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wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves, a mozambican woman turns mother, her water breaking loose to pool with the flood licking the trunk below, a country-sized puddle calls forth the child whose name, the mother vowed, would not be drowned, no matter how high she had to climb. my mother’s water washed her bare yellow bathroom tile many years ago, a diluvial warning of my struggle to arrive. we fought to get me out, and have been tugging at each other ever since, tethered by a cord that simply thickens when it’s cut. we descended then, thirsting, churning, not into the waters that hound the mozambican mother, baying her and her baby in the tree, but into that enduring ocean in which — as mother, daughter, or both — a woman’s only choices are drink or swim.

A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children. Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used. The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children. Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand. True to our God, True to our native land.

As I leave for work she holds out her arms, and I bend to lift her . . . always heavier than I remember, because in my mind she is still that seedling bough I used to cradle in one elbow. Her hug is honest, fierce, forgiving. I think of Oregon's coastal pines, wind-bent even on quiet days; they've grown in ways the Pacific breeze has blown them all their lives. And how will my daughter grow? Last night, I dreamed of a mid-ocean gale, a howl among writhing waterspouts; I don't know what it meant, or if it's still distant, or already here. I know only how I hug my daughter, my arms grown taut with the thought of that wind.

The bioluminescent undersides of squid render them invisible to predators below. That the radiance of the boy’s anger might protect him. Walking the dog and stepping on a patch of repaired road, I remember the soft spot in his head. You’re deaf as a beagle. No, you are. Can I feel the tide’s drag on the turning earth increase each day’s duration? A hair in my nostril has gone white. In absolute night, from my bed, I hear him aiming for the toilet’s center. The sound deepens, voice finding its register. Scientists call it an entangled system. We survive Christmas, his face pressed to the smooshed bosom of his grandmother in a house so immaculate, the spider in the seam of the ceiling stands out obscenely. Like a star at the outskirts of the galaxy, and slung around by the gravity of dark matter. For now, he goes where we go, but he does not belong to us. I begin to begin my sentences leaning toward him, taking a deep breath. He relinquishes the conversation with a contraction of his pupils. What is for one of us the throb of the immediate is, for the other, the imminent mundane. When napalm hits my brain, he takes on the tranquillity of a blinking newt. She finds a photograph of him at seven. The sheer expressed of his face. As among Michelangelo’s early drawings, there is a copy of Masacchio’s lost Sagra, the consecration. We search our memories of him for a certain unity of characteristics that would hold through the permutations he now submits to us. When it clings to the wire-and-rug surrogate, lab technicians shock it again. Instead of releasing, it clings tighter. Throwing himself into the back seat after wrestling practice, mat burns on his cheek and forehead. His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples— I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…” then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave, a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures, their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one, perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others, was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings as though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me, to situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now, the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again, this time the way he’ll refer to a figure he meets as “the life of…” not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I, our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives, his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem, mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark, his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist, mine having to know for us both that everything ends, world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.

Lady, take care; for in the diamond eyes Of old old men is figured your undoing; Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going. Flesh hangs like the curtains in a house Long unused, damp as cellars without wine; They are the future of us all, when we Will be dried-leaf-thin, the sour whine Of a siren’s diminuendo. They have no past But egg husks shattered to a rubbish heap By memory’s looting. Do not follow them To their camp pitched in a cranny, do not keep To the road for them, a weary weary yard Will bring you in; that beckoning host ahead, Inn-keeper Death, has but to lift his hat To topple the oldster in the dust. Read, Poor old man, the sensual moral; sleep Narrow in your bed, wear no More so bright a rose in your lapel; The spell of the world is loosed, it is time to go.

The white clothes on the line put the man to sleep. He was sitting on a soda case Leaning back on the porch. He rolled down his sleeves with his eyes shut. He could feel the sun going into the trees. He wanted to catch the evening ferry And meet someone across the river. He dreamed about her Putting polish on her nails. He was in the woods and many women Were walking around him in a circle. He thought about crosses in their blood. As it got to be night he could feel the heat in his face. He was going to open his eyes. And look up at the moon. It was like the light blue handkerchief She gave him to go with his dark suit. That’s when he felt the hot salt all over him Like broken glass. He was afraid to open his eyes. He wondered if he could use any words on it. But the big woman in the black dress Was already in the backseat of the car Rolling the window up with one hand And making a sign on him with the other. She was in the car, too. He saw her biting her nails when they pulled away. There was a dead snake on his shoes. He knew there would be a circle Of little beating hearts in his bed, And before he could get home They would be dry and still.

Tonight, away begins to go farther away, and the dream what do we know of the dream metallic leaps Jackson Pollock silvery streams Jackson Pollock I gaze across the sea see in the distance your walk and you pass the Pacific, distant and blue phallus and Moloch pace my view on into otherness on into otherness? are we in the world after or before are we or are we not magnetic force it is apparently me you inform: genesis woman dream that begins tonight to go farther away tonight to reach farther away metallic leaps Jackson Pollock silvery streams Jackson Pollock on across the blue sea

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system— not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small, the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive, correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see. The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper? Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.

I always thought reality was something you became when you grew up. In the square stands Fata Morgana looking tired, shouting Morning paper—morning paper.