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In an uncurtained room across the way a woman in a tight dress paints her lips a deeper red, and sizes up her hips for signs of ounces gained since yesterday. She has a thoughtful and a clever face, but she is also smart enough to know the truth: however large the brain may grow, the lashes and the earrings must keep pace. Although I’ve spread my books in front of me with a majestic air of I’ll show her, I’m much less confident than I’d prefer, and now I’ve started pacing nervously. I’m poring over theorems, tomes and tracts. I’m getting ready for a heavy date by staying up ridiculously late. But a small voice advises, Face the facts: go on this way and you’ll soon come to harm. The world’s most famous scholars wander down the most appalling alleyways in town, a blond and busty airhead on each arm. There is an inner motor known as lust that makes a man of learning walk a mile to gratify his raging senses, while the woman he can talk to gathers dust. A chilling vision of the years ahead invades my thoughts, and widens like a stain: a barren dance card and a teeming brain, a crowded bookcase and an empty bed... What if I compromised? I’d stay up late to hone my elocutionary skills, and at the crack of dawn I’d swallow pills to calm my temper and control my weight, but I just can’t. Romantics, so far gone they think their lovers live for wisdom, woo by growing wiser; when I think of you I find the nearest lamp and turn it on. Great gods of longing, watch me as I work and if I sprout a martyr’s smarmy grin please find some violent way to do me in; I’m burning all these candles not to shirk a night of passion, but to give that night a richly textured backdrop when it comes. The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs her discourse down has never seen the flight of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage; the fool whose love is truest is the one who knows a lover’s work is never done. I’ll call you when I’ve finished one more page.

The soul descends once more in bitter love… —Richard Wilbur The eyes open to the cries of police. Skirting sleep, the soul industrial as laundry— realities like bad checks, burning like new sex. Dinner is the better half of someone’s lunch. Someone’s playing a guessing game: Psychosis or Handsfree. Local fame. Praying to a calf, or debt ceiling, keeps us grounded. You can take the kid out the food court, but child support won’t upgrade from buy to buy— outbid, I am my financial aide. Astounded, we wake and take. Let every boy Tolstoy with disease have a chance. Liabilities, let’s dance. We’re clean— or rather, not unclean— doxycycline our balance sheet. Our spirits, neat.

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels. Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessèd day, And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” Yet, as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.”

Let me cook you some dinner. Sit down and take off your shoes and socks and in fact the rest of your clothes, have a daquiri, turn on some music and dance around the house, inside and out, it’s night and the neighbors are sleeping, those dolts, and the stars are shining bright, and I’ve got the burners lit for you, you hungry thing.

Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s contractions are five minutes apart. Doctor says,Is this her first child? guy says,No, it’s her husband. I promise to try to remember who I am. Wife gets up on one elbow, says, I wanted to get married. It seemed a fulfillment of some several things, a thing to be done. Even the diamond ring was some thing like a quest, a thing they set you out to get and how insane the quest is; how you have to turn it every way before you can even think to seek it; this metaphysical refraining is in fact the quest. Who’d have guessed? She sighs, I like the predictability of two, I like my pleasures fully expected, when the expectation of them grows patterned in its steady surprise. I’ve got my sweet and tumble pat. Here on earth, I like to count upon a thing like that. Thus explained the woman in contractions to her lover holding on the telephone for the doctor to recover from this strange conversational turn. You say you’re whom? It is a pleasure to meet you. She rolls her eyes, but he’d once asked her Am I your first lover? and she’d said,Could be. Your face looks familiar.

November 22, 1963 First, a black mark in the sky, a speck that grows into a plane widening, dramatically circling before it touches a gray strip of land designed for its landing. Then the players descend the wheeled stair to the stage for the cameras, our collective eye: first her, then him, as is custom, and their entourage trailing behind, those who believe the world is young and the future spreads out like geography. It's the beginning of all that, and what a show it is, the bouquet of roses we see given to her on the scratchy screen, the film pouring its light, edges burned. And who knows what's truth, what's myth, or if they arrive as hawks or doves, brave with risk in a bright and swirling land where the dust seems to crown from its own gray dust. Here's the raw footage. Here's the film clicking in the projector, and, as all things seen through it are black and white, isn't it important to note her roses are red and not yellow, and that neither of them squints in the bright Texas sun? If you can stand what the light inside the darkness does to your eyes, watch them pause there for a moment: our champion, our grace, in that high noon that holds all the freshness of the morning.

Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white, And soon down ladders of reflected light The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually They separate on paths of long ago, Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew That leads, live as a nerve, to memory. But often when too steep her dream descends, Perhaps to the grotto where her father bends To pick her up, the husband wakes as though He had forgotten something in the house. Motionless he eyes the room that glows With the little animals of light that prowl This way and that. Soft are the beasts of light But softer still her hand that drifts so white Upon the whiteness. How like a water-plant It floats upon the black canal of sleep, Suspended upward from the distant deep In pure achievement of its lovely want! Quietly then he plucks it and it folds And is again a hand, small as a child’s. He would revive it but it barely stirs And so he carries it off a little way And breaks it open gently. Now he can see The sweetness of the fruit, his hand eats hers.

Immortal Love, author of this great frame, Sprung from that beauty which can never fade, How hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name, And thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made, While mortal love doth all the title gain! Which siding with Invention, they together Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain, (Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither. Wit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit; The world is theirs, they two play out the game, Thou standing by: and though Thy glorious name Wrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit, Who sings Thy praise? Only a scarf or glove Doth warm our hands, and make them write of love.

You ever wake up with your footie PJs warming your neck like a noose? Ever upchuck after a home-cooked meal? Or notice how the blood on the bottoms of your feet just won’t seem to go away? Love, it used to be you could retire your toothbrush for like two or three days and still I’d push my downy face into your neck. Used to be I hung on your every word. (Sing! you’d say: and I was a bird. Freedom! you’d say: and I never really knew what that meant, but liked the way it rang like a rusty bell.) Used to be. But now I can tell you your breath stinks and you’re full of shit. You have more lies about yourself than bodies beneath your bed.Rooting for the underdog. Team player. Hook, line and sinker. Love, you helped design the brick that built the walls around the castle in the basement of which is a vault inside of which is another vault inside of which . . . you get my point. Your tongue is made of honey but flicks like a snake’s. Voice like a bird but everyone’s ears are bleeding. From the inside your house shines and shines, but from outside you can see it’s built from bones. From out here it looks like a graveyard, and the garden’s all ash. And besides, your breath stinks. We’re through.

FOR BAILEY We were entwined in red rings Of blood and loneliness before The first snows fell Before muddy rivers seeded clouds Above a virgin forest, and Men ran naked, blue and black Skinned into the warm embraces Of Sheba, Eve and Lilith. I was your sister. You left me to force strangers Into brother molds, exacting Taxations they never Owed or could ever pay. You fought to die, thinking In destruction lies the seed Of birth. You may be right. I will remember silent walks in Southern woods and long talks In low voices Shielding meaning from the big ears Of overcurious adults. You may be right. Your slow return from Regions of terror and bloody Screams, races my heart. I hear again the laughter Of children and see fireflies Bursting tiny explosions in An Arkansas twilight.