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Over the night a bull Whispers into a coal :Unmeant in the stall to sit and plate, But sixth, with all the senses, To consume— Incorporate— those signal Impressions which are (we know) its fate: In explosions, in hard strides, His coattails fly; to bits, to friends Craven and brave. Sadness undulates at their back. His lilt's a cotillion of flies. But how he charges, he commits! Each to the next. It seems unfair, a target lies Between its shoulder blades.

On the radio this morning: The average woman knows 275 colors—and men know eight. Women say coffee, mocha, copper, cinnamon, taupe . Men say brown. Women know an Amazon of colors I might have said were green, an Antarctica of whites, oceans of colors I'd stupidly call blue, fields of color, with flowers in them I would have said were red. From women, I've learned to love the browns, the earths, the dusts, the clays, the soft colors, the colors brought out from the mines, hardened ones, hardened in fires I would call red; the colors of the furies; the reconciling colors of the cooling ash. By myself I know the evening colors when the sky goes from blue to another blue to black—although it's a lonely, whitish black sometimes, like the color of sleep— the way dreams are lit by the light that's thrown from nowhere on the things you find in them. Last night there was a turtle, I would say it was brown or green, or it was a snake, mottled, a kind of grey, disguised as a turtle, red spots as if painted on the shell, a palish greenish underside—vulnerable, alone swimming in water I would say was colorless. I woke to the pale colors of the morning—no one has a name for those: the white-rose white you see through the white of the curtains on the window, the milks, the creams, the cream a galactic swirl before it turns to brown when your wife stirs it in the coffee, the faint drying oval on the silver of the spoon.

Nowhere in those kerosene years could she find a soft-headed match. The wife crosses over an ocean, red-faced and cheerless. Trades the flat pad of a stethoscope for a dining hall spatula. Life is two choices, she thinks: you hatch a life, or you pass through one. Photographs of a child swaddled in layers arrive by post. Money doesn’t, to her embarrassment. Over time, she grows out her hair. Then she sprouts nerves. The wife was no fool, but neither did she wander. She lives inside a season of thrift, which stretches on. Her sorrow has thickness and a certain sheen. The wife knows to hurry when she washes. When she cooks, she licks spoons slowly. Every night, she made a dish with ground pork. Paired with a dish that was fibrous.

For Stanley Plumly Then the breakers turning back to brightness, if the light’s opaque ocean-blue sameness in the sky can be said to break, the way the waves themselves, blue in back of blue like a color in the eye, fall back to the wall — sea wrack, driftwood, or the inner optic shelf behind the lens. Then the gulls and simple cirrus strands turn back to light. Then to inland sparrows, drifting under blue Ohio’s sky — it’s a work day and the heat is the heat of the color of your clothes, wash day, and hands hurt from the swinging of a scythe. Then it’s day into night at the heart of the seeds that fell from your hands breaking open, strewn in rows like water along the ancient seabed floor of the farm. Someone is standing at the door. Someone is waving from the car. This day and that one sinking to brightness and the blue evening wall before that, and a seed that fell from a star becoming, as you will say, one day, all we will become.

He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down.

Many of my friends are alone and know too much to be happy though they still want to dive to the bottom of the green ocean and bring back a gold coin in their hand. A woman I know wakes in the late evening and talks to her late husband, the windows blank photographs. On the porch, my brother, hands in pockets, stares at the flowing stream. What’s wrong? Nothing. The cows stand in their own slow afternoons. The horses gather wild rose hips in the sun the way I longed for someone long ago. What was it like? The door opening and no one on either side.

Outside in the creek that feeds the lake and never freezes, an otter slaps the water with his paw to feel the current's pulse— Slip in, lie back. Slip in, lie back. He shuts his eyes and obeys, knowing the layers of hair and underfur will warm him while he floats on a faith we wish could carry us. The sound of his splashing fades, but not his joy in being pushed, light as driftwood, back to the mouth of the den I have seen carved out beneath the roots of a fallen fir now packed with snow and lined with leaves that promise his sleep will be deep. Because no dreams wait softly for me, I open the woodstove and strike a match, hold the bloom of the flame to kindling that catches quick as my wish: To be that slick body sliding into the lake that holds the moon, bright portal to glide through without so much as a shiver, no doubt about where I'm going, how to get there.

If I told you Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, bow-legged and ominous, could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole, and if, at dinnertime, I took you into the faint light of his Section 8 home reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat for room in front of a cracked flat-screen, one whose diaper sags it's a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles, the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock the perfect O of a handle, and the slats of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin whose mother stands on a corner on the other side of town all times of day and night, except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month, you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class, but not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too small, hunching his shoulders around his ears, as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your Queen.

Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical; then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing. Trailer to keep her in; he asked me if I knew her ‘auction name.’ Walked over the scorch; what are values when there’s nothing here? The wing of a dead soul grows into all the lace you see through, foreigner, lice-ridden article of divestment. Splendid vices pouring outcomes over the eager cash flow promotions. So many of the dead came to me that their transparencies covered my visage, I’m too near you. Don’t you want to see? We came from faraway camps, forsaking the human because it broke our bodies into pieces for the torturer’s pet, who propositions you. There is always a slant on it. The trees must go down; or light affects your eyes badly. We pleaded for an adjustment, before we’d recognizably died. You told me you were a heart, but you were guarding a tower. You said you were a failure, but you helped destroy us. Wings all over me, stuck to my skin, there’s no point to it why are you here when there’s nothing? We just don’t believe it. Now not no never you. I wasn’t you. You have to talk to me my name is irretrievable. No one letting you go because you are prized for not existing except as a body, now not. No I don’t exist, alighting and ghoulishly begging you for a drop of your blood, a morsel of your flesh. Yes take some of me, though there are so many others with flesh. But they’re too rich to give. I know they will never let you in, you beautiful kids who haunt the corridors extending through the invisible world, so you can find your way. So you can see past the smoke of disastrous fear acting out of dreams: it creeps everywhere. See how it took them over, for they had no mind to stand against any fantasy the instigators chose. Had no minds at all. When I was little, no one told me I’d have to suffer. Who can be a child? And the ghoul patiently explains how the wing of a word can extend till the barrier is made, so they can’t see us. If you say beauty, that will be ignored, and we can hide. It was his name a long time ago, before the auctions began. Her face then was large and younger. She can be lice or ghoul. I want that, I don’t want action. But I will have to live off bits of you. The new definition of witch is one who lets them eat you, if they have to. Because you keep regenerating. Oh that’s such an oldy, and all that flying. Sometimes they do—the man who showed me a few things sits all day. The teaching is to let them come as far as inside you even, empty enough; I can hear them and render affection Why, if there’s nothing? Is this nothing? But you are destroyed We shake all the time. You remind me of someone else I knew. The wing is inscribed, for involute. Not to beg in the offering of primal services, we have come here. No one would let us tell anything but our bodily humiliations; had to do differently, not for redemption, because we are more than redemption. I am my maker. The shape formed by the bits of mirror glued on is unimportant. They’re inside my chest and stomach, and they glitter in there. Then if light disattaches, comes up to be spoken, you can see and you can hear. This is true because each of you has this too. Has all the bright pieces inside: there was nothing else left to be. Then I say it, like these pages, or how they would love me for hosting them. The earliest people feared them, and subsequent ones deny the dead. Why would I be afraid of all the people dead and martyred? I thought you were talking about words. You knew I wasn’t. Dido who had to be delivered from the wrong story: I want you to know I’m no longer left over. What about our library, nothing good left there? I want to read the fashion of when you were old a long time ago. Gothic roses in the type; I’m an ancient Had read every the book of before they arrested me. I had crossed the black plain, I had held tears it was abrupt to be walked in a herd pushing us, wherever we went to be shot, or executed in the earlier style. It is a timeless death placed next to the most beat-up books. Only a book can love me now. We’re reading without real eyes; I’ve read everything too, or in the tradition of telling it is repeated within you what we did. We must have been trying to make something as we are now, but why. You have the ear for it. The light wants you to reply, asking if a shore had been attained or if the language were Dutch or Swahili I didn’t know. It is how you raised the ground, like raising a child every word that comes out of my mouth torn I’m responsible to The wind foul pieces here tries to turn me from tenderness, the way they killed us in the center of the city, that night. The bodies floated in the river while I looked for other souls and saw my face water damaged a new texture and how can I see? Potential returning within its white petals and central whorl. He couldn’t believe someone would hate and betray. I told him, but he refused to believe it; then I left the room. This lace has to be made. Treason said the ghoul that peculiar invention betrayal, how primal was that? In Hesiod after the light, after chaos and lover. Said the armless woman, said the one cut open, said the smallpoxed the strewn children their bodies woven into the page so I could find what they thought, even if babies only cry. Those are the bodies when I was no longer alive but uplifted butterfly of lace with an empty length to bifurcate my symmetry. No I don’t believe the lies of the live. I am a spot of light in order to find out, hanging on because it wasn’t revealed in death. I know what happened to me, she said; bleeding I lay there unblessed. Do I want a blessing now, or a god to rebuild me? We have gone beyond god or new lives, or death, or tribes. I am working on this lace light at present; I accept the drop of sacrificial blood to propitiate me. One piece of you at a time is all I need. I am letting you feed, I say, because I know this has always been. You’ve been telling me for years We needed you, if no one else did. We have this project to change our silence into the beautiful city of a voice.

(Alcaics) O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages; Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset— Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of India Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods Whisper in odorous heights of even.