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The whit’ning ground In frost is bound; The snow is swiftly falling; While coldly blows the northern breeze, And whistles through the leafless trees, In hollow sounds appalling. On this cold plain, Now reach’d with pain, Once stood my father’s dwelling: Where smiling pleasure once was found, Now desolation frowns around, And wintry blasts are yelling. Hope’s visions wild My thoughts beguil’d, My earliest days delighting, Till unsuspected treach’ry came, Beneath affection’s specious name, The lovely prospect blighting. With many a wile Of blackest guile Did Henry first deceive me: What winning words to him were giv’n! He swore, by all the pow’rs of Heav’n, That he would never leave me. With fondest truth I lov’d the youth: My soul, to guilt a stranger, Knew not, in those too simple hours, That oft beneath the sweetest flow’rs Is couch’d the deadliest danger. With him to roam I fled my home; I burst the bonds of duty; I thought my days in joy would roll; But Henry hid a demon’s soul Beneath an angel’s beauty! Shall this poor heart E’er cease to smart? Oh never! never! never! Did av’rice whisper thee, or pride, False Henry! for a wealthier bride To cast me off for ever? My sire was poor: No golden store Had he, no earthly treasure: I only could his griefs assuage, The only pillar of his age, His only source of pleasure. With anguish wild, He miss’d his child, And long in vain he sought her: The fiercest thunder-bolts of heav’n Shall on thy guilty head be driv’n, Thou Disobedient Daughter! I feel his fears, I see his tears, I hear his groans of sadness: My cruel falsehood seal’d his doom: He seems to curse me from the tomb, And fire my brain to madness! Oh! keenly blow, While drifts the snow, The cold nocturnal breezes; On me the gath’ring snow-flakes rest, And colder grows my friendless breast; My very heart-blood freezes! ‘Tis midnight deep, And thousands sleep, Unknown to guilt and sorrow; They think not of a wretch like me, Who cannot, dare not, hope to see The rising light to-morrow! An outcast hurl’d From all the world, Whom none would love or cherish, What now remains to end my woes, But here, amid the deep’ning snows, To lay me down and perish? Death’s icy dart Invades my heart: Just Heav’n! all-good! all-seeing! Thy matchless mercy I implore, When I must wake, to sleep no more, In realms of endless being!

"Mariana in the Moated Grange" (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

With one black shadow at its feet, The house thro' all the level shines, Close-latticed to the brooding heat, And silent in its dusty vines: A faint-blue ridge upon the right, An empty river-bed before, And shallows on a distant shore, In glaring sand and inlets bright. But "Aye Mary," made she moan, And "Aye Mary," night and morn, And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone, To live forgotten, and love forlorn." She, as her carol sadder grew, From brow and bosom slowly down Thro' rosy taper fingers drew Her streaming curls of deepest brown To left and right, and made appear, Still-lighted in a secret shrine, Her melancholy eyes divine, The home of woe without a tear. And "Aye Mary," was her moan, "Madonna, sad is night and morn;" And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone, To live forgotten, and love forlorn." Till all the crimson changed, and past Into deep orange o'er the sea, Low on her knees herself she cast, Before Our Lady murmur'd she: Complaining, "Mother, give me grace To help me of my weary load." And on the liquid mirror glow'd The clear perfection of her face. "Is this the form," she made her moan, "That won his praises night and morn?" And "Ah," she said, "but I wake alone, I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn." Nor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat, Nor any cloud would cross the vault, But day increased from heat to heat, On stony drought and steaming salt; Till now at noon she slept again, And seem'd knee-deep in mountain grass, And heard her native breezes pass, And runlets babbling down the glen. She breathed in sleep a lower moan, And murmuring, as at night and morn She thought, "My spirit is here alone, Walks forgotten, and is forlorn." Dreaming, she knew it was a dream: She felt he was and was not there. She woke: the babble of the stream Fell, and, without, the steady glare Shrank one sick willow sere and small. The river-bed was dusty-white; And all the furnace of the light Struck up against the blinding wall. She whisper'd, with a stifled moan More inward than at night or morn, "Sweet Mother, let me not here alone Live forgotten and die forlorn." And, rising, from her bosom drew Old letters, breathing of her worth, For "Love", they said, "must needs be true, To what is loveliest upon earth." An image seem'd to pass the door, To look at her with slight, and say, "But now thy beauty flows away, So be alone for evermore." "O cruel heart," she changed her tone, "And cruel love, whose end is scorn, Is this the end to be left alone, To live forgotten, and die forlorn?" But sometimes in the falling day An image seem'd to pass the door, To look into her eyes and say, "But thou shalt be alone no more." And flaming downward over all From heat to heat the day decreased, And slowly rounded to the east The one black shadow from the wall. "The day to night," she made her moan, "The day to night, the night to morn, And day and night I am left alone To live forgotten, and love forlorn." At eve a dry cicala sung, There came a sound as of the sea; Backward the lattice-blind she flung, And lean'd upon the balcony. There all in spaces rosy-bright Large Hesper glitter'd on her tears, And deepening thro' the silent spheres Heaven over Heaven rose the night. And weeping then she made her moan, "The night comes on that knows not morn, When I shall cease to be all alone, To live forgotten, and love forlorn."

