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You couples lying where moon-scythes and day-scythes reaped you, browning fruit falls and sleeps in tangled nests, the wild grass, falls from your apple tree that still grows here: cry for your dead hero, his weak sword, his flight, that you were slaughtered and your bed poured whiteness, the issue of murdered marriage dawns. The streets crack, a house falls open to the air, sun and rain lie on the bed. And the river still runs in a child’s hands under the factory’s black hulk, four stacks that used to bloom with smoke over shining leaves, beneath thunderheads. Then the storm shatters and beats and after in woods a scented smoke of light, a dripping quiet, and the small gold snake sparkles at the pond’s edge. But who is he? What were the goods he made, what became of his loved wife, his children, and where has he gone, fearsome, powerless? The silver path of air from the river’s bend to its rippling away beneath the low concrete bridge is still pure. No one comes, and the child who watched by it has vanished. Or sometimes he appears for a day, a night, in the walls and windows reflected on the water, in goldfinches’ flight, cricket song, the heron’s great rise from the bank. Last a carp leaps, voices and a lantern slide down the secret stream in black and gold peace, past the child’s husk, the family never born.

Love brought by night a vision to my bed, One that still wore the vesture of a child But eighteen years of age – who sweetly smiled Till of the lovely form false hopes were bred And keen embraces wild. Ah! for the lost desire that haunts me yet, Till mine eyes fail in sleep that finds no more That fleeting ghost! Oh, lovelorn heart, give o’er – Cease thy vain dreams of beauty’s warmth – forget The face thou longest for!

I’d given up hope. Hadn’t eaten in three days. Resigned to being wolf meat ... when, unbelievably, I found myself in a clearing. Two goats with bells round their necks stared at me: their pupils like coin slots in piggy banks. I could have gotten the truth out of those two, if goats spoke. I saw leeks and radishes planted in rows; wash billowing on a clothesline ... and the innocuous-looking cottage in the woods with its lapping tongue of a welcome mat slurped me in. In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex is barely discernible pours a glass of fraudulent milk. I’m so hungry my hand shakes. But what is this liquid? “Drink up, sweetheart,” she says, and as I wipe the white mustache off with the back of my hand: “Atta girl.” Have I stumbled into the clutches of St. Somebody? Who can tell. “You’ll find I prevail here in my own little kingdom,” she says as she leads me upstairs—her bony grip on my arm a proclamation of ownership, as though I've always been hers.

It’s not that I don’t like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleansers. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s And oxygen in tanks attached to them— A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigarette, which was delicious but Too brief. I held his hand; it felt Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was, The sunlight pointing down at us, as if We were important, full of life, unbound. I wandered for a moment where his ribs Had made a space for me, and there, beside The thundering waterfall of his heart, I rubbed my eyes and thought, “I’m lost.”

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain as if prepared for the path of  the spirit’s journey to the world of all souls. It is not an easy path. A dog stands at the opening constellation past the great helping hand. The dog wants to know, did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature, did you take a life you didn’t eat? This is the first on your map. There is another my people made of  the great beyond that lies farther away than this galaxy. It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means. After this first one, the next could be a map of  forever. It could be a cartography shining only at some times of  the year like a great web of finery some spider pulled from herself to help you recall your true following your first white breath in the cold. The next door opens and Old Woman counts your scars. She is interested in how you have been hurt and not in anything akin to sin. From between stars are the words we now refuse; loneliness, longing, whatever suffering might follow your life into the sky. Once those are gone, the life you had against your own will, the hope, even the prayers take you one more bend around the river of sky.

Before devising, your chicken you do not have to count. As for the penny which is rescued it is the penny which is obtained. The girl and the spice has become entirely from the splendid sugar. The boy has consisted of the tail of the slug and the snail and the puppy. As for the place of the woman there is a house. One basket your egg everything does not have to be made. The idiot hurries being about you fear because the angel steps on. Your cake cannot do possessing and is eaten thing. There is no wastefulness, unless so is, we want. The safe which is better than regrettable. Living, you have lived, permit.

I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element. So I could say mine. My own. And mean it. Now they are grown up and far away and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape: Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons: At night, on the edge of sleep, I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. Its rocky sweep and its granite pier. Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight, shadows falling on everything they had to leave? And would love forever? And then I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat searching for the last sight of a hand. I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land: Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat— Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, Lost all the others she lets us devote; They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, So much was theirs who so little allowed: How all our copper had gone for his service! Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud! We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die! Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves! He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, —He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again! Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly, Menace our heart ere we master his own; Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!

