For Stella

I dreamt we were already there.
Some things were right
and some were not.

And somehow Tuesday
was Wednesday
was Monday again.

I slept then woke
and then fell asleep again
and when I slept again

I dreamt we were already there.
Things were right some
and were some not.

My father died yesterday, she said.
Yesterday, some things were and.
Today some are not.

That’s the job, he said,
shrugging his shoulders
and running his hand
through his hair, like Dante,
or a spider
that knows its web,
That’s just the job,
he repeated stubbornly
whenever I complained
about working the night shift
in hundred-degree heat,
or hauling my ass
over the hump
for a foul-mouthed dispatcher
yelling at us
over a loudspeaker,
or riding the cab
of an iron dungeon
creeping over bumpy rails
to a steel mill
rising out of the smog
in Joliet or Calumet City
where we headed
to track down
a few hundred giants
in chains clanking together
on rusty wheels
for dragging home
and uncoupling
at the clearing yard
loaded with empty
freight cars
waiting to be loaded
with more freight,
because that’s the job.

Peace without Justice is a low estate,—
A coward cringing to an iron Fate!
But Peace through Justice is the great ideal,—
We’ll pay the price of war to make it real.

(In Memory of July 1, 1916)

Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
     Received when in that grand and tragic “show”
You played your part
     Two years ago,

And silver in the summer morning sun
     I see the symbol of your courage glow—
That Cross you won
     Two years ago.

Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
     And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
     Two years ago,

May you endure to lead the Last Advance
     And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
     Two years ago.

Or sometimes watched drifting with the leaves,
some last confetti of yellow or brown. Or it existed

the way the juncos huddled beneath the thistle
feeder in winter, in the way the clouds spilled water

in May to soak the ground. Once we found it
in the attic in a steamer trunk, and another time

we closed it in a suitcase and drove it across
the countryside to Ohio. And often we imagined that

the years were a locked door against which
we kept knocking to be admitted. And on the dresser

of the new house, I spilled the change of the marriage
into a heap, and later we sat on the back porch and watched

the nuptial clouds on their conveyor belts. And we slept
at night with the breaths of the marriage around us.

imagine your heart is just a ball you learned to dribble up
and down the length of your driveway back home. slow down

control it. plant your feet in the soft blue of your mat and release
it is hard but slowly you are unlearning the shallow pant

of your childhood. extend your body—do not reach
for someone but something fixed and fleshless and certain—

fold flatten then lift your head like a cobra sure of the sun
waiting and ready to caress the chill

from its scales. inhale—try not to remember how desperate
you’ve been for touch—yes ignore it—that hitch of your heart

you got from mornings you woke to find momma hysterical
or gone. try to give up the certainty she’d never return

recall only the return and not its coldness. imagine her arms
wide to receive you imagine you are not a thing that needs

escaping. it is hard and though at times you are sure
you will always be the abandoned girl trying to abandon herself

push up arch deep into your back exhale and remember—
when it is too late to pray the end of the flood

we pray instead to survive it.

You are a nobody
until another man leaves
a note under your wiper:
I like your hair, clothes, car—call me!
Late May, I brush pink
Crepe Myrtle blossoms
from the hood of my car.
Again spring factors
into our fever. Would this
affair leave any room for error?
What if I only want
him to hum me a lullaby.
To rest in the nets
of our own preferences.
I think of women
I’ve loved who, near the end,
made love to me solely
for the endorphins. Praise
be to those bodies lit
with magic. I pulse
my wipers, sweep away pollen
from the windshield glass
to allow the radar
detector to detect. In the prim
light of spring I drive
home alone along the river’s
tight curves where it bends
like handwritten words.
On the radio, a foreign love
song some men sing to rise.

the shape
of this

&her smell

&the shine in the small
lit room
to the boy

replace him
w you &
let me love
that shine
in you

let me.

It flares up at sunrise, a blush in a bramble
Tumbling out of its bed by the city pavement—a single
Rose, coral heat, at the end of the season.			
And you are drawn to it, to its scent, its silky
Layers, to its core. It gathers you into its 
Body until you lose your balance, all you can see	
Is a petaled grid, an endless repetition
Of roses. You sink swirling into the rose,
Deep into the rose, into the rose.
I hold you to me. Love, I am forty-four, 
And you, love, you, my love,
You have planted me.

