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There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows No successful suicides. A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead. (they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome) A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead. (no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone) They find a model dead alone in bed and very dead. (it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge) Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows. Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.

For Pos Moua What is the name for an antelope who grazes inside a dream then vanishes into the nebula’s brush. What is the face for refurbishing grammar at each comma’s lip. Whose identity never remembers the shape of beige. What is the word for how to conjure the sigh of a line hushed beneath the flap of a thousand shifting plumes. What is the body of a garden where a crescent despairs, drifts beneath the melt of amber. The season is always growing out its hooves. One cradlesong of your leaving is not larger than the forest of your arrival. To make you a noun forever. A loss of you cannot be equal to the loss of you.

1 At focus in the national Park’s ellipse a marker Draws tight the guys of Miles, opposite the national Obelisk with its restless oval Peoples who shall be Deeply drawn to its Austerities: or For a moment try the mystery Of the god-like eye, before Our long climb down past relic Schoolboy names and states And one foolish man Climbs up, his death high In his elliptic face. 2 A double highway little Used in early spring Goes to the end of the land Where Washington’s chandeliers Are kept, his beds and chairs, His roped-off relic kitchen Spits, his pans; his floors Are worn underneath the dead Pilgrims’ feet; outside The not-so-visited tomb; And over the field and fence His legendary river: And so I walk although The day is cold for this; I eat a thin slice Of bread and one remarkable Egg perfectly shaped, A perfect oriental por- Celain sheen of white. Suddenly the lost Ghosts of his life Broke from the trees and from the cold Mud pools where he played A boy and set as a man The sand glint of his boot, The flick of his coat on the weeds; His wheels click in the single road.

Today the moon sees fit to come between a parched earth and sun, hurrying the premature darkness. A rooster in the yard cuts off its crowing, fooled into momentary sleep. And soon the Perseid showers, broken bits of the ancient universe, will pass through the skin of our atmosphere. Time and space are alive over our city. Final eclipse of the sun, last of this millennium, our city’s brightness broken off. We have known other dark hours: Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac— Lincoln’s death, winding procession toward sleep. We have known slave coffles and holding pens in yards not half a mile from our Capitol, wooden palings sunk in earth to guarantee none would escape. In this freest city. Oh if earth could talk. Earth does talk in the neatly framed yards where death thinks to lay us down to rest. Asleep, the marker stones. But not the voices, jagged bits of memory, shards of poems. Sterling Brown. Our human possessions and all they've left us. This whole city sings their songs. Say their names. In this city they are our monuments: Frederick Douglass, our Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, Franklin Frazier, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, May Miller: Not sleep but garlands left to us. Montague Cobb, William Hastie. Yards of names. And here, the place where we unearth an immigrant father of seven. He leans down—no earthly reason for his choice—to pick up his nearest child. A yard-long rack of brooms behind him, a bin of apples. Not the sleep of cold, but autumn in Washington. 1913 or a bit later. He stands awkwardly on 4 1/2 Street, S. W. Our street photographer, who’s just come by with his city chatter, ducks beneath a dark cloth. Monuments of the city behind him, he leans over his black box camera in time to capture that moment when the child will play her bit part, pushing away from her father like a boat from shore. In the sleep of winter, years later, she will become my mother. What yardstick by which to measure importance? To measure earthly agency? Each of us has monuments in the bone case of memory. Earth- bound, I take my sac of marble and carry it down lonely city streets where our generals on horseback and a tall bearded man keep watch over all their citizens.

Moo, moo, brown cow Have you any milk? Yes miss, three jugs smooth as silk. One for you, And one for me, And one for the little cat Who sits in the tree.

Inside me lived a small donkey. I didn’t believe in magic, but the donkey was a sucker for the stuff. Psychics, illusionists, arthritics who’d predict the rainfall. That was the year I had trouble walking. I over-thought it and couldn’t get the rhythm right. The donkey re-taught me. “This foot. Yes, then that one. And swing your arms as if you’re going to trial to be exonerated of a crime you’ve most definitely committed.” Next, trouble sleeping because I’d need to crank the generator in my chest so frequently. Seeing I was overworked, the donkey finally hauled it out— it looked shiny and new, a silver dollar— and tossed it into a flock of birds who had to fly a long way to find safety. I knew then I was a large and dangerous man, what with this donkey living inside me, but felt futile. One day, during a final lesson on breathing, the donkey asked what kind of jeans I was wearing. I said, “The somber ones.” “Poor kid.” “So will you be staying on for a third year, donkey?” “No. I think I should be leaving soon. I think I should go and await your arrival beside the crumpled river.” “Yes, I suppose you have many important matters to attend to, but maybe one day I will come and join you for a drink or, perhaps, for a brief nap.”

Marvelous Opaque Orb. Night-light for the world.

Last night, when the moon slipped into my attic room as an oblong of light, I sensed she’d come to commiserate. It was August. She traveled with a small valise of darkness, and the first few stars returning to the northern sky, and my room, it seemed, had missed her. She pretended an interest in the bookcase while other objects stirred, as in a rock pool, with unexpected life: strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed, the paper-crowded desk; the books, too, appeared inclined to open and confess. Being sure the moon harbored some intention, I waited; watched for an age her cool gaze shift first toward a flower sketch pinned on the far wall then glide down to recline along the pinewood floor, before I’d had enough.Moon, I said,We’re both scarred now. Are they quite beyond you, the simple words of love? Say them. You are not my mother; with my mother, I waited unto death.

The moon came late to a lonesome bog, And there sat Goggleky Gluck, the frog. ‘My stars!’ she cried, and veiled her face, ‘What very grand people they have in this place!’

Moon has dusks for walls, October’s days for a floor, crickets for rooms, windy halls. Only one night is her door. When I was thirteen she found me, spiralled into my blood like a hive. I stood on a porch where she wound me for the first time, tight and alive, till my body flooded to find her: to know I would not be alone as I moved through the tides that don't bind her into womanhood, like a flung stone. With each curve that waxed into fullness I grew to her, ready and wild. I filled myself up like her priestess. I emptied myself like her child. Flooding, ready, and certain, I hid her—full, fallow, or frail— beneath each long summer's rich curtain. It covered her face—the thin grail that delivers me now. Now I’m with her. All cast shadows come home. I stand in these shadows to kiss her; I spin in her cool, calming storm. Now as I move through my own beauty and my shadow grows deeper than blood, oh triple, oh goddess, sustain me with your light’s simple opening hood.