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O young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best; And save his good broadsword he weapons had none, He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone. So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar. He staid not for brake, and he stopp’d not for stone, He swam the Eske river where ford there was none; But ere he alighted at Netherby gate, The bride had consented, the gallant came late: For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war, Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar. So boldly he enter’d the Netherby Hall, Among bride’s-men, and kinsmen, and brothers and all: Then spoke the bride’s father, his hand on his sword, (For the poor craven bridegroom said never a word,) “O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war, Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?” “I long woo’d your daughter, my suit you denied;— Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide— And now I am come, with this lost love of mine, To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine. There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far, That would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar.” The bride kiss’d the goblet: the knight took it up, He quaff’d off the wine, and he threw down the cup. She look’d down to blush, and she look’d up to sigh, With a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye. He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar,— “Now tread we a measure!” said young Lochinvar. So stately his form, and so lovely her face, That never a hall such a galliard did grace; While her mother did fret, and her father did fume, And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume; And the bride-maidens whisper’d, “’twere better by far To have match’d our fair cousin with young Lochinvar.” One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear, When they reach’d the hall-door, and the charger stood near; So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung, So light to the saddle before her he sprung! “She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur; They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar. There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan; Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran: There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lee, But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see. So daring in love, and so dauntless in war, Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool, this hank’s thankless task is vast, a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly, since what I’m thinking of is your toe pad pinknesses too, your soup hots and round-and-rounds, the fine and perfect poundage of you on my paws, the very cause and problem I moan and bemoan the absence of. For Love, above the head this reddish coil once lavishly wore, there’s an air so far away it’s sad for me to even think the same sun’s rays play where it was and do to you what I would do if I were there or you were here. Still, some thrills remembered do resemble thrills, one hopes, and the ropes of it that gently fell around me bound me so well no hell of miles can defile this dream I dream. I mean the anyway DNA I can find of you. I mean the home of bones and blood that holds the whole of you and which this fizzed-up missive means to conjure, missy, my world in a curl, girl, this man oh man half man I am when you’re gone.

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn: Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn. 'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call, Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall; Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts, And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts. Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time; When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed; When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed: When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see; Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.— In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast; In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest; In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove; In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young, And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee." On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light, As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night. And she turn'd—her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs— All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes— Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong"; Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin?" weeping, "I have loved thee long." Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight. Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring, And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fulness of the Spring. Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips. O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more! O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore! Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung, Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue! Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me—to decline On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine! Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay. As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. What is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine. Go to him, it is thy duty, kiss him, take his hand in thine. It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought: Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought. He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand— Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand! Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace, Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace. Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth! Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth! Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule! Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool! Well—'t is well that I should bluster!—Hadst thou less unworthy proved— Would to God—for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved. Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit? I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root. Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should come As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home. Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind? Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind? I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move; Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love. Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore? No—she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore. Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof. Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall. Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep, To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep. Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by the phantom years, And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears; And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain. Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again. Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry. 'T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry. Baby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest. Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast. O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due. Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two. O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part, With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart. "They were dangerous guides the feelings—she herself was not exempt— Truly, she herself had suffer'd"—Perish in thy self-contempt! Overlive it—lower yet—be happy! wherefore should I care? I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair. What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these? Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys. Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow. I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do? I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground, When the ranks are roll'd in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound. But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels, And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels. Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page. Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age! Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife, When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life; Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn; And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men: Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do: For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law. So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry, Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye; Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint: Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point: Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns. What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's? Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn, They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn: Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string? I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing. Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain— Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain: Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine— Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat; Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr'd,— I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward. Or to burst all links of habit—there to wander far away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree— Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space; I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books— Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild, But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! Mated with a squalid savage—what to me were sun or clime? I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time— I that rather held it better men should perish one by one, Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon! Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun: Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun. O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set. Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet. Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall! Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall. Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt, Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow; For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

What a surprise it is to hear that locusts come the thirteenth year and not the seventeenth as told for ages and enshrined in old folklore and rhymes and family lies. The species similar otherwise: cicadas books call periodic, found here in our southern district. They grow from eggs pressed into twigs. The nymphs that hatch then start to dig at least ten inches into soil, and live by sucking juicy oil from roots and stems, sweet sap that nourishes through the giant nap, and then the lucky thirteenth year they grow a polished armor and crawl into the summer air and, louder than a Mahler choir, fill meadow, hedge, and orchard grove with necessary calls for love, then leave their eggs to fortune's whim with Philip Glass-like requiem.

