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Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea. The freshness of night has been fresh a long time. The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs More than, less than or it puffs like this or that. The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew For buttons, how many women have covered themselves With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew. One grows to hate these things except on the dump. Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums, Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox), Between that disgust and this, between the things That are on the dump (azaleas and so on) And those that will be (azaleas and so on), One feels the purifying change. One rejects The trash. That’s the moment when the moon creeps up To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires. Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon (All its images are in the dump) and you see As a man (not like an image of a man), You see the moon rise in the empty sky. One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear, Peck the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead, Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve: Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

What booth is this? The last was a plastic gallows. In the teach me to kiss booth, you paid your dollar to promote, when prompted, a theory. Advised me about standing close and touching him who might next enter in such a way that draws contrast, rough and smooth, cool and warm, maybe the heel of the hand and thumb at the neck if the collar is open and the fingertips two three four, but never anything about the mouth, and then it was time. I back exited through the heavy drapes and opened shop next door. What booth is this? In this booth I have rescued a dovekie but it will not eat. As the tub fills I need you (tore your ticket, right?) to surrender two of the goldfish from this bag. I’ll be back in a minute. The last of the sun is pinkening the ridge beyond the fairgrounds, and I’d like to see. What booth is this? Keep moving everyone. Careful of the gourds; they’re pursing. I’ve handed over the last admission I can afford. Into this booth the branch of a bean tree descends and in an eventuality brought on by what yet I cannot say the armlong pods burst with pellet shot pressure and release seeds like these embedded in the board behind you. The next booth is one I have to man for someone. An emergency. I’ll meet you there. Is this even a booth? In this booth there is room for one. Get in here and hold me up. I would fall without you. Why are we not told plainly? What good as a booth is this, what booth if it be one? Feel the first drop, as from a shearwater ocean bird held high for miles on the cyclonic air, blown far inland, never otherwise seen. The barometer is bottoming. This booth of ours is an eye of the storm simulation.

I Love me Sweet, with all thou art, Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the lightest part, Love me in full being. II Love me with thine open youth In its frank surrender; With the vowing of thy mouth, With its silence tender. III Love me with thine azure eyes, Made for earnest granting; Taking colour from the skies, Can Heaven’s truth be wanting? IV Love me with their lids, that fall Snow-like at first meeting; Love me with thine heart, that all Neighbours then see beating. V Love me with thine hand stretched out Freely—open-minded: Love me with thy loitering foot,— Hearing one behind it. VI Love me with thy voice, that turns Sudden faint above me; Love me with thy blush that burns When I murmur Love me! VII Love me with thy thinking soul, Break it to love-sighing; Love me with thy thoughts that roll On through living—dying. VIII Love me when in thy gorgeous airs, When the world has crowned thee; Love me, kneeling at thy prayers, With the angels round thee. IX Love me pure, as musers do, Up the woodlands shady: Love me gaily, fast and true As a winsome lady. X Through all hopes that keep us brave, Farther off or nigher, Love me for the house and grave, And for something higher. XI Thus, if thou wilt prove me, Dear, Woman’s love no fable. I will love thee—half a year— As a man is able.

In gardens sweet each flower mark did I, How they did spring, bud, blow, wither and die. With that, contemplating of man's short stay, Saw man like to those flowers pass away. Yet built he houses, thick and strong and high, As if he'd live to all Eternity. Hoards up a mass of wealth, yet cannot fill His empty mind, but covet will he still. To gain or keep, such falsehood will he use! Wrong, right or truth—no base ways will refuse. I would not blame him could he death out keep, Or ease his pains or be secure of sleep: Or buy Heaven's mansions—like the gods become, And with his gold rule stars and moon and sun: Command the winds to blow, seas to obey, Level their waves and make their breezes stay. But he no power hath unless to die, And care in life is only misery. This care is but a word, an empty sound, Wherein there is no soul nor substance found; Yet as his heir he makes it to inherit, And all he has he leaves unto this spirit. To get this Child of Fame and this bare word, He fears no dangers, neither fire nor sword: All horrid pains and death he will endure, Or any thing can he but fame procure. O man, O man, what high ambition grows Within his brain, and yet how low he goes! To be contented only with a sound, Wherein is neither peace nor life nor body found.

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”

The man splitting wood in the daybreak looks strong, as though, if one weakened, one could turn to him and he would help. Gus Newland was strong. When he split wood he struck hard, flashing the bright steel through the air so hard the hard maple leapt apart, as it’s feared marriages will do in countries reluctant to permit divorce, and even willow, which, though stacked to dry a full year, on being split actually weeps—totem wood, therefore, to the married-until-death—sunders with many little lip-wetting gasp-noises. But Gus is dead. We could turn to our fathers, but they help us only by the unperplexed looking-back of the numerals cut into headstones. Or to our mothers, whose love, so devastated, can’t, even in spring, break through the hard earth. Our spouses weaken at the same rate we do. We have to hold our children up to lean on them. Everyone who could help goes or hasn’t arrived. What about the man splitting wood in the daybreak, who looked strong? That was years ago. That was me.

The old Russian spits up a plum fruit of the rasping sound he has stored in his throat all these lonely years made in fact lonely by his wife who left him, God knows without knowing how to cook for himself. He examines the plum notes its purplish consistency almost the color and shape of her buttocks whose circulation was bad which is why he himself wears a beret: black, good wool, certainly warm enough the times he remembers. He shoots the plum to the ground like a child whose confidence is a game of marbles whose flick of a thumb is a smile inside his mouth knowing what he knows will happen. But his wife, Marthe does not spill out when the plum breaks open. Instead, it is a younger self alive and waving just the size he remembers himself to have been. The old Russian puts him onto his finger like a parakeet and sits him on the shelf with the pictures. For the rest of his days he nags himself constantly into a half-sleep surprised by this turn of events.

