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Miss Scarlett, effen we kain git de doctah w’en Miss Melly’s time come, doan you bodder Ah kin manage. Ah knows all ’bout birthin. Ain’ mah ma a midwife? Ain’ she raise me ter be a midwife, too? Jes’ you leave it ter me. She warn’t dar. Well’m, Dey Cookie say Miss Meade done got wud early dis mawnin’ dat young Mist’ Phil done been shot an’ Miss Meade she tuck de cah’ige an’ Ole Talbot an’ Besty an’ dey done gone ter fotch him home. Cookie say he bad hurt an’ Miss Meade ain’ gwin ter be studyin’ ’bout comin’ up hyah. Dey ain’ dar, Miss Scarlett. Ah drapped in ter pass time of de day wid Mammy on mah way home. Dey’s doen gone. House all locked up. Spec dey’s at de horsepittle. Miss Elsing ober at de horsepittle. Dey Cookie ’lows a whole lot of wounded sojers come in on de early train. Cookie fixin’ soup ter tek over dar. She say—Yas’m Gawdlmighty, Miss Scarlett! De Yankees ain’ at Tara, s dey? Gawdlmighty, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll dey do ter Maw? Dey’s fightin’ at Jonesboro, Miss Scarlett! Dey say our gempumus is gittin’ beat. Oh, Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll happen ter Maw an’ Poke? Oh, Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll happen ter us effen de Yankees gits hyah? Oh, Gawd—Ah ain’ nebber seed him, Miss Scarlett. No’m, he ain’ at de horsepittle. Miss Merriwether an’ Miss Elsing ain’ dar needer. A man he tole me de doctah down by de car shed wid the wounded sojers jes’ come in frum Jonesboro, but Miss Scarlett, Ah wuz sceered ter go down dar ter de shed—dey’s folkses dyin’ down dar. Ah’s sceered of daid folkses—Miss Scarlett, fo’ Gawd, Ah couldn’ sceercely git one of dem ter read yo’ note. Dey wukin’ in de horsepittle lak dey all done gone crazy. One doctah he say ter me, “Damn yo’ hide! Doan you come roun’ hyah bodderi’ me ’bout babies w’en we got a mess of men dyin’ hyah. Git some woman ter he’p you.” An’ den Ah went aroun’ an’ about an’ ask fer news lak you done tole me an’ dey all say “fightin’ at Jonesboro” an’ Ah— Is her time nigh, Miss Scarlett? Is de doctah come? Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Miss Melly bad off! Fo’ Gawd, Miss Scarlett— Fo’ Gawd, Miss Scarlett! We’s got ter have a doctah. Ah—Ah— Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nutin’ ‘bout bringin’ babies.

Miss Snooks was really awfully nice And never wrote a poem That was not really awfully nice And fitted to a woman, She therefore made no enemies And gave no sad surprises But went on being awfully nice And took a lot of prizes. November 1964

O Venlo, Venlo, stedje van pleseer. This time her body made him think of countryside, some figure from his childhood, sun on scythe, wind blowing shadows across the shining barley, the milk-pail dented from use, the smell of leaf-mulch and leather in the tack room. Soon she’d take bus and ferry from London to Belfast, but first the fire in her bed-sit. Her fingers traveled too, down the raised purple scars along his vertebrae, the flannel sheets between her thighs, his hair trailing along her abdomen, the quill of a feather poking through seams of the comforter, the comforter itself. Those scars—he’d lied to her, his time in Nicaragua, thugs cut him coming from the fields. The bloodier fight was with his brother, slicing tines of a pitchfork plucked up along the flooded Maas. Everything reduced to trinket and anecdote, the beer and facepaint of carnival, street-dance and tuba, beyond the muddy English roundabouts, the brown and white waves, yellow lamps along Dutch highways, his work at the union office pinned beneath a glass globe paperweight—shaken it showered silver snow over the wide straw hat, red and green plow, the slouching body, a campesino from days before Somoza fell. He wondered if she were any better, smuggling French social theory into Ulster, encounter groups in the rec-centers of tower-block basements. She’d just gotten the news: her last lover died in a fire along the side of the highway, body broken in seven places, silver chrome, pearl and gold gas tank scorched, his bike crumpled beneath the husk of an overturned van. There wasn’t much to talk about. Afterwards she lay with her back to him and he sang her carnival songs in a language she didn’t speak,O Venlo, stedje van pleseer. He thought of himself as the sun, kissing her neck at the hairline, turning grey cobblestones of the town-square silver, marshaling parades.

God and Mother went the same way. *       *       * What's a person to us but a contortion of pressure ridges palpable long after she is gone? *       *       * A thin old man in blue jeans, back arched, grimaces at the freezer compartment. *       *       * Lying in the tub, I'm telling them— the missing persons— that a discrepancy is a pea and I am a Princess.

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter, something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once if you could remember. The child's voice flies across a small parking lot where, in one of the cars, a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them. The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily with a sense of beauty apparently very possible yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said. And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field after a game—the last three or four players walk slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked, one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls— the players seem to have known what it was all for yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall. Hours later the field is dark and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed. In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us. This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy. Remember when you got the news of the accident— or the illness—in the life of someone more laced into your life than you might have thought; the cool flash of what serious is. Well, the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman! Yet not like just another Halliday thing either. Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world, the real world we imagine. With lightness! With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio, that certain song you almost forgot to love.

It does not do you like it Imperfect copy's forgery Posts its vermillion decree These anointed mistakes Neither robust nor

Back there then I lived across the street from a home for funerals—afternoons I’d look out the shades

death surrounds itself with the living i watch them take the body from the house i’m a young kid maybe five years old the whole thing makes no sense to me i hear my father say lord jesus what she go and do this for i watch him walk out the backdoor of the house i watch him walk around the garden kick the dirt stare at the flowers & shake his head  shake his head he shakes his head all night long yazoo jackson vicksburg we must have family in almost every city i spent more time traveling than growing up guess that’s why i’m still shorter than my old man he don’t like to stay in one place much he tell me soon as people get to know your last name seem like they want to call you by your first boy    if someone ask you your name tell them to call you mississippi not sippi or sip but mississippi how many colored folks you know name mississippi none see now you can find a whole lot of folks whose name is canada just like you can find 53 people in any phone book whose name is booker t. washington your mother she was a smart woman gave you a good name not one of them abolitionist names what you look like with a name like john brown or william lloyd garrison that don’t have no class your mother she named you after the river cause of its beauty and mystery just like my mother named me nevada cause she didn’t know where it was

1 The subject will claim that she has been taken to the wrong place. That the room she is brought back to is not the room she left. That these comings and goings are happening to someone else, are gathering momentum controlled by a secret mechanism. That she needs to tell someone. 2 I walk out the door to the stone bench without meaning to (without meaning it?), each step jarring my frame as it would anyone’s

Sitting under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle burning on, Shadows lurking everywhere: Some one came, and kissed me there. Tired I was; my head would go Nodding under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), No footsteps came, no voice, but only, Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely, Stooped in the still and shadowy air Lips unseen—and kissed me there.