A range of clouds banked up behind the peak Of that apocryphal Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique Burst of late sun Projecting at the east’s receding wall A film of what the day so far has done: A wind that tries to scrape The breaking waves up as they run Across the bay And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray; And trees the wind has caught, Which seem too self-contained to sway When they are blown, And only move as a pleasing afterthought. No one. No human presence has been known, Surely, to venture here. It takes one blackbird to disown That vagary And, whistling just a few feet from his ear, To call him back again and make him be The subject in this scene, The one who is required to see. Another day, No blackbird with its song will intervene. The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway.

I. Children's Arms On my way home I pass a cameraman On a platform on the bumper of a car Inside which, rolling and plunging, a comedian Is working; on one white lot I see a star Stumble to her igloo through the howling gale Of the wind machines. On Melrose a dinosaur And pterodactyl, with their immense pale Papier-mâché smiles, look over the fence Of The Lost World. Whispering to myself the tale These shout—done with my schoolwork, I commence My real life: my arsenal, my workshop Opens, and in impotent omnipotence I put on the helmet and the breastplate Pop Cut out and soldered for me. Here is the shield I sawed from beaver board and painted; here on top The bow that only Odysseus can wield And eleven vermilion-ringed, goose-feathered arrows. (The twelfth was broken on the battlefield When, searching among snap beans and potatoes, I stepped on it.) Some dry weeds, a dead cane Are my spears. The knife on the bureau's My throwing-knife; the small unpainted biplane Without wheels—that so often, helped by human hands, Has taken off from, landed on, the counterpane— Is my Spad. O dead list, that misunderstands And laughs at and lies about the new live wild Loves it lists! that sets upright, in the sands Of age in which nothing grows, where all our friends are old, A few dried leaves marked THIS IS THE GREENWOOD— O arms that arm, for a child's wars, the child! And yet they are good, if anything is good, Against his enemies . . . Across the seas At the bottom of the world, where Childhood Sits on its desert island with Achilles And Pitamakan, the White Blackfoot: In the black auditorium, my heart at ease, I watch the furred castaways (the seniors put A play on every spring) tame their wild beasts, Erect their tree house. Chatting over their fruit, Their coconuts, they relish their stately feasts. The family's servant, their magnanimous Master now, rules them by right. Nature's priests, They worship at Nature's altar; when with decorous Affection the Admirable Crichton Kisses a girl like a big Wendy, all of us Squirm or sit up in our seats . . . Undone When an English sail is sighted, the prisoners Escape from their Eden to the world: the real one Where servants are servants, masters masters, And no one's magnanimous. The lights go on And we go off, robbed of our fruit, our furs— The island that the children ran is gone. The island sang to me:Believe! Believe! And didn't I know a lady with a lion? Each evening, as the sun sank, didn't I grieve To leave my tree house for reality? There was nothing there for me to disbelieve. At peace among my weapons, I sit in my tree And feel:Friday night, then Saturday, then Sunday! I'm dreaming of a wolf, as Mama wakes me, And a tall girl who is–outside it's gray, I can't remember, I jump up and dress. We eat in the lighted kitchen. And what is play For me, for them is habit. Happiness Is a quiet presence, breathless and familiar: My grandfather and I sit there in oneness As the Sunset bus, lit by the lavender And rose of sunrise, takes us to the dark Echoing cavern where Pop, a worker, Works for our living. As he rules a mark, A short square pencil in his short square hand, On a great sheet of copper, I make some remark He doesn't hear. In that hard maze—in that land That grown men live in—in the world of work, He measures, shears, solders; and I stand Empty-handed, watching him. I wander into the murk The naked light bulbs pierce: the workmen, making something, Say something to the boy in his white shirt. I jerk As the sparks fly at me. The man hammering As acid hisses, and the solder turns to silver, Seems to me a dwarf hammering out the Ring In the world under the world. The hours blur; Bored and not bored, I bend things out of lead. I wash my smudged hands, as my grandfather Washes his black ones, with their gritty soap: ahead, Past their time clock, their pay window, is the blue And gold and white of noon. The sooty thread Up which the laborers feel their way into Their wives and houses, is money; the fact of life, The secret the grown-ups share, is what to do To make money. The husband Adam, Eve his wife Have