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The American public is patient, The American public is slow, The American public will stand as much As any public I know. We submit to be killed by our railroads, We submit to be fooled by our press, We can stand as much government scandal As any folks going, I guess, We can bear bad air in the subway, We can bear quick death in the street, But we are a little particular About the things we eat. It is not so much that it kills us -- We are used to being killed; But we like to know what fills us When we pay for being filled When we pay the Beef Trust prices, As we must, or go without, It is not that we grudge the money But we grudge the horrid doubt. Is it ham or trichinosis? Can a label command belief? Is it pork we have purchased, or poison? Is it tuberculosis or beef? There is really a choice of diseases, To any one, little or big; And no man really pleases To die of a long dead pig. We take our risks as we’re able, On elevator and train, But to sit in peace at the table And to be seized with sudden pain When we are at home and happy -- Is really against the grain. And besides admitting the poison, Admitting we all must die, Accepting the second-hand sickness From a cholera-smitten stye; Patiently bearing the murder, Amiable, meek, inert, — We do rise up and remonstrate Against the Packingtown dirt. Let there be death in the dinner, Subtle and unforeseen, But O, Mr. Packer, in packing our death, Won’t you please to pack it clean!

Sonnet VII I would I might forget that I am I, And break the heavy chain that binds me fast, Whose links about myself my deeds have cast. What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky, Lord of the future, guardian of the past, And soon must forth, to know his own at last. In his large life to live, I fain would die. Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, But calling not his suffering his own; Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good, But knowing not he sits upon a throne; Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

I would like to describe the simplest emotion joy or sadness but not as others do reaching for shafts of rain or sun I would like to describe a light which is being born in me but I know it does not resemble any star for it is not so bright not so pure and is uncertain I would like to describe courage without dragging behind me a dusty lion and also anxiety without shaking a glass full of water to put it another way I would give all metaphors in return for one word drawn out of my breast like a rib for one word contained within the boundaries of my skin but apparently this is not possible and just to say—I love I run around like mad picking up handfuls of birds and my tenderness which after all is not made of water asks the water for a face and anger different from fire borrows from it a loquacious tongue so is blurred so is blurred in me what white-haired gentlemen separated once and for all and said this is the subject and this is the object we fall asleep with one hand under our head and with the other in a mound of planets our feet abandon us and taste the earth with their tiny roots which next morning we tear out painfully

I would not paint — a picture — I'd rather be the One It's bright impossibility To dwell — delicious — on — And wonder how the fingers feel Whose rare — celestial — stir — Evokes so sweet a torment — Such sumptuous — Despair — I would not talk, like Cornets — I'd rather be the One Raised softly to the Ceilings — And out, and easy on — Through Villages of Ether — Myself endued Balloon By but a lip of Metal — The pier to my Pontoon — Nor would I be a Poet — It's finer — Own the Ear — Enamored — impotent — content — The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts — of Melody!

Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state, Make thy self flutt'ring wings of thy fast flying Thought, and fly forth unto my love, wheresoever she be: Whether lying restless in heavy bed, or else Sitting so cheerless at the cheerful board, or else Playing alone careless on her heavenly virginals. If in bed, tell her, that my eyes can take no rest: If at board, tell her, that my mouth can eat no meat: If at her virginals, tell her, I can hear no mirth. Asked why? say: waking love suffereth no sleep: Say that raging love doth appal the weak stomach: Say, that lamenting love marreth the musical. Tell her, that her pleasures were wont to lull me asleep: Tell her, that her beauty was wont to feed mine eyes: Tell her, that her sweet tongue was wont to make me mirth. Now do I nightly waste, wanting my kindly rest: Now do I daily starve, wanting my lively food: Now do I always die, wanting thy timely mirth. And if I waste, who will bewail my heavy chance? And if I starve, who will record my cursed end? And if I die, who will say: "This was Immerito"?

Ianthe! you are call’d to cross the sea! A path forbidden me! Remember, while the Sun his blessing sheds Upon the mountain-heads, How often we have watcht him laying down His brow, and dropt our own Against each other’s, and how faint and short And sliding the support! What will succeed it now? Mine is unblest, Ianthe! nor will rest But on the very thought that swells with pain. O bid me hope again! O give me back what Earth, what (without you) Not Heaven itself can do— One of the golden days that we have past, And let it be my last! Or else the gift would be, however sweet, Fragile and incomplete.

was it so I could never say across a courtroom that man, the one standing there was it so you could walk among us again after as if you had shed the body that did those things was it because you could not bear my pupils so huge they would have swallowed you my whites like flayed kneecaps when you pressed down to singe them back into my skull they were softer than you expected you had thought them diamond hard weapons turned on you was it so you could imagine a time when you would be human again among humans that you had to leave some of us alive?