Each flower a wilting sun The death of a new day is never kind Grief ain’t no song No loss is this romantic

The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upon down where the jaws snap blindly at whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless term and to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongue and ghost-lit lantern into a sea like liquid wind, without prior compass of the way the wind is blowing. Should they be gifted with a corpse whose half-spoilt flesh holds distillate eternal summers spent glittering in the euphotic zone, they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy. In the cartography of sea, they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Maris but to your own bright band — yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhand from a long-gone grocery display, drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.

1 “With never a whisper on the main,” so the snow falls, glaring through the festschrift of acacia leaves at sunrise and seeping a dye of immortelle on mild fleece, shrinking back eternity to flurries stalking summer cairns. Somewhere, harpies in cruisers blare beneath prairie clouds. An iceberg flashes, turns a smoke of ice on the air. The cold repels, draws out redoubling whites; in the green heat you hallucinate where the sea runs, light on light, creeping the heights your new turret on the house in clouds scorns nothing: poetry’s sub rosa, ever uncompromised, as now, infrared crows eclipse the lawns. 2 And I once brute and stammering to you toppled in a blue beach chair, pushed to the meridian-hush island coup talk, but your eyes search out where children leap hotels’ sand dams and worry the guard and his dog. The triumph of surrender, of love flamed from history, like that pyro-tailor’s scissors bright roar, reducing the “treasury of the poor.” You sputter into a blinding cough and recover with, “Emerson?” Yes, that culprit all along, new to me, so was Boston Common when we waited in the trash fire of autumn and could feel salt driving off the Atlantic. 3 Where the mezcal ferns begin and after them dross wet soil rises from bank to ridge, sunset’s slow inflation; you point; they change in one stroke to mountain-blue foliage! On utility poles hang night’s recessive fable. Again, you stab the windscreen    ...out there, abundant still lifes, the stark inflammable river you will cross over, recoil at the pier. What value is the ride? In digression, art. A mare froths in the sea the following day. It seems, gathered up by spokes of clouds, caught in an agonizing conversion. You jolt towards it, but out laughed a schoolboy, way too happy — “O Apilo!” — sun-blasted, all colors. 4 Clinking cavalcade inching up the Sunday road lined with crowds: none anonymous, moving as lines do, growing in depth of play, unstable and absolute where they must. Each thing has a crack, indeed. Adjust the mirror beyond the surf’s exhortation and see arched dolphins at equinox blur with drizzle Port Antonio into Vigie. Half mile of bamboo cathedral tunnels an airy pass there once; its shadows hacked away and in that vacancy light depreciates now. Geography is not fate but fatal. Gone is the corridor to hold your glory. The sun and sea in your eyes still bow. 5 Pilgrim of occasional fireflies, brooding inside the Alliance Française Pyramid, where the wild honey expires and the doggerel air embalms all you’ve lived, relived with lament and praise. Pain’s license. Silence, then the reciprocity of silence, its immense language sends an ibis to absolve and to mark your sins. Late-in-life astonishment, like bitcoins on the tongue. What you say is hidden in noon gossip. Yes, having a gift is to be called. Since it is given, let it go. The mind irons bronze in water, a voice radiating: “We please our elders when we sit enthralled.” 6 Ascend and bless the devil’s altitude. Shale drifting from the sky’s blue furnace. Slant sparks of green off the vale Santa Cruz below, being so blessed, this is penance, of a kind, my own road to Emmaus, wafers upon wafers of oleanders suture those eyes scattered and staring through dust. Around each bend arrives the future, which departs exactly close to Lalibela one fleeting night the rock churches wept by my ears, refracted Stoney Hill’s stars, their ragged music pitching diaspora against despair. Such music you’ve left withstands permanently the striation of scars. 7 To evening air I add, “blown cane blown cane blown cane,” and step into the Quattrocento outside the library by the pier. All’s changed. Blown I am a broad Antillean echo lost in the marrow wings of a pelican, or an albatross, cloud remnant, tasseled low flyer below the radar of the wind. Trade Winds. Travailed not traveled. Shit-bloodied. A million blades choir and collapse on repeat their absolute, surging pledge, picked up by potholes which I jump to reach home. Blown canes, singed from the African holocaust. Dark breaks in me carrying your line, lucid sandglass, seething uphill. Mine to keep and give. 8 The kite season is early. Little insurgence everywhere of souls lifting, subsiding half transparent in night’s green silence. By morning they are fallen over the cement fence, your childhood allamandas annunciate your last withdrawal into heat so fierce it breaks its own laws and the man into tears along Lapeyrouse seawall, his umbrella kite shielding the sun from the murals. Meantime, I hesitate on a maroon canal in Delft, crossing water’s filial piety, erring rings whisper “small honors in the storm” and watch moss lilies drift into untouchable maze, fastened to each other. Your ancestors’ spires are of ambergris, they magnify in the water my spectral self.

