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We were apart; yet, day by day, I bade my heart more constant be. I bade it keep the world away, And grow a home for only thee; Nor fear'd but thy love likewise grew, Like mine, each day, more tried, more true. The fault was grave! I might have known, What far too soon, alas! I learn'd— The heart can bind itself alone, And faith may oft be unreturn'd. Self-sway'd our feelings ebb and swell— Thou lov'st no more;—Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!—and thou, thou lonely heart, Which never yet without remorse Even for a moment didst depart From thy remote and spher{e}d course To haunt the place where passions reign— Back to thy solitude again! Back! with the conscious thrill of shame Which Luna felt, that summer-night, Flash through her pure immortal frame, When she forsook the starry height To hang over Endymion's sleep Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep. Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved How vain a thing is mortal love, Wandering in Heaven, far removed. But thou hast long had place to prove This truth—to prove, and make thine own: "Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone." Or, if not quite alone, yet they Which touch thee are unmating things— Ocean and clouds and night and day; Lorn autumns and triumphant springs; And life, and others' joy and pain, And love, if love, of happier men. Of happier men—for they, at least, Have dream'd two human hearts might blend In one, and were through faith released From isolation without end Prolong'd; nor knew, although not less Alone than thou, their loneliness.

The Israeli Navy, sailing to the end of the world, stocked with grain and books black with God’s verse, turned back, rather than sail on the Sabbath. Six days, was the consensus, was enough for anyone. So the world, it was concluded, was three days wide in each direction, allowing three days back. And Saturdays were given over to keeping close, while Sundays the Navy, all decked out in white and many-colored skullcaps, would sail furiously, trying to go off the deep end. Yo-ho-ho, would say the sailors, for six days. While on the shore their women moaned. For years, their boats were slow, and all show. And they turned into families on the only land they knew.

And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN In Heaven a spirit doth dwell “Whose heart-strings are a lute”; None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell), Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute. Tottering above In her highest noon, The enamoured moon Blushes with love, While, to listen, the red levin (With the rapid Pleiads, even, Which were seven,) Pauses in Heaven. And they say (the starry choir And the other listening things) That Israfeli’s fire Is owing to that lyre By which he sits and sings— The trembling living wire Of those unusual strings. But the skies that angel trod, Where deep thoughts are a duty, Where Love’s a grown-up God, Where the Houri glances are Imbued with all the beauty Which we worship in a star. Therefore, thou art not wrong, Israfeli, who despisest An unimpassioned song; To thee the laurels belong, Best bard, because the wisest! Merrily live, and long! The ecstasies above With thy burning measures suit— Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love, With the fervour of thy lute— Well may the stars be mute! Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merely—flowers, And the shadow of thy perfect bliss Is the sunshine of ours. If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky.

In the frozen square, the student asks me if I will sell him the books from my backpack. He hides them under his winter coat. Steam rises from the whole wheat rolls we break open at the breakfast table. We drink hot apple tea and pronounce the skyline “charming.” In a jail a man counts the visible bones, and recounts them in the blaze of morning. To turn a self to light proves painful — each piece must be dissected in turn; you pass through every feeling imaginable, so many you might make a dictionary — dread to disgust, delight to degradation. The prisoner remembers wanting only to read as if in a fever — running fingers over pyramids of words as if he might translate himself from this life to a more vivid existence in which he cuts open the pages with a knife in plain sight of everyone like a man eating meat and potatoes at the dinner table. Not that world; this one where blue light and sharpened files, where identikit and stamps on passports, where the book in his back- pack is a crime, and I have sold him down the river for ideas I barely value — the volumes flung carelessly across my hotel room, while he picks mushrooms on the edge of dread, pallid ghosts of what won’t speak or be spoken. Or where I remember what it is to be present in the world, and I turn away, unable to bear it — so much light and dread, so much in the darkness growing or simply how hard to ever remain in place.

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done But he with a chuckle replied That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried. So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, and he did it! Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that; At least no one ever has done it;” But he took off his coat and he took off his hat And the first thing we knew he’d begun it. With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin, Without any doubting or quiddit, He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, and he did it. There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, There are thousands to prophesy failure, There are thousands to point out to you one by one, The dangers that wait to assail you. But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, Just take off your coat and go to it; Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.

If you had a lot of money (by some coincidence you’re at the Nassau Inn in Princeton getting a whiff of class) and you just noticed two days ago that your face has fallen, but you don’t believe it, so every time you look in the glass it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t. Would you take the money you needed for a new roof on your old house (the house you’re paying for over and over in property taxes) because it’s been leaking for years and you’re tired of emptying buckets and spraying for mold, would you take that money and get your face lifted? Face-lift. They cut a slit under your ears and pull up the slack and they tack it with plastic. Then they pull up the outer skin and trim it because it’s too long and fasten that. (Your skin pulls loose from the fat like chicken skin.) Because once you were almost as beautiful as Jane Wyman ... your friends all said that. Of course at the time she was married to Ronnie and you were involved with the ASU— a McCarthy suspect. Forget about your neck. They can’t do that yet. A face-lift lasts five years. So you could go on being a member of new-speak and re-entry— with the unsung benefits of radiation and by then your roof would have rotted anyway. Or been recycled by some corporate kid. But think how you’d rather be stripped and streaked and while you’re about it get some implants of baby teeth buds that they’ve taken from dead babies’ gums and frozen for this sort of thing. You could still die young.

It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit drying to chalk, trees falling at an angle, taking those moist and buried rootballs with them into deadly air. But someone will tell you the butterfly's the happy ending of every dirge-singing worm, the rat a river rat come up from a shimmering depth, the shit passed purely into scat one can read for a source, the creature that shadowed it one longish minute. And trees, of course they wanted to fall.It was their time or something equally sonorous. And wind too knows its mindless little whirlpool's not for nothing, not nothing—that pitch and rage stopped. How else does the sparrow's neck break.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility; The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea; Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.

a trouble archaically fettered to produce E Pluribus Unum an island in the sea a Capitol surmounted by Armed Liberty— painting sculpture straddled by a dome eight million pounds in weight iron plates constructed to expand and contract with variations of temperature the folding and unfolding of a lily. And Congress authorized and the Commission was entrusted was entrusted! a sculptured group Mars in Roman mail placing a wreath of laurel on the brow of Washington Commerce Minerva Thomas Jefferson John Hancock at the table Mrs. Motte presenting Indian burning arrows to Generals Marion and Lee to fire her mansion and dislodge the British— this scaleless jumble is superb and accurate in its expression of the thing they would destroy— Baptism of Poca- hontas with a little card hanging under it to tell the persons in the picture. It climbs it runs, it is Geo. Shoup of Idaho it wears a beard it fetches naked Indian women from a river Trumbull Varnum Henderson Frances Willard’s corset is absurd— Banks White Columbus stretched in bed men felling trees The Hon. Michael C. Kerr onetime Speaker of the House of Representatives Perry in a rowboat on Lake Erie changing ships the dead among the wreckage sickly green

We have the body of a woman, an arch over the ground, but there is no danger. Her hair falls, spine bowed, but no one is with her. The desert, yes, with its cacti, bursage, sidewinders. She is not in danger. If we notice, there are the tracks of animals moving east toward the sunrise. And the light is about to touch a woman's body without possession. Here, there are no girl's bones in the earth, marked with violence. A cholla blooms, just two feet away. It blooms. There is a man, like her father, who wakes to a note saying I have gone, for a day, to the desert