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The eyeballs on her behind are like fire Leaping and annoying The space they just passed Just like fire would do The ground have no mouth to complain And the girl is not braver herself She is beautiful in her spotted Leopard ensemble. Heartless so To keep her fashionalbe in New York Leopards are dying Crude comments flutter around her At lunchtime. She sure look good She remembers nine banishing speeches More powerful than this is the seam Of the leotard under her clothing Her tail in the leotard is never still The seam! She feels it too familiar on her leg As some crumb says something suggestive The leopard embracing around her Is too chic to leap and strike Her thoughts fall back to last semester’s karate Underneath, the leotard crouches up on her thigh It is waiting for its terrible moment!

White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross, The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun. Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young, In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade. Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes. Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, Holding his head up for a flag of all the free. Love-light of Spain—hurrah! Death-light of Africa! Don John of Austria Is riding to the sea. Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, (Don John of Austria is going to the war.) He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees, His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas. He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees, And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing. Giants and the Genii, Multiplex of wing and eye, Whose strong obedience broke the sky When Solomon was king. They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn, From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn; They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be; On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl, Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl; They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,— They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound. And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide, And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest, For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west. We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done, But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago: It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate! It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth, Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.” For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, (Don John of Austria is going to the war.) Sudden and still—hurrah! Bolt from Iberia! Don John of Austria Is gone by Alcalar. St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north (Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift. He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone; The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone; The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee, But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, Trumpet that sayeth ha! Domino gloria! Don John of Austria Is shouting to the ships. King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck (Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.) The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin, And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon, He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon, And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day, And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work, But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk. Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed— Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid Gun upon gun, ha! ha! Gun upon gun, hurrah! Don John of Austria Has loosed the cannonade. The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year, The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear. He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark, They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark; And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young. They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon. And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell, And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign— (But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!) Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop, Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. Vivat Hispania! Domino Gloria!

Les plantes et les planètes Au même ciel obáissent ; Du même soleil les bêtes Et les hommes se nourrissent ; Et le mátal dans la mine Couve l'astre minuscule, Soufre dont la fleur si fine Vit en chaque corpuscule. Naines ou gáantes sont Poudre et bran jetás loin Qui sans chute ou frein s'en vont Aux quatre mondes sans coin Ni angle, d'anges peuplás, Mais d'autres disent que non, Dont les mondes envolás Seraient comme d'un canon, Par qui par hasard tirá, L'expansive consáquence, Et d'aucune intelligence Le fruit de quel grain tirá. [Plants and planets] Plants and planets Obey the same heaven; As beasts and men Are nourished by the same sun; And the metal in the mine Warms minute stars, Sulphurous flowers so delicate They live in every corpuscule. Dwarves and giants are Powder and dust thrown far Without fall or check whirl To the four cornerless, angleless Worlds, peopled with angels, But others say not at all. Their worlds seem Fired from a cannon, Fired by whom by chance, This expanding consequence, The fruit of some grapeshot Without any intelligence.

I was walking from the Louvre to Place Saint-Michel along the Seine when I noticed a crowd gathered under a large linden tree. As I approached I thought how much I’d liked to walk down Unter den Linden when I’d lived in Berlin, and now I saw again how attractive the light green seeds of the linden tree were against the darker green of the leaves. I was also agog to see what had caused the crowd to gather. As I neared I heard a mother say to her little boy, “Regardez, Sébastien, les saltimbanques.” Saltimbanques? This was a new word to me. I had a quick look on my iPhone and came up with the translation “mountebank.” 
I pushed my way as politely as possible through the crowd until I had a good view. It was a family of street performers. They had improvised a small stage on the wide pavement, and a father, mother, and ten-year-old or so boy were up there. The man was dressed in a striking yellow and blue outfit with white leggings and black shoes, and was banging a little drum rhythmically while the boy in a checked black-and-white jumpsuit capered about, playing thumb rolls on a tambourine, with a black-and-white dog dancing in perfect step alongside him. The woman dressed all in white sat on a stool playing quick dance music on a red tin whistle. On her head was a white floppy hat, sitting on which was a snowy owl who periodically flew in a circle over the heads of the crowd, coming back to land on the white hat. It was a scene worthy of being painted by the young Picasso, or the old Chagall. Or maybe by Gustave Doré. The boy on stage didn’t look in the best of health, but I hoped I was wrong. The effect of the whole performance was strange and utterly charming. And the little troupe seemed to have emerged from another era — from that of Baudelaire, even. I was puzzled by the translation offered by my iPhone, however. 
What I understood by the English word “mountebank” (which seemed very archaic) was either a person who sold quack medicines in public places, or a charlatan. These performers were no fakes. And yet, the English word, like the French, seemed to suggest the jumping up onto a stage. I’d have to revisit my Shakespeare plays — I seemed to remember that he’d liked using that word. When the white hat came round I put a €20 note into it, took a quick photograph of les saltimbanques and made my way to the nearest metro. I was almost surprised to see cars and motorbikes clogging the road.