If the ashes of Mark Twain lie in the Mississippi River then I’m sure he does rise up some days emerge from dark polluted depths to walk over water to land and scans the horizon for change being a curious sort, he sees the crisis rise again another war on the horizon and shakes his craggy head to say no not again he hopes truth-sayers still exist who don’t have to wait until their dead. December 2002

Money changed hands. It’s how we came to be Came to be planted here in the mortar In the miniature cash forest Aster greenwood ficus hemlock Taproot stipe calyx anther in the Mortal hereafter Hearing hands making money change. Speak up. I can’t hear you. There’s something wrong with your voice. You’re speaking too fast. Slow up. Speak into the currency. It wants to bone you. It wants to receive Your warmth in its coffers. Listen up. I’ve a fee to see to A toll-man a drawbridge. Open up. Close up. You have a cross bite In your crown, palate-ax. Bite down. Bite my ball Bearing interest. I’m a businessman. I own a plant. I bid for it, bought it, soiled it, drowned it Tilled it, scolded it, heaved into it, stole from it Wept unto it A token in its behalf, suffered a stem To rise in it To market, to market In my dirty jumpsuit Worthlessness.

Adjectives continue their downward spiral, with adverbs likely to follow. Wisdom,grace, and beauty can be had three for a dollar, as they head for a recession. Diaphanous,filigree, pearlescent, and love are now available at wholesale prices. Verbs are still blue-chip investments, but not many are willing to sell. The image market is still strong, but only for those rated AA or higher. Beware of cheap imitations sold by the side of the road. Only the most conservative consider rhyme a good option, but its success in certain circles warrants a brief mention. The ongoing search for fresh metaphor has caused concern among environmental activists, who warn that both the moon and the sea have measurably diminished since the dawn of the Romantic era. Latter-day prosodists are having to settle for menial positions in poultry plants, where an aptitude for repetitive rhythms is considered a valuable trait. The outlook for the future remains uncertain, and troubled times may lie ahead. Supply will continue to outpace demand, and the best of the lot will remain unread.

My mind is like a clamorous market-place. All day in wind, rain, sun, its babel wells; Voice answering to voice in tumult swells. Chaffering and laughing, pushing for a place, My thoughts haste on, gay, strange, poor, simple, base; This one buys dust, and that a bauble sells: But none to any scrutiny hints or tells The haunting secrets hidden in each sad face. The clamour quietens when the dark draws near; Strange looms the earth in twilight of the West, Lonely with one sweet star serene and clear, Dwelling, when all this place is hushed to rest, On vacant stall, gold, refuse, worst and best, Abandoned utterly in haste and fear.