside me all these years, scared of the otherworldly light around his eyes. Scared and ashamed of what I didn’t know. Ashamed of my fear that made his death, when it came, unspeakable. So history bounds into the present, glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands and daggering eyeteeth. Because that boy wasn’t dead: he must be killed again.

to John Logan 1 I wonder how many old men last winter Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled The Mississippi shore Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming Of suicide in the river. The police remove their cadavers by daybreak And turn them in somewhere. Where? How does the city keep lists of its fathers Who have no names? By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water So beautifully slow. And I wish my brothers good luck And a warm grave. 2 The Chippewa young men Stab one another shrieking Jesus Christ. Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault. High school backfields search under benches Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich Raw bacon without eyes. The Walker Art Center crowd stare At the Guthrie Theater. 3 Tall Negro girls from Chicago Listen to light songs. They know when the supposed patron Is a plainclothesman. A cop’s palm Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs Of a light bulb. The soul of a cop’s eyes Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs Of Juárez, Mexico. 4 The legless beggars are gone, carried away By white birds. The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted And sown with lime. The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses Huddle together dreaming in a desolation Of dry groins. I think of poor men astonished to waken Exposed in broad daylight by the blade Of a strange plough. 5 All over the walls of comb cells Automobiles perfumed and blindered Consent with a mutter of high good humor To take their two naps a day. Without sound windows glide back Into dusk. The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier Tower not quite toppling. There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn To sell me my death. 6 But I could not bear To allow my poor brother my body to die In Minneapolis. The old man Walt Whitman our countryman Is now in America our country Dead. But he was not buried in Minneapolis At least. And no more may I be Please God. 7 I want to be lifted up By some great white bird unknown to the police, And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden Modest and golden as one last corn grain, Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives Of the unnamed poor.

I’ve been eating like a sultan since I was two days old. I had a mother and three sisters who worshipped me. When I was two years old they used to plop me in a bed with a jillion satin pillows and spray me with exotic perfumes and lilac water, and then they would shoot me the grapes.

Some men who are at least fifty-five wake up in the night to touch their sex like patting the family dog on the head. Others rise to pace the square of   their den as if  called to guard duty. Still others peer back at me from their bedroom windows as if  on lookout for some lost shipment to arrive from Bitterroot, Montana. I uncurl in bed listening for the 3 AM train to whip through Wayzata, hugging the lake so close I imagine it could skip the hot rails and skid across the ancestral ice toward me, an ice train come to ferry me home or away from my encircling command or back to some earlier time when I too was more fiercely racing the night, my body clamorous thumping, the windows rattling, the length of me moon-drenched, snow falling, sparks raking my wheels, one more town flown through.

Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools. I don’t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish, or the failure of the marsh I’m so hidden. Up above is the island with its few houses facing the ocean God walks with anyone there. I often slosh through the low tide to a sister unattached to causeways. It’s where deer mate then lead their young by my house to fields, again up above me. Pray for me. Like myself be lost. An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the first rose you ever saw, the first shore. Then I wash my horse, dogs, me behind the barn. Only the narrow way leads home.