She always got mad at him every time he came home in the middle of the morning with his pant legs wet. She knew he had fallen in the ditch again. His legs were not strong enough to be straddling ditches. He was too old to be walking over temporary dikes. She wished he didn’t do that, but sometimes he had to. She sometimes imagined him falling over backward in one of the irrigation ditches, his head hitting hard cement, his body slowly sinking into the water. Water that was only three feet deep. A harmless three feet of water, where children played, and ladies sometimes sat and dipped their feet, especially on hot summer evening. She knew he would drown, she knew it was bound to happen sometime. As far as the eye could see, flat, green fields appearing to end at the foot of distant mountains. Mountains, a reminder of what the fields once looked like. Fields saturated with water pulled from its secret storage place beneath the earth’s surface. We are called “the people of the cotton fields” because of the labor our families did. For us there was no reservation, no Housing & Urban Development, no tribal support. We were a people segregated in row houses all lined up along the roads of our labor. It is a muggy summer evening. My father, my sister, and I sit on the east side of the house finding shade against the still-hot setting sun. The change from brilliant white sun to blue and gold sunset and finally, to warm darkness, a change we anticipate for brief relief. On this evening the anticipation is shattered. A boy comes to the house. He gestures for my father to come to him, out of our hearing. With what the boy says to him my father moves quickly. As quickly as his stiff back and legs can move him. Back and legs broken and fused from when he was a cowboy. He rushes by, throwing the kitchen door open, grabbing his hat. He gets into his truck and drives away. We pay him no mind other than for the fact that he is rushing. A second later my mother comes out of the house and with a single motion pulls her apron off. In a tone I recognize as signifying something is wrong, she instructs us to come with her. She starts in the direction of a cotton field a few hundred yards from our house. My sister and I walk beside her. Saying nothing. Her hands wring the towel she carries with her. This towel, a multipurpose kind of thing. Women carry it to fan themselves, to wipe sweat, to cover their heads and eyes from the sunlight, to shoo away kids, dogs, flies. I remember once a student of mine, out of habit, brought her towel with her to summer school at the university. Whenever we see each other on campus during a summer session we always laugh about it. We continue to walk, stepping over the ends of rows of cotton. Rows of cotton my family and I know well. In early summer we walk the rows to thin out the growth, and later we walk to chop the weeds somehow immune to chemicals. And in the winter, at least before the machinery, we pick the cotton from their stalks. Now I can’t begin to imagine how many miles we have all walked, up and back, up and back along these rows. We walk alongside her. The setting sun maintains a continuous pounding on our backs, the humidity from the damp fields is warm, it rests on our shoulders like tired, sweaty arms. She heads toward the irrigation ditch. The ditch is dirt, not cement, it is wide, muddy, and slippery. The water is shallow. I see my father’s truck pulling up on the opposite side. In the front seat there are women, and in the back, men. The men wedge their feet in between plastic and aluminum irrigation pipes, mud-caked shovels, boots, and hoes. Equipment in the back of his truck all for the purposes of working fields. I remember the hoe he carried. It was big, with a blade that held an edge well and got the work done. I recall purchasing a hoe for my home and being particularly unsatisfied with the craftsmanship. “They call this a hoe?” I said to my husband. It had a skinny neck, and no blade to speak of. The handle was too thin, causing blisters. Once in awhile I look around for the type of hoe my father carried. I found one once, but didn’t have money to buy it. In slow motion, weighed down by the heat, the women begin to slide across the bench of the pickup truck. They slowly step out of the cab, appearing as a single long strand of woman, emerging. In cautious unison they walk toward the edge of the ditch. My mother, as if connected to them by an invisible string, is pulled toward them from the opposite side. Their movement is dreamlike. They peer into the muddy water. And as if with a shared nervous system, their hands motion the towel each is carrying, motion it to just above their eyes, covering their faces. With a single vocal act they release from their depths a hard, deep, mournful wail. This sound breaks the wave of bright summer light above the green cotton fields.

He had to have it, his mother told him. How could he not, with so few left in the world? He felt heaviest at night with the miracle of it. He was a vessel now. A receptacle for a threatened being. What if he rose too fast and killed it? Or maybe his stillness would do it, too much sitting around, stunned and hungry. And what if the bear emerged alive and another formed in its place, would he have to have that one, too, and another one after that? He dreamed of the panda’s tiny eyes opening inside him, the doctor’s wide incision, a whirring pain, and then the furry thing emerging, the bear turning to him as to a stranger and whether that would be it—his bit part in the history of the future.

The man who married Magdalene Had not forgiven her. God might pardon every sin ... Love is no pardoner. Her hands were hollow, pale, and blue, Her mouth like watered wine. He watched to see if she were true And waited for a sign. It was old harlotry, he guessed, That drained her strength away, So gladly for the dark she dressed, So sadly for the day. Their quarrels made her dull and weak And soon a man might fit A penny in the hollow cheek And never notice it. At last, as they exhausted slept, Death granted the divorce, And nakedly the woman leapt Upon that narrow horse. But when he woke and woke alone He wept and would deny The loose behavior of the bone And the immodest thigh.