In the warming house, children lace their skates, bending, choked, over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river. December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove, the first sheer ice, black, then white and deep until the city sends trucks of men with wooden barriers to put up the boys’ hockey rink. An hour of skating after school, of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling, then—twilight, the warming house steamy with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep playing, slamming the round black puck until it’s dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father. Although there isn’t music, they glide arm in arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, find her perfect, skate with her in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

A million years ago the earth grew cold. Iowa was covered by twenty-five hundred feet of ice. No one knows why the glaciers formed and spread, or why they eventually retreated. I blinked and you were gone. As a boy, he loved the idea of the ice age. Lumbering woolly mammoths and giant sloths. Outside, a vast white edict erasing the landscape. Inside his head, cave paintings of bison leapt in the firelight, their horns spiraling upward, the tips smoking. Men on skis came to dig you out. Though they worked all night, they were too late. Waking every day the frost reasserts itself. Its relentlessness a tedium, a closure. The earth must have looked more familiar when all was water. We don’t recognize ourselves amidst this overwhelming winter: static that censors newscasts, cold that burns, incessant dripping as icicles perfect themselves. The night skies are a riot of Chinese silk: bolts of crimson and shadow-blue. The radio crackles faintly. Medical refuse litters the beaches, spews into the water from a backed up sewer under the pier. Bacteria cavort in the seawater. The weather’s gone haywire all over the globe. The more sensitive you are the earlier you’ll die. Just hold your breath a little longer, dear. Once you start this medication, you can’t stop. Your life changes. You decide, based on a dearth of information, which force you want to submit to:nature, now less maternal than ever, or her idiot son—modern medicine. You make an effort to find some grand design in this blindness. If you can’t see well enough anymore to edit your film, perhaps you can still do the music. You set an example. Lemme outa here. As a boy, before his mother found out and made him stop, he’d bury the frozen birds he found on the porch after big storms by warming the earth first with his father’s blowtorch. Being human, we can’t help attempting to arrange events into patterns—the way a sick man sees faces in the stains on his bedroom ceiling. He names them. Months later, they all converse. The men in the ice-covered radio station play cards and drink bourbon. What defense can one mount against an avalanche? Spotless beakers, pipettes, rows of small cages. Welcome to the lab. Here’s the chamber where we run preliminary screenings. Better don these gloves. Why not use two pair, like me? The new man on the night shift nods off over his work, with the radio playing. Its tinny strands of music enter his dream disguised as a dead friend’s hair. He had short coarse hair, like a terrier’s, pleasantly stiff to the touch. The lab is brightly lit to ward off the backwash of night. Under the table the research assistant’s feet twitch spasmodically in his sleep. A series of blurry black-and-white newsreels flickers on the screen. Martian canals overflow their banks. A lake in Africa exhales a cloud of poison gas, killing thousands of villagers on its shores. Venice sinks. Anchorage, Alaska, is leveled by earthquakes. Pompeii is breaded and fried by its volcano. The swamp swallows another sand bar, then coughs up a tiny island. Subzero temperatures paralyze Acapulco.There have been several ice ages, a female narrator intones.The most recent lasted 90,000 years. A timer goes off and the lab assistant jerks awake. In about the time it takes to drink a glass of water, he remembers where he is. “This is probably the last time I will write to you . . .” The rocks applaud. Summers turn short and cool. The world remakes itself without us now.

The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit. “Open up!” they bellow, hands quiet before my door that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway. You can’t do it, I squeak from inside. You can’t make me feel at home here in this time of siege for me and mine,mi raza. Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy is now a permanent resident in my gut. “Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear, striding up to my table to juice me a glass of pink nectar. They’ve brought welcome baskets stuffed with proof I’m earthling. From under a gingham cover, I tug a dark feather iridescing green — cohering to “magpie” thought, to memory’s chatter, to mind. Mine. And here they have my mind translated into a slate-surfaced pond, which vibrates in the shape of a cottonwood’s autumn molt, which trees me to dirt, which soils me heat & freeze — But you’ll always be one definitive document short! I complain. Doubts can forever outstrip your geo-logic. For which they produce a lock of my natal dust, bronzed to the fluttering fiber of lacebark pine. Where’d they get that stuff? The baskets are bottomless, and it’s useless for me to insist on being distinct. Undergoing re-portation, I’m awakened to a Center, where walls between all beings are dreamt to dissolve.