learned how not to have to do without Till Santa Claus brings them their Boy Scout knife— Nor do they find things in dreams, carry a paper route, Sell Christmas seals . . . Starting his Saturday, his Sunday, Pop tells me what I love to hear about, His boyhood in Shelbyville. I play What he plays, hunt what he hunts, remember What he remembers: it seems to me I could stay In that dark forest, lit by one fading ember Of his campfire, forever . . . But we're home. I run in love to each familiar member Of this little state, clustered about the Dome Of St. Nicholas—this city in which my rabbit Depends on me, and I on everyone—this first Rome Of childhood, so absolute in every habit That when we hear the world our jailor say: "Tell me, art thou a Roman ?" the time we inhabit Drops from our shoulders, and we answer: "Yea. I stand at Caesar's judgment seat, I appeal Unto Caesar." I wash my hands, Pop gives his pay Envelope to Mama; we sit down to our meal. The phone rings: Mrs. Mercer wonders if I'd care To go to the library. That would be ideal, I say when Mama lets me. I comb my hair And find the four books I have out:The Food Of the Gods was best. Liking that world where The children eat, and grow giant and good, I swear as I've often sworn: "I'll never forget What it's like, when I've grown up." A prelude By Chopin, hammered note by note, like alphabet Blocks, comes from next door. It's played with real feeling, The feeling of being indoors practicing. "And yet It's not as if—" a gray electric, stealing To the curb on silent wheels, has come; and I See on the back seat (sight more appealing Than any human sight!) my own friend Lucky, Half wolf, half police-dog. And he can play the piano— Play that he does, that is—and jump so high For a ball that he turns a somersault. "Hello," I say to the lady, and hug Lucky . . . In my Talk with the world, in which it tells me what I know And I tell it, "I know—" how strange that I Know nothing, and yet it tells me what I know!— I appreciate the animals, who stand by Purring. Or else they sit and pant. It's so— So agreeable. If only people purred and panted! So, now, Lucky and I sit in our row, Mrs. Mercer in hers. I take for granted The tiller by which she steers, the yellow roses In the bud vases, the whole enchanted Drawing room of our progress. The glass encloses As glass does, a womanish and childish And doggish universe. We press our noses To the glass and wish: the angel- and devilfish Floating by on Vine, on Sunset, shut their eyes And press their noses to their glass and wish. II. A Night with Lions When I was twelve we'd visit my aunt's friend Who owned a lion, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Lion. I'd play with him, and he'd pretend To play with me. I was the real player But he'd trot back and forth inside his cage Till he got bored. I put Tawny in the prayer I didn't believe in, not at my age, But said still; just as I did everything in fours And gave to Something, on the average, One cookie out of three. And by my quartz, my ores, My wood with the bark on it, from the Petrified Forest, I put his dewclaw . . . Now the lion roars His slow comfortable roars; I lie beside My young, tall, brown aunt, out there in the past Or future, and I sleepily confide My dream-discovery: my breath comes fast Whenever I see someone with your skin, Hear someone with your voice. The lion's steadfast Roar goes on in the darkness. I have been Asleep a while when I remember: you Are—you, and Tawny was the lion in— In Tarzan. In Tarzan! Just as we used to, I talk to you, you talk to me or pretend To talk to me as grown-up people do, Of Jurgen and Rupert Hughes, till in the end I think as a child thinks: "You're my real friend." III. A Street off Sunset Sometimes as I drive by the factory That manufactures, after so long, Vicks VapoRub Ointment, there rises over me A eucalyptus tree. I feel its stair-sticks Impressed on my palms, my insteps, as I climb To my tree house. The gray leaves make me mix My coughing chest, anointed at bedtime, With the smell of the sap trickling from the tan Trunk, where the nails go in. My lifetime Got rid of, I sit in a dark blue sedan Beside my great-grandmother, in Hollywood. We pass a windmill, a pink sphinx, an Allbran Billboard; thinking of Salâmmbo, Robin Hood, The old prospector with his flapjack in the air, I sit with my hands folded: I am good. That night as I lie crossways in an armchair Reading Amazing Stories(just as, long before, I'd lie by my rich uncle's polar bear On his domed library's reflecting floor In the last year of the first World War, and see A poor two-seater being attacked by four Triplanes, on the cover of the Literary Digest, and a Camel coming to its aid; I'd feel the bear's fur warm and rough against me, The colors of the afternoon would fade, I'd reach into the bear's mouth and hold tight To its front tooth and think, "I'm not afraid") There off Sunset, in the lamplit starlight, A scientist is