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To perform death is something only humans would do No animal would sit there With a blank look on its face Just because the camera is there No no an animal would look directly in it Or cover its face, like the overweight Woman in the picture in the magazine By the room where I keep my bed What people don’t understand about beauty Is that after all it is not fleeting After all it is so gross to be that way That someone sees among you After all, to call into question I painted my lips, my eyes Only our scholars know that To perform is to be malleable To perform in language Or was it The large purple insect I let in the room Or was it the furred face — the hippo or the gorge That I was the devil in the wood In my own bones that I knew the face That I took that face Was it midnight blue sky No, were my wings iridescent Even in these lines The voice moves you What sense of exquisite cause Thought Moves you past these lines Into conversation With the undead I don’t know That is something You will have to answer for yourself I came back to this place to help you And that I did Shoot sparks of green and gray Through time What skin sack I put myself  in I mean for what, why, Or who Did I manage to do this for if not you Lilaced thing The soft rustle of  beetle wings In air that is warm and gray And is not strong But there, is there to carry us past it

Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England. Among your heart-shaped leaves Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing Their little weak soft songs; In the crooks of your branches The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs Peer restlessly through the light and shadow Of all Springs. Lilacs in dooryards Holding quiet conversations with an early moon; Lilacs watching a deserted house Settling sideways into the grass of an old road; Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom Above a cellar dug into a hill. You are everywhere. You were everywhere. You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon, And ran along the road beside the boy going to school. You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking, You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver. And her husband an image of pure gold. You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms Through the wide doors of Custom Houses— You, and sandal-wood, and tea, Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks When a ship was in from China. You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, May is a month for flitting.” Until they writhed on their high stools And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers. Paradoxical New England clerks, Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night, So many verses before bed-time, Because it was the Bible. The dead fed you Amid the slant stones of graveyards. Pale ghosts who planted you Came in the nighttime And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems. You are of the green sea, And of the stone hills which reach a long distance. You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles, You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home. You cover the blind sides of greenhouses And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass To your friends, the grapes, inside. Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, You have forgotten your Eastern origin, The veiled women with eyes like panthers, The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled pashas. Now you are a very decent flower, A reticent flower, A curiously clear-cut, candid flower, Standing beside clean doorways, Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles, Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight And a hundred or two sharp blossoms. Maine knows you, Has for years and years; New Hampshire knows you, And Massachusetts And Vermont. Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island; Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea. You are brighter than apples, Sweeter than tulips, You are the great flood of our souls Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts, You are the smell of all Summers, The love of wives and children, The recollection of gardens of little children, You are State Houses and Charters And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows. May is lilac here in New England, May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash tree, May is white clouds behind pine-trees Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky. May is a green as no other, May is much sun through small leaves, May is soft earth, And apple-blossoms, And windows open to a South Wind. May is full light wind of lilac From Canada to Narragansett Bay. Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac. Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England, Because my roots are in it, Because my leaves are of it, Because my flowers are for it, Because it is my country And I speak to it of itself And sing of it with my own voice Since certainly it is mine.

The flowerets look edible before they open, like columns of sugar dots on tiny strips I bought as a child. Hard to bite the candy without some paper adhering, as adding machine tape will to large, red numbers. Lilacs are like that: another year unspools without major accomplishment, while I question "major" and "accomplishment." And when I find in Costco those clusters of pointillist pastel, I hope they will become someone else's nostalgia—honorable emotion propelling Ulysses toward Ithaca, and a woman to set lilacs in her dooryard as her mother did.

No one would take her when Ruth passed. As the survivors assessed some antiques, I kept hearing, "She's old. Somebody should put her down." I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her about the fish who died for her, the ones in the cheerful aluminum cans. She lies on my chest to sleep, rising and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat fastened to a battered dock by a string.

No sooner does the plane angle up than I cork off to dream a bomb blast: A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo, seat blown loose from its bolts, I hang weightless a nanosecond in blue space then jerk awake to ordered rows. And there’s the silver liquor cart jangling its thousand bells, the perfect doses of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch held by a rose-nailed hand. I don’t miss drinking, don’t miss driving into shit with more molecular density than myself, nor the Mission Impossible reruns I sat before, nor the dead space inside only alcohol could fill and then not even. But I miss the aftermath, the pure simplicity: mouth parched, head hissing static. How little I asked of myself then—to suck the next breath, suffer the next heave, live till cocktail hour when I could mix the next sickness. I locked the bathroom door, sat on the closed commode, shirtless, in filmy underpants telling myself that death could fit my grasp and be staved off while in the smeary shaving glass, I practiced the stillness of a soul awaiting birth. For the real that swarmed beyond the door I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint Absence, Duchess of Naught . . . A stinging ether folded me in mist. Sometimes landing the head's pressure’s enormous. When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal, and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms as if to rise. Thank god for our place in this forest of forms, for the gravitas that draws me back to him, and for how lightly lightly I touch down.