Once, we were coming back From a fête votive in Goudargues When, sticky with pink barbe à papa, And queasy because The hairpinning road through St Marcel de Careiret Resembled the crazy-maze passage of our caroming bumper car, We were met by a stream of sangliers— Wild boars — Dashing across the D9 near the Forêt de Cavillargues. They pelted in a single ribbon, as I recall, So how could we even tell what they were, How distinguish that ruche of  shadow and wind From any other ghost of  the district? That year I came across A theory about the suffix –argues That trails behind village names all around here. (Vallérargues, St André d’Olérargues, Goussargues, Foussargues.) It may refer to an area of  land Given to Roman soldiers after service in North Africa By the praetor in Nîmes. Cavillargues. The acres of Cavillus, perhaps. The hairy pigs had emigrated, perhaps from the Caucasus, And no doubt had settled the Val de Tave long before Cavillus Arrived to begin gentrification. He wandered from the marble steps of the Maison Carrée, Perhaps having paid obeisance to Roman gods and governors, Perhaps uncertain from an encounter with the local plonk, And les sangliers came out to give him a thrill, And to tell him that this is not yet the Forêt de Cavillargues you can’t run through it as if you were a ground-level mistral with your feet like bound clumps of asparagus and your eyes on the Perseid meteor showers all roads lead to Rome except ours

NONES At three p.m. under sky coming to harm something too red flashes from a limb, so red it hurts: against sky coming apart, against a left-out, twice-soaked shirt, a cardinal inflames the profane cathedral of suburban yard its owner let fall into disgrace. How rain embarrasses the half-pruned hedge. The half-mown grass that sports a tonsure in reverse shines under the torture. Rain slicks with praise red shed, red feather. Crested seedeater out of character where you’re neither the strictly monkish brown thrasher nor the odd hermit thrush, you scratch in the underbrush of faith to see what you can flush: a grub. A seed. Eminence not grise but rouge, from your lipsticked beak you pass a sowbug to your mate. You peck at a slug sliming your path, seeming to beg your forgiveness. To what would you confess beyond season-to-season unfaithfulness? VESPERS There are more divine hours: a gold-leafed page a mower rows with a scythe as tall as the tower that tents aloft a tiny sky bereft of cloud, a chapel ceiling left unstarred, heaven a lake turned upside down, filled with an emptiness that’s clean because it’s cold, glacial enough to scald the skin it bathed, the lungs it filled. On devotion’s last page, deep in the golden age of illumination, the hunt’s cortège has halted at the edge of the known world, a clearing wedged in a forest of spears. Red bird the badge on the huntsman’s tunic, you’re the splash of crimson lake, the distant lordship’s flag, the cleric dog’s bright collar, its heretic tongue. It slavers on the bleeding stag. Snarling at prayer that chases belief, it licks the offal of grief, the heart cast aside reward enough.

—cooked by crooked math—is more than enough. For example, the rough patch on the roof of the mouth we tongue— a light fixture, chandelier of texture—is so much more than mere canker. And when fingering the clasp on Father's snuffbox, his fine initials grate against our fingerprints' grain like an engraved last gasp. Less, being more, makes of the tectonic plates of molehills a mountain ridge the way the stark plain of the White Album's sleeve raises the Beatles' embossed logo to the level of topography— the way tiny things can't help being, next to nothing, something— the unanticipated mole that makes a one-night stand's upturned ass, the last leaf out on a limb, the little going a long way.

He hardly spoke any words only two — or you could call it one the last thing he said was bye-bye flight-feathers veined and hairlike with interlocking barbules of  sound the bye-bye trapped a breath of air the two linked words drifted out on a calm lake that lay there with a single purpose — to receive final words and allow them to drift on its surface out and further out on the lake of  thought and composure encircled by mountains the simple phrase soared upwards to the highest peak where it would be planted like a flag would eventually be enshrined each identical word carefully balanced either side of the invisible join — like baby talk he put equal emphasis on each word his face was pinched and his bird beak very prominent there have never been two joined words with so much space around them pack up all my cares and woes light the light I’ll arrive late tonight blackbird     bye bye bye

Where am I going today if I'm going anywhere at all without my soul, that bird with its unreadable, unheard name having wandered off again, convinced that it is more than just a word— do we travel far from each other today?— me in my pre-owned Mazda with my radio full of wasps' nest news, my Peshawar & my Rupert Murdoch, all my guilty Murdochs— my destination like a homestead made of fallen maple leaves, the three leaves that form a tipi tipped together by a 5-year-old's hands, a dwelling place, where if I wanted to I could rest my human rights while my soul travels far from its base, lost for a while on its own highly privatized trip, the idea of living forever an idea that is not an eternity at all for my wanderer but a wish the bird has to fly brocaded by herself within the borders of a tapestry, far from some witch queen's cackle, far from that witch who has disguised herself as a sparhawk woven out of dark thread by a Flemish peasant's hands— how far is too far, you ask?— a little foolishness goes a long, long way, I'd say; a lot drops dead in its tracks.

After a morning of work in separate rooms she said she was going to the municipal pool and he said he would walk along the river for a while before they met back for their lunch of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went to the lobby of the Hotel du Panthéon to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup ofnthe Irish tea she liked and he to the little church of St. Médard. A couple old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews. He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone. And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes were filled with kids from the elementary school or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex with the curtains drawn against the chemistry students conducting their experiments in the building across the street. Incremental triumphs of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings they liked to fire champagne corks over at the vast darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe. Turning back to their tumors with relief.