O faint sad noises
and milky dullness,

rose-colored blindness
in evening gowns

how moist and rhythmic
those who walk near

the glassy harbor.
Silent drift of deserters

from the theater,
and everywhere the stars

receding, receding . . .
nothing to hold onto

but their own silver hearts.

My mother took the bag from its box— 
home to my father’s ashes for thirteen years— 
and poured its heft into a form she made  
on the potter’s wheel—a vase, damp and unfired. 
She pinched the rotating lip, and sealed the clay  
perfectly shut, a technique I haven’t yet mastered.

We planned to launch it like a football at low tide,  
but when we arrived, the beach was lined with people, 
and there was no subtle way for my brother to toss it out past  
the children kneeling in the surf, the surfers awaiting the break. 

To carry my father out, arm above my head, heavy with him— 
or hold him against my chest, side-stroking  
with one hand while the clay disintegrated into the water— 
I wasn’t dressed for it.

Instead, we dropped him in the water by the docks  
by the old Shrimp Shack, all 6’4” of him, 
and I watched the vessel slowly descend, a few bubbles  
emerging as if the last breath left in a dying lung.

This is not a small voice
you hear               this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river mouths.

This is not a small love
you hear               this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron and lace.
This is a love initialed Black Genius.

This is not a small voice
you hear.

Friendless, with an intimation of islands,
The merchant set up shop on shore.

He had no jovial manner and made no eye
Contact with customers but gazed--

They might be birds or nations--at white
Forms out there in the offing.  People preferred

Buying from him to pretending to be hearty
And earthy--what you have to do with some shopkeepers.

He was the lower-middle class transfinite--
Handing you something to eat and taking the cash

With indifference like the unpainted eyes
Of the oldest classical sculptures of their own erosion,

The self (imagine this) no longer tainted,
The blue long gone because of weather.

So torn by my tides, I do not know I can read them.

Hour book, our book. “H” in Italian is a tool, not a sound. My mother slips the “h” in only where it doesn’t belong. Our book, our book. How events just accumulate in time. Who will we lose in the duration of this writing. The promise of future children named for our beloved dead. Whispered at caskets. An hour dead. How many hours.

In our village the streets empty at appointed times. If life were a time-lapse video, lingering would be more visible than slipping away. Invisible motions the more pronounced. Once I stood akimbo, 8PM mid-street, waiting for everyone to go. I am astonished, in memory, by the boldness of it. Did everyone go?

                      How many ours.

It dreams in the deepest sleep, it remembers the storm
       last month or it feels the far storm
Off Unalaska and the lash of the sea-rain.
It is never mournful but wise, and takes the magical
       misrule of the steep world
With strong tolerance, its depth is not moved
From where the green sun fails to where the thin red clay
       lies on the basalt
And there has never been light nor life.
The black crystal, the untroubled fountain, the roots of
       endurance.

                      Therefore I belted
The house and the tower and courtyard with stone,
And have planted the naked foreland with future forest
       toward noon and morning: for it told me,
The time I was gazing in the black crystal,
To be faithful in storm, patient of fools, tolerant of
       memories and the muttering prophets,
It is needful to have night in one’s body.

Often now as an old man 
Who sleeps only four hours a night, 
I wake before dawn, dress and go down 
To my study to start typing: 
Poems, letters, more pages 
In the book of recollections. 
Anything to get words flowing, 
To get them out of my head 
Where they’re pressing so hard 
For release it’s like a kind 
Of pain. My study window 
Faces east, out over the meadow, 
And I see this morning 
That the sheep have scattered 
On the hillside, their white shapes 
Making the pattern of the stars 
In Canis Major, the constellation 
Around Sirius, the Dog Star, 
Whom my father used to point 
Out to us, calling it 
For some reason I forget 
Little Dog Peppermint. 

