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I'm an inexperienced mourner I don't even know how to begin to cry out like that old man wailing in the next hospital room— oi vay, oi vay—his two sounds beating against the wall. He makes me squirm but I get his message better than my own. How can I free myself like him? How can I know my place as he does, know how little I am? How can I mourn, the cheep of a trapped bird crying out violent sorrow? Old man, teach me. Help me reach the bowels of my cry and bring it up, coarse, rasping. Teach me to be disgusting. Help me to exile myself from all the populations of eyes and ears. Teach me to live in that country where no one else is, where I can bash to pieces my good breeding, my priests and pillars —no illusions, the self wiped out, unable to see or hear or understand. Old man—lying in your shit— you've let the angel of death from your mouth. One minute of your unforgiving protest is like true song: reckless, fatal singing, song that is not victorious, not even consoling, merely a sound you have to make.

Very soon the Yankee teachers Came down and set up school; But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,— It was agin’ their rule. Our masters always tried to hide Book learning from our eyes; Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery— ’Twould make us all too wise. But some of us would try to steal A little from the book. And put the words together, And learn by hook or crook. I remember Uncle Caldwell, Who took pot liquor fat And greased the pages of his book, And hid it in his hat. And had his master ever seen The leaves upon his head, He’d have thought them greasy papers, But nothing to be read. And there was Mr. Turner’s Ben, Who heard the children spell, And picked the words right up by heart, And learned to read ’em well. Well, the Northern folks kept sending The Yankee teachers down; And they stood right up and helped us, Though Rebs did sneer and frown. And I longed to read my Bible, For precious words it said; But when I begun to learn it, Folks just shook their heads, And said there is no use trying, Oh! Chloe, you’re too late; But as I was rising sixty, I had no time to wait. So I got a pair of glasses, And straight to work I went, And never stopped till I could read The hymns and Testament. Then I got a little cabin A place to call my own— And I felt independent As the queen upon her throne.

At forty-eight, to be given water, which is most of the world, given life in water, which is most of me, given ease, which is most of what I lack, here, where walls don’t part to my hands, is to be born as of three weeks ago. Taking nothing from you, mother, or you, sky, or you, mountain, that you wouldn’t take if offered by the sea, any sea, or river, any river, or the pool, beside which a woman sits who would save me if I needed saving, in a red suit, as if flame is the color of emergency, as I do, need saving, from solid things, most of all, their dissolve.

On Magnolia Avenue there are no magnolias. Someone bought the house of the one survivor. All morning I heard the chainsaw sever its limbs from root to bud. No more scattered flowers, star city. No pink galaxy. Now the yard is a parking space, one Jeep SUV, one older car. Next door a woman comes out, late afternoon, a child in her arms. She speaks low, as if there’s just the two of them. She says to him, Listen to the little birdies, and he listens to the common sparrows talking in the hedge. He listens as they argue back and forth, their dialect of nature, as the street clatters with commuters taking a shortcut home. She says: Listen. And he turns his head to follow the fugitive motion, the small streaked wings unfolding, folding, the relentless chirp from a tiny blunt beak, the sound almost within reach.

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear the frantic automatic weapons unleashed, the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say:Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know. But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks break-necking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud roaring things will love her back, her soft small self alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm, until I yank the leash back to save her because I want her to survive forever.Don’t die, I say, and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth. Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

Chimerical, the rhinoceros egret, its keratin dehorned in South Africa and container-shipped to Vietnam or China where it’s ground by aphrodisiasts and snorted by affluent boneheads, metamorphs into the hippopotamus egret, the elephant, Cape buffalo, zebra, giraffe, the ostrich, and the camel egret, the deep-domed tortoise, and in the Americas the cow heron or cattle egret. Ranging like wildfire over the last century, a migration prodded by the transmutation of forests into ranches, the cattle egret writhes and champs and tilts and plods and darts in cursive at grasshoppers. And where its livestock gets concentrated, decapitated, tenderized, charred, whatever, the Bubulcus ibis or cattleman wader, capitalizing on a field without cattle, reinvents itself as the tractor egret though the unattached bird is emblem enough of the other end of extinction, ignition, when not just its shaggy breeding crest and breast plumage go up in flame but its legs, beak, lores, and irises catch color.

Leave him now quiet by the way To rest apart. I know what draws him to the dust alway And churns him in the builder’s lime: He has the fright of time. I heard it knocking in his breast A minute since; His human eyes did wince, He stubborned like the massive slaughter beast And as a thing o’erwhelmed with sound Stood bolted to the ground. Leave him, for rest alone can cure— If cure there be— This waif upon the sea. He is of those who slanted the great door And listened—wretched little lad— To what they said.

from Certain Sonnets Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust; And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things; Grow rich in that which never taketh rust; Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings. Draw in thy beams and humble all thy might To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light, That both doth shine and give us sight to see. O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide In this small course which birth draws out to death, And think how evil becometh him to slide, Who seeketh heav'n, and comes of heav'nly breath. Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see: Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.

I do not know where either of us can turn Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other. I do not know how we can bear The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon, Or many trees shaken together in the darkness. We shall wish not to be alone And that love were not dispersed and set free— Though you defeat me, And I be heavy upon you. But like earth heaped over the heart Is love grown perfect. Like a shell over the beat of life Is love perfect to the last. So let it be the same Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another; Let us know this for leavetaking, That I may not be heavy upon you, That you may blind me no more.

Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear. Let us go hence together without fear; Keep silence now, for singing-time is over, And over all old things and all things dear. She loves not you nor me as all we love her. Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, She would not hear. Let us rise up and part; she will not know. Let us go seaward as the great winds go, Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? There is no help, for all these things are so, And all the world is bitter as a tear. And how these things are, though ye strove to show, She would not know. Let us go home and hence; she will not weep. We gave love many dreams and days to keep, Flowers without scent, and fruits that would not grow, Saying 'If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and reap.' All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow; And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep, She would not weep. Let us go hence and rest; she will not love. She shall not hear us if we sing hereof, Nor see love's ways, how sore they are and steep. Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough. Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep; And though she saw all heaven in flower above, She would not love. Let us give up, go down; she will not care. Though all the stars made gold of all the air, And the sea moving saw before it move One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair; Though all those waves went over us, and drove Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair, She would not care. Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. Sing all once more together; surely she, She too, remembering days and words that were, Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we, We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me, She would not see.