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Mix a pancake, Stir a pancake, Pop it in the pan; Fry the pancake, Toss the pancake— Catch it if you can.

The stars grow lemon in the field, spread like tea leaves in a cup; red-wing blackbirds fold themselves into the fence, corn dreamers. The sky undulating with clouds returns gold-throated arpeggios to the one walking at sunrise, sunfall. Light as the air I sit on my cottage steps; a tom cat come home to die for the day.

That day in December I sat down by Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I was myriad-weary. Feets swole from sewing seams on a filthy fabric; tired-sore a pedalin’ the rusty Singer; dingy cotton thread jammed in the eye. All lifelong I’d slide through century-reams loathsome with tears. Dreaming my own silk-self. It was not like they all say. Miss Liberty Muffet she didn’t jump at the sight of me. Not exactly. They hauled me away—a thousand kicking legs pinned down. The rest of me I tell you—a cloud. Beautiful trouble on the dead December horizon. Come to sit in judgment. How many miles as the Jim Crow flies? Over oceans and some. I rumbled. They couldn’t hold me down. Long. No. My feets were tired. My eyes were sore. My heart was raw from hemming dirty edges of Miss L. Muffet’s garment. I rode again. A thousand bloody miles after the Crow flies that day in December long remembered when I sat down beside Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I said—like the joke say—What’s in the bowl, Thief? I said—That’s your curse. I said—This my way. She slipped her frock, disembarked, settled in the suburbs, deaf, mute, lewd, and blind. The bowl she left behind. The empty bowl mine. The spoiled dress. Jim Crow dies and ravens come with crumbs. They say—Eat and be satisfied. I fast and pray and ride.

Cirrus dispersed. As a black night grew colder, clearer, I spied the binary in the handle of the Big Dipper dangling above my shoulder, a pinprick twinkling by a blinding candle. Absent the moon, its boreal corona, I watched the stars rise east of Ellendale, Guelph and Ludden, then wheel above Verona and sleeping friends who farm near Englevale. A thousand miles of road: I’d shunned the pavement which bears the burdens I no longer ferry, the cargo of material enslavement. Six eagles hunted small game on the prairie. An Arab prince’s fortunes once were measured by blooded foals, by sons his wives could dandle, by tributary quatrains to be treasured and his eyesight: a pinprick by a candle.

The cruelty of ages past affects us now Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life Each door has locks designed for keys unknown Our living room was once somebody’s home Our bedroom, someone’s only room Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door. Door to a kitchen? And our lives are hasped and boundaried Because of ancient locks and madnesses Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies Which one is madness? Depends on who you are. We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way. The cruelties of ages past affect us now

Alexandria, 1956, after the nationalization of the Suez Canal and all foreign capital Perhaps her cook, come under the influence Of a few discreet piastres, had spoken Too indiscreetly. Or just perhaps, On a hot day along the azure of the Mediterranean, Rue Fouad bearing a stream of traffic To Muhammed Ali Square in a riot Of klaxons and shouts, and the whole city Gleaming white as it must have from a distance, Perhaps on such a day, someone got lucky And Mme. Sperides at the customs house Could sense what price she would have to pay, That the official full of apologies And gold teeth would usher her into A private room smelling of dark tobacco, That under the drone of the ceiling fans Her valises would be searched, the linings Cut out, the cowhide ripped back, That despite her protests which would be Useless but obligatory, she herself Would be stripped, that finally, Two large diamonds worth a modest villa Would peek and shine from the elegant crack Of her ass. Whatever the story, It was not for a boy to know. I listened at my grandmother’s door As she spoke in a whisper, thieving A fragment here a word there naked Jewels   hidden you know where

It’s autumn in the country I remember. How warm a wind blew here about the ways! And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber During the long sun-sweetened summer-days. It’s cold abroad the country I remember. The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain At midday with a wing aslant and limber; And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain. It’s empty down the country I remember. I had a sister lovely in my sight: Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre; We sang together in the woods at night. It’s lonely in the country I remember. The babble of our children fills my ears, And on our hearth I stare the perished ember To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears. It’s dark about the country I remember. There are the mountains where I lived. The path Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber, The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath. But that I knew these places are my own, I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber The earth, and I to people it alone. It rains across the country I remember.