getting ready to destroy The world. "It's time for you to say good night," Mama tells me; I go on in breathless joy. "Remember, tomorrow is a school day," Mama tells me; I go on in breathless joy. At last I go to Mama in her gray Silk, to Pop, to Dandeen in her black Silk. I put my arms around them, they Put their arms around me. Then I go back To my bedroom; I read as I undress. The scientist is ready to attack. Mama calls, "Is your light out?" I call back, "Yes," And turn the light out. Forced out of life into Bed, for a moment I lie comfortless In the blank darkness; then as I always do, I put on the earphones of the crystal set— Each bed has its earphones—and the uneasy tissue Of their far-off star-sound, of the blue-violet Of space, surrounds the sweet voice from the Tabernacle Of the Four-Square Gospel. A vague marionette, Tall, auburn, holds her arms out, to unshackle The bonds of sin, of sleep—as, next instant, the sun Holds its arms out through the fig, the lemon tree, In the back yard the clucking hens all cackle As Mama brings their chicken feed. I see My magazine. My magazine! Dressing for school, I read how the good world wins its victory Over that bad man. Books; book strap; jump the footstool You made in Manual Training . . . Then we three Sit down, and one says grace; and then, by rule, By that habit that moves the stars, some coffee— One spoonful—is poured out into my milk And the milk, transubstantiated, is coffee. And Mama's weekday wash-dress, Dandeen's soft black silk Are ways that habit itself makes holy Just as, on Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, His will Comes in their ways—of Church, of Prayer Meeting—to set free The spirit from the flesh it questions. So, So unquestioned, my own habit moves me To and through and from school, like a domino, Till, home, I wake to find that I am playing Dominoes with Dandeen. Her old face is slow In pleasure, slow in doubt, as she sits weighing Strategies: patient, equable, and humble, She hears what this last child of hers is saying In pride or bewilderment; and she will grumble Like a child or animal when, indifferent To the reasons of my better self, I mumble: "I'd better stop now—the rabbit . . ." I relent And play her one more game. It is miraculous To have a great-grandmother: I feel different From others as, between moves, we discuss The War Between the States. The cheerful troops Ride up to our farmhouse, steal from us The spoons, the horses—when their captain stoops To Dandeen and puts Dandeen on his horse, She cries . . . As I run by the chicken coops With lettuce for my rabbit, real remorse Hurts me, here, now: the little girl is crying Because I didn't write. Because— of course, I was a child, I missed them so. But justifying Hurts too: if only I could play you one more game, See you all one more time! I think of you dying Forgiving me—or not, it is all the same To the forgiven . . . My rabbit's glad to see me; He scrambles to me, gives me little tame Bites before he eats the lettuce. His furry Long warm soft floppy ears, his crinkling nose Are reassuring to a child. They guarantee, As so much here does, that the child knows Who takes care of him, whom he takes care of. Mama comes out and takes in the clothes From the clothesline. She looks with righteous love At all of us, her spare face half a girl's. She enters a chicken coop, and the hens shove And flap and squawk, in fear; the whole flock whirls Into the farthest corner. She chooses one, Comes out, and wrings its neck. The body hurls Itself out—lunging, reeling, it begins to run Away from Something, to fly away from Something In great flopping circles. Mama stands like a nun In the center of each awful, anguished ring. The thudding and scrambling go on, go on—then they fade, I open my eyes, it's over . . . Could such a thing Happen to anything ? It could to a rabbit, I'm afraid; It could to— "Mama, you won't kill Reddy ever, You won't ever, will you?" The farm woman tries to persuade The little boy, her grandson, that she'd never Kill the boy's rabbit, never even think of it. He would like to believe her . . . And whenever I see her, there in that dark infinite, Standing like Judith, with the hen's head in her hand, I explain it away, in vain—a hypocrite, Like all who love. Into the blue wonderland Of Hollywood, the sun sinks, past the eucalyptus, The sphinx, the windmill, and I watch and read and Hold my story tight. And when the bus Stops at the corner and Pop—Pop!—steps down And I run out to meet him, a blurred nimbus, Half-red, half-gold, enchants his sober brown Face, his stooped shoulders, into the All-Father's. He tells me about the work he's done downtown, We sit there on the steps. My universe Mended almost, I tell him about the scientist. I say, "He couldn't really, could he, Pop ?" My comforter's Eyes light up, and he laughs. "No, that's just play, Just make-believe," he says. The sky is gray, We sit there, at the end of our good day.