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Slight unpremeditated Words are borne By every common Wind into the Air; Carelessly utter’d, die as soon as born, And in one instant give both Hope and Fear: Breathing all Contraries with the same Wind According to the Caprice of the Mind. But Billetdoux are constant Witnesses, Substantial Records to Eternity; Just Evidences, who the Truth confess, On which the Lover safely may rely; They’re serious Thoughts, digested and resolv’d; And last, when Words are into Clouds devolv’d.

My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled— Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world,— And I wish I’d never met him. My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet, And a wild young wood-thing bore him! The ways are fair to his roaming feet, And the skies are sunlit for him. As sharply sweet to my heart he seems As the fragrance of acacia. My own dear love, he is all my dreams,— And I wish he were in Asia. My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart,— And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

I lie here thinking of you:— the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world— you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!

There is a strong wall about me to protect me: It is built of the words you have said to me. There are swords about me to keep me safe: They are the kisses of your lips. Before me goes a shield to guard me from harm: It is the shadow of your arms between me and danger. All the wishes of my mind know your name, And the white desires of my heart They are acquainted with you. The cry of my body for completeness, That is a cry to you. My blood beats out your name to me, unceasing, pitiless Your name, your name.

Beloved, I have to adore the earth: The wind must have heard your voice once. It echoes and sings like you. The soil must have tasted you once. It is laden with your scent. The trees honor you in gold and blush when you pass. I know why the north country is frozen. It has been trying to preserve your memory. I know why the desert burns with fever. It was wept too long without you. On hands and knees, the ocean begs up the beach, and falls at your feet. I have to adore the mirror of the earth. You have taught her well how to be beautiful.

Though I am more Che than Chavez, I am still a dove. I do not apologize to you. Or to the state of California. The IRS. New York. That administrator I bit in the third grade, who was delicious and sweet. I, oh, so cold. In the mind, the Dionysian defiles walls the Apollonian protects. I am always looking to take something down. Usually it’s me. Two bulls stand on a hill. The younger says, Father, let’s run down and fuck a cow. The father, wiser, longer in the horn, higher on the grass, reminds his son how Moses was also horned, beamed with light, that to handle a massive snake, to charm Pharaoh, to steal fire, to fly, to unzip the sea, is to speak and not tap vanity. Moses descended Mount Sinai with cracked slabs and saw a golden calf. The father said to the young bull, No son, let’s strut down and fuck them all. Thus begins the beef  between bird and bee, the isthmus isolating order from chaos. My mind is made up of so many different cuts of meat. My marbles stay as mixed as my metaphors. As my myths. As myself. At parties my favorite icebreaker involves asking strangers to describe themselves with three words. Their descriptions are a slipping away to change clothes. Identity and irony neatly knit in an ugly Christmas sweater. Sometimes I feel so Socratic: oft-laureled, poison-palmed, toga-partied, exasperated by the masses: I wouldn’t have guessed ambitious. Free-spirited, you don’t say. Other times I feel like the woman rambling among the vapors escaping the ground in Iceland’s volcanic canyon, making a bus an em dash in a rest stop, where some fifty-odd persons searching for themselves in true existentialism are yellow lupines growing on the side of the road. An epiphany can not be achieved, as a cedar waxwing cannot be more cedar qua waxwing. Eventually what we’re looking for appears. Sometimes incitation opens at the bottom of a straw, a spoon, a barrel of wine, the windfall happens while eating farfalle, while flipping through The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. At the moon me the animal roofs atop brownstones, sin vergüenza. Upwards our eyes scamper, a reflex action, when inserting an object in the mouth, even when the object is a gun. Over hills a road erodes the way home. Only after the Coast Guard has readied a helicopter, do we descend the cold volcano in Eldg já to realize we are the woman in the search party looking for ourselves. to poetry. In moments of ecstasy we are lifted At the shore of the Aegean Sea or at the banks of the river Evros, he loosened his sandals while Pegasus stamped the soil, crushing reeds and hoofing away stray wood. The sun bandaged light on a sky that would not heal. Perseus, with eyes heavenward, formed the shapes of gods into clouds, slipped his hand into the woven sack, and felt the flint of primped snakes. He thought, But it is the cold weight of scales that protects. As sure as a child, he lined leaves rocked to sleep by salt water waves for a bed, so as not to, with sand, or with hubris, bruise Medusa’s disunited head. One day, like a beam through skylight, we realize life is a puddle jumper of  tragedy. Some stones sink fast yet still hold light. So phantom are a statue’s busted arms and toes. Everything must go. And yet I still hanger hope when shopping the racks of discount stores. Veni vidi vici when I see Vince, freeze when I see the coiled coif of Versace’s emblem. Like Sisyphus, errybody think they headed for the top. Sing,started from the bottom, to my reflection in the dressing room mirror, now we here boy when I remember that Oh my god Becky, look at her butt passes the Bechdel test. I have eaten from the tree the fig that sullies and seen that the meat’s not always fair. I was, like Perseus and Sir Mix-a-Lot, born by a riv of water, felled by pride when a brown boy, tattooed with age, obsessed with fame, took his talents to Vermont to kiss trees and tap syrup from the sap. There and there and there, he kissed. Here and here he drank. So drunk he hugged an old white woman off the ground. None of the gods I love love me. To be tipsy is to leverage one’s self. Or so I’m told. The pulley is considered civilization’s highest achievement. Icarus killed himself being lifted.

The ancients would lift a clay spout to your lips— water and honey and wine. I give you milk, softened with wine, and swear you'll never hunger, never thirst while I'm alive. What suffering I can't preclude I'll soothe with singing: My future, for you not the greenness of a leaf but of the leaves on all the April branches. Fire, I give you fuel. I sweat and chop the wood. I tender forever in you who begin where I end as if your body is my body, your elegance my elegance. Sustenance, emptiness is lack of you, yearning is the road to where you are. You are the road, the where, the song, the hunger. Child, I give you sleep, I sing you there.

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie; the lover of my life, my youth and age. My heart belongs to him and to him only; the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage Now grown to years advancing through the dozens the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder but all my days of Happiness and wonder are cradled in his arms and eyes entire. They carry us under the waters of the world out past the starposts of a distant planet And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories where we have been together, you and I.

Nothing is plumb, level, or square: the studs are bowed, the joists are shaky by nature, no piece fits any other piece without a gap or pinch, and bent nails dance all over the surfacing like maggots. By Christ I am no carpenter. I built the roof for myself, the walls for myself, the floors for myself, and got hung up in it myself. I danced with a purple thumb at this house-warming, drunk with my prime whiskey: rage. Oh I spat rage’s nails into the frame-up of my work: it held. It settled plumb, level, solid, square and true for that great moment. Then it screamed and went on through, skewing as wrong the other way. God damned it. This is hell, but I planned it. I sawed it, I nailed it, and I will live in it until it kills me. I can nail my left palm to the left-hand crosspiece but I can’t do everything myself. I need a hand to nail the right, a help, a love, a you, a wife.

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume? And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin? Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, settling a pillow by her head Should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.” And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.” No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool. I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.