You could figure it as a trapdoor, blur of hinge and down into the unconscious of this stranger moving around your garden like a trap— making all the greens unstable as the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you. Bang to rights is how he'd like to have your house. Cuckoo, wool-wearing garden-dweller, new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley and roses. Meanwhile, the unaccustomed heat. Meanwhile, a sky tunnelling upward— sense of proportion—golden section of elder hedge; then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.

It was a poem men took because it said ovary didn’t take my political poems they took the one that said ovary Are you sure it was because it said ovary? Yes, for them that’s logical. --------------------------- Destroy another city What else is war for? So you’ll go down each of you does. dies in whirlwind each of you who does, dies paying for the pain you experience Just that and nothing is established Because I am a woman Cutting as many cords as tie you to me. this isn’t anarchy it isn’t anything you could name You’re still here without ties? because they were logical. --------------------------- Dance little asshole dance oh he gets elected, like a Calvinist He says, I have these guts Men, I have these guts. --------------------------- Having dedicated whole regions to the destruction you inspire, the logic will be to go on doing it doing it. Having proceeded by the logic of your per- sonal vaccuum you will perceive your continued lightlessness as an excuse to go on. having gone on as you have. And so one continues. ----------------------------- Lead the boy out of the building on fire his head twisted upwards all fucked What else is there to know if one has gotten twisted up all fucked he is a screaming fire ----------------------------- In the explanations of our lives’ experience they’ve left out this wild moment the long mirror on the right-hand wall of the corridor suddenly shattered I can’t see myself anymore. ----------------------------- I repeat that I am not frightened and why not I don’t know what my reactions are supposed to be. ----------------------------- “Please tell me something with which I’m familiar.” isn’t there another part of now

In another poem, called The Logic of Spring, a mechanical drawing of a tree that I've passed a 100 times on my way to a different problem. I glance backwards, and the stack of the day multiplies, glancing backwards several times, the dog-eared corner with the graph paper sky of that morning and the logic of spring. Right before I wake, I hear the riposte of mean jays (blue dots that drag the pink banners of answers off the tree with words in gold italic latin) from the fog pumped in by the machine set on my lawn. First thing in the morning, (page numbers in all the dish rags hanging around the sink) I part the buttery curtains to see beyond the doric columns sitting on my porch & the hibiscus twig that someone has set the stump of such a tree—gray smudges and still intact line breaks with flashing pink splashes— outside my house while I slept. Seems unbearably cruel until I realize that in the flapping fog I finally hear its questions. Are you so easily distracted by pieces of a poem attached to a tree? in which as the situation changes you catch glimpses of yourself a series of emoticons.

I’ll know the time to leave the room where I’ve been growing hair from my face, drinking dark beers when the light in the lake bums out. That’s when fish turn on their music. They lie in a blue current waiting for the moon to pass over, and the fishermen with their lanterns know this as they spill a can of sweet corn and wonder if they spoke what they were just thinking. I clear my way through the fog as music will break through static. The frogs strike up, a window goes out in the Home for Elders. Don’t you wonder why it is built far from anywhere, as though memory needs a terrain for forgetting; blind driveways to lost roads. As for my own parents, they did not grow old. What I know: dinners without conversation, stars that shine for anyone. I know my time is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve. I want to say don’t feel sorry for men, those who leave women smouldering like cigarettes, those who are fond of burials. War is a habit of mind, I swear by my mother’s gender. Tonight sticks in the leaves are slick as pilot snakes. Wherever I part branches no one is in a boat, no one has stirred a wake. Not jackknifing off the dock, it’s hauling myself back up that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink. Don’t wake the cottonmouths. Summertime. If you were here and you remembered to stash your smokes in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine we’d fall quiet now as pollen on water, I would tell you the true story of Urashima and the turtle.

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

London crossfigured creeping with trams and the artists on sundays in the summer all ‘tracking Nature’ in the suburbs It could have been anyplace but it wasn’t It was London and when someone shouted over that they had got a model I ran out across the court but then when the model started taking off her clothes there was nothing underneath I mean to say she took off her shoes and found no feet took off her top and found no tit under it and I must say she did look a bit ASTOUNDED just standing there looking down at where her legs were not But so very carefully then she put her clothes back on and as soon as she was dressed again completely she was completely all right Do it again! cried someone rushing for his easel But she was afraid to and gave up modelling and forever after slept in her clothes