The team behind Moana has taken great care to respect the cultures of the Pacific Islands that inspired the film, and we regret that the Maui costume has offended some. — Disney, Inc. someone will touch the Earth once, I wanted my own soil. tried to drown my ankles in myself. again. Daughter of Oceania wanting me home. my skin is sacred ground. always want to take a white girl's skin I cried so hard, until I became a boat I never want to be lost at high tide. Daughter of Ancestor's language tatted on my skin my skin what's mine more than an ocean floating above myself at sea open-mouthed Sun on my body. my story will breathe.

O, come erlong, come erlong, Wut’s de use er hol’in back; O, hit it strong, er hit it strong, Mek de ol’ flo’ ben’ an’ crack. O, hoop tee doo, uh, hoop tee doo! Dat’s de way ter knock it froo. Right erlong, right erlong, Slide de lef’ foot right erlong. Hoop tee doo, O, hoop tee doo, See, my lub, I dawnce ter you. Ho, boy! Ho, boy! Well done, meh lady! O, slide erlong, slide erlong— Fas’ah wid dat pattin’, Sam! Dar’s music in dis lef’ heel’s song, Mis’ah right foot, doan’ you sham! O, hoop tee doo, oh, hoop tee doo! Straight erlong I dawnce ter you. Slide erlong, slide erlong, Mek dat right foot hit it strong. Hoop tee do, O, hoop tee doo, See, my lub, I dawnce ter you. Ho, boy! Ho, boy! Well done, meh lady!

for R.G. As if sliding down the green, scuffed face of the wave, a seaplane falls and turns together, keeping the waters of the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’s frowning strip of shoreline, the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes of the rich, when these flip upside down, and the pale clouded sky floats below the ocean, then we jolt awake— But this is not her dream, not water or land. Tell me again, what illness do I think I have? The ropes of blood coil through her neck, they twist as it twists, as the head looks for parents and young men, for nurses, strangers, year upon year attending until the pulpy blood knots up at last, and the warrens of the brain dry and crackle, a town of names she saunters one long night: streets without signs lead to a girlhood park, to songs under stars, and lipstick, old houses forever unbuilding themselves—but within the blue jungle scaffolding, a gallery of faces stares back at her, portraits she can’t place . . . and then the town flattens and crumbles behind her, it grows to dry scrabbled pasture under a dishplate moon, hanging there in the tints of the sky, yet like a stopped clock, right twice a day: Now ma’am, can you remember the name of the President who was shot in the ‘60s? —Lincoln? And if the names had sunk beneath the sea, rolling hump and hollow, leopard spotted foam—surgeons would haul up the big sharks and club them silly, knife off a fin, then drop them bleeding onto the docks of Alcatraz, warning the inmates: “See that? No inside fin, they’ll  swim round this Rock forever. . . .” The convicts build the prison, then move inside, their block minds ignite a thousand homes by dawn, then melt in the butter sun of breakfast porridge. . . . But this is not the Philosopher’s circle prison, no lidless Eye radiates from the center, beneficent and watchful: the neutered grounds here at the Residence for Life are groomed like the campus of Depression State U: past the dwarfish berms and drumlins a mazy cobalt walkway slithers to the storage lake, with its hooded fount of aqua vitae sudsing the green larvae, its dry Gazebo Isle no one shuffles to . . . One night, the distraught Residence cook shoots himself dead: everyone mourns, but only the young staff seek counseling, their threshold of death not yet raised to that of teetering Mr. On-His-Toes, of Ms. Wheelchair-With-Political-Bumper-Stickers, or elegant Mrs. Whisper, polite confused survivors of wiped-out families, trolley cars, jobs learned and lost, a cosmos squeezed beneath the blood boulder— Why can’t I remember my problem? They do not scream. They who once made things happen now watch things happen to them: they hand their middle chapters to their children, and quietly appraise the spindle of a leafless sapling outside, staked to three larger poles of wood: all of them under arrest. And you must calm yourself. In the acrid hold of their boat, whose strangely knotted sail whips the wind round on each side, anchorless boat that hugs the dock, and keeps the dock from drifting to sea, you can hear the first, reeling chapters, of pierside painters crowding a rustic barrel-and-shanty scene so clichéd the locals called it “Port Motif Number One”—: the washy dab and smear of the medical test, Can you tell me what day this is? —You mean now? The brush like an oar rinses off its paints; a filmy rainbow upon the waters, coils and ribbons you trace in your own sweet time.