The victorious army marches into the city, & not far behind tarries a throng of women Who slept with the enemy on the edge Of battlements. The stunned morning Opens into a dust cloud of hooves & drums. Some new priests cradle Stone tablets, & others are poised With raised mallets in a forest of defeated Statuary. Of course, behind them Linger the turncoats & pious Merchants of lime. What’s Greek Is forged into Roman; what’s Roman Is hammered into a ceremony of birds Headed east. Whatever is marble Burns in the lime kilns because Someone dreams of a domed bathhouse.

1 As she grows to twelve, her body begins Its Spring, its hike along the trail In the mountains that open Suddenly to show a whole valley So surprising one forgets For the moment to breathe. Her hips, and so her walk, Her breasts, and so The way she begins to see How other people look at her, How they are caught mid-breath, and shy. But the day a train first came here, They look at her like that: No one staring at her face, no one Noting a moustache curling up Like the arms of the bald He-man posing in the traveling circus There on the face of the engineer. She gets angry, steam in her head The way the engine had Barely held in, almost bursting. Angry in the manner that a person might Take an egg and hold it too hard. Her breasts begin to grow, And she gets angry. Or, she gets angry, So her breasts begin to grow. She cannot remember exactly which. Her mother had told her This would come, But told her so quickly, so much In a hurry and in a small room, And with the other things, She neglected to say that also They would stop growing, So they might not. She would have to wear— She learns this in a dream— High heels backward on her feet To keep a symmetry of balance. The angrier she gets through the months, The more worried she feels At the silliness of how She has begun to grow two new shoulders, Of how she will have to wear her shoes, As bigger, one centimeter at a time, She sprouts out like buds, at first, Like fast plants, Then, like the trees, And finally unstoppable In their season: fruit. The future, she reasons, cannot be good. 2 At 28, she has forgotten what is past. She sits and watches now her thighs Flowing out like the broad Varicosed backs of alligators She has seen in moving pictures, Pushed out around the metal Edges of the lawn chair. Long and flat animals, Sated and full of wrinkling Ridges, held as if by small bones The way camping tents are suspended, All from having eaten Too many pigs, too many birds and cows In the summers of her middle Years of crying When she was all mouth and chewing To feel better, all without boys, No Pedro of her own And now the boys cannot Come close, dare not Dare the alligators Which might come after them. 3 But no. This is an exaggeration, This sadness At het self. Sadness is like that, Adding weight to a thing, to legs The way legs look as one sits In a chair relaxed, Or on the edge of a wall. As if one were a circus performer With a partner, Ramón, Ramón standing Feet planted this moment precisely On the thighs. But no. This is a further exaggeration. Sadness again is like that, It learns you, she thinks, Makes you heavy in those places exactly You have dared think to be strong. On Thursday the 8th of this month Miguel her husband left her, But in that odd physics of how distance Increased every step she took Away from him. As she left the house, he got farther. As she, his María, walked out the door He left her, and the more she walked The farther he got, and smaller. She had learned him as one learns A pair of good leather shoes. She loved him so much She stopped thinking about him. He was like breathing. So that when sadness called, she went To see what it wanted And did not worry. Sadness, again, is like that, Not telling a person the whole story. 4 The orchard was his passion now More than women, More than hard words and fast guns In the hands of other men. And he tended his trees with fingers He might have used touching The hair of his young cousin, lovely Marta, his wife, light skinned, Eyes the color in the moss And barks of his trees, Who walked to the river and stayed. Fingers that might have Pointed out to her with care The beaten line a trail made Leading to his house, their house. But he was busy growing the limes So that her hair was like a bramble Having to be torn away Hard from her, leaving the blood.

The subtlest strain a great musician weaves, Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony To music in his soul. May it not be Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves Unheard in the transition. Thus do we Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty Of some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives A vision exquisite. Yet who can match The sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing The skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine? We struggle vainly, still we fain would catch Such rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring Glimpses ineffable of things divine.

Only he Remembered the day we met And only I The day we said goodbye: “Last day of  June, our first blackberry pie,” He always said. A wood fire in the summer kitchen, The hottest day.... A squall in the bedroom. I can’t remember. Nor he, The December cube of  clay, The storm the day before, How the bare trees Played Giant Step in the dawn wind, Or how On the other bed, rhythmically Touching her knuckles to the wall, My mother slipped forever into fantasy. Only he Remembered the spoken hate (Its change too sheepish to impart) Saw daggers still growing In bristling clump out of my heart. I beg you, kids—no memorials, please. Don’t write poems to me. Don’t bother. What we said we said. What’s unsaid lacks ears. In this I’m like my father.

Who knows this or that? Hark in the wall to the rat: Since the world was, he has gnawed; Of his wisdom, of his fraud What dost thou know? In the wretched little beast Is life and heart, Child and parent, Not without relation To fruitful field and sun and moon. What art thou? His wicked eye Is cruel to thy cruelty.