What is this line I’m writing? 
I never could scan in school. 
It’s certainly not an Alcaic. 
Nor a Sapphic. Perhaps it’s 
The short line Rexroth used 
In The Dragon & The Unicorn,
Tossed to me from wherever 
He is by the Cranky Old Bear 
(but I loved him). It’s really 
Just a prose cadence, broken 
As I breathe while putting 
My thoughts into words; 
Mostly they are stored-up 
Memories—dove sta memoria. 
Which one of the Italians 
Wrote that? Dante or Cavalcanti? 
Five years ago I’d have had 
The name on the tip of my tongue 
But no longer. In India
They call a storeroom a godown,
But there’s inventory
For my godown. I can’t keep 
Track of what’s in there. 
All those people in books 
From Krishna & the characters 
In the Greek Anthology 
Up to the latest nonsense 
Of the Deconstructionists, 
Floating around in my brain, 
A sort of “continuous present”
As Gertrude Stein called it; 
The world in my head 
Confusing me about the messy 
World I have to live in. 
Better the drunken gods of Greece 
Than a life ordained by computers. 

My worktable faces east; 
I watch for the coming 
Of the dawnlight, raising 
My eyes occasionally from 
The typing to rest them, 
There is always a little ritual, 
A moment’s supplication 
To Apollo, god of the lyre; 
Asking he keep an eye on me 
That I commit no great stupidity. 
Phoebus Apollo, called also 
Smintheus the mousekiller
For the protection he gives 
The grain of the farmers. My 
Dawns don't come up like thunder 
Though I have been to Mandalay 
That year when I worked in Burma. 
Those gentle, tender people
Puzzled by modern life; 
The men, the warriors, were lazy, 
It was the women who hustled, 
Matriarchs running the businesses. 
And the girls bound their chests 
So their breasts wouldn’t grow; 
Who started that, and why? 
My dawns come up circumspectly, 
Quietly with no great fuss. 
Night was and in ten minutes 
Day is, unless of course 
It’s raining hard. Then comes 
My first breakfast. I can’t cook 
So it’s only tea, puffed wheat and 
Pepperidge Farm biscuits. 
Then a cigar. Dr Luchs 
Warned me the cigars 
Would kill me years ago 
But I’m still here today. 

                       I

When the sea has devoured the ships,
And the spires and the towers
Have gone back to the hills.
And all the cities
Are one with the plains again.
And the beauty of bronze,
And the strength of steel
Are blown over silent continents,
As the desert sand is blown—
My dust with yours forever.

                       II

When folly and wisdom are no more,
And fire is no more,
Because man is no more;
When the dead world slowly spinning
Drifts and falls through the void—
My light with yours
In the Light of Lights forever!
 

It to take; or was it to be unpacked?
Packed it might signify death. The wind
Death the wind calculating your lesson—
hast thou learned a thing? The name of
a thing. I am still defiant, of the presumption,
as articulated. I passed him
in his velveteen jacket worn elbows. The
enculturated elbows of Death need patches.
Do you want my job? he said, for you are brave.
And you are the one different one . . . How do
you know? In your sleep I approach you
and you breathe on me, as if I were an object,
observable malice. I mean, he said, when you
die, that’s when you can be me. Spy then thief
always the one left; but then there’s more.
I’m too wild, I say; I’m an American. Maybe
I’m leaving—for where? bankrupt in
June, lost identity, lost shortcomings.

Momma sent me to bring daddy home for dinner,

but I wouldn’t open the heavy glass door

until I heard him Shoot the Moon!

So I pressed my ear against the

black-painted windows of Smith's domino parlor

listening for my father's voice to rise

above the rapid fire click clack of six

simultaneous games of moon.

I thought the game must have been named

for the small ivory dots I was not yet old enough—

could not count fast enough—

to join in the game with the men, when,

after last suppers at family reunions, they

gathered ‘round an old folding table set up

under a broad cottonwood and played

far into the night, long after the real moon

dropped like a quarter into the velvet pocket

of the western horizon.

Sometimes I would fall asleep under the table

mesmerized by my grandpa's worn black socks

bunched up around his swollen ankles.

Near dawn, my father, smelling of cigarettes and beer,

carried me to my bed where I dreamed of a domino train,

its horn trumpeting Moooooonnn to the stars.