November’s days are thirty:
November’s earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest thing on ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.

But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While the after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth is silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud, in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly,
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky;
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.

          I ask but one thing of you, only one,
           That always you will be my dream of you;
           That never shall I wake to find untrue
          All this I have believed and rested on,
          Forever vanished, like a vision gone
           Out into the night. Alas, how few
           There are who strike in us a chord we knew
          Existed, but so seldom heard its tone
           We tremble at the half-forgotten sound.
          The world is full of rude awakenings
           And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground,
          Yet still our human longing vainly clings
           To a belief in beauty through all wrongs.
           O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!

The time you won your town the race  
We chaired you through the market-place;  
Man and boy stood cheering by,  
And home we brought you shoulder-high.  

To-day, the road all runners come,    
Shoulder-high we bring you home,  
And set you at your threshold down,  
Townsman of a stiller town.  

Smart lad, to slip betimes away  
From fields where glory does not stay, 
And early though the laurel grows  
It withers quicker than the rose.  

Eyes the shady night has shut  
Cannot see the record cut,  
And silence sounds no worse than cheers 
After earth has stopped the ears:  

Now you will not swell the rout  
Of lads that wore their honours out,  
Runners whom renown outran  
And the name died before the man. 

So set, before its echoes fade,  
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,  
And hold to the low lintel up  
The still-defended challenge-cup.  

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,  
And find unwithered on its curls  
The garland briefer than a girl's.

how hunger boy
mercer must you
brain crane lay

over lap one
dream broom
person starved

down chaff
rain pencil
shaving ego 

peck of
pimpled flesh
on fire

eat burnt crane
eat burnt crane
eat burnt crane

who your gods then
while you wait
for the soupbird to unshade yr life 

in who the cleated teeth
of rain
in mist

in whom the fired
sibilant remnants
a passing

storm’s little
unsuccessful denials
of fire

inside every song
another song
fruit teaches this

white sun flesh
the seed at the breast
thread wrestled button the

crane
burnt
eaten

can’t stack a day’s
strength a night’s
rest at the unravel hotel

truly hungry fools
dream too but
not of confluences

not of gardenias
not of pedigrees 
not the stony feats of insomniac sentinels

mothered
by the
killing maze

milk like junk wool
milk like gauze
milk like hesitancy

might as well
eat your own cane
god and crawl
 

Always caught up in what they called 
the practical side of life 
(theory was for Plato), 
up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding, 
in cupboards and kitchen gardens,
they never neglected the lavender sachets 
that turned a linen closet to a meadow.

The practical side of life, 
like the Moon's unlighted face, 
didn't lack for mysteries; 
when Christmastime drew near, 
life became pure praxis 
and resided temporarily in hallways, 
took refuge in suitcases and satchels.

And when somebody died--it happened 
even in our family, alas--
my aunts, preoccupied
with death's practical side, 
forgot at last about the lavender,
whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly 
beneath a heavy snow of sheets.
Don't just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
                    the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound. 

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

Back when my head like an egg in a nest  
was vowel-keen and dawdling, I shed my slick beautiful 
and put it in a basket and laid it barefaced at the river 
among the taxing rocks. My beautiful was all hush 
and glitter. It was too moist to grasp. My beautiful 
had no tongue with which to lick—no discernable 
wallowing gnaw. It was really a breed of destruction 
like a nick in a knife. It was a notch in the works 
or a wound like a bell in a fat iron mess. My beautiful 
was a drink too sopping to haul up and swig!
Therefore with the trees watching and the beavers abiding 
I tossed my beautiful down at the waterway against 
the screwball rocks. Even then there was no hum.  
My beautiful was never ill-bred enough, no matter what 
you say. If you want my blue yes everlasting, try my 
she, instead. Try the why not of my low down, 
Sugar, my windswept and wrecked.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
            From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
            Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
            "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
            "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
            So I did sit and eat.

To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall,
The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall,
As if he grew there, house and all
                                                Together.

Within that house secure he hides,
When danger imminent betides
Of storm, or other harm besides
                                                Of weather.

Give but his horns the slightest touch,
His self-collecting power is such,
He shrinks into his house, with much
                                                Displeasure.

Where'er he dwells, he dwells alone,
Except himself has chattels none,
Well satisfied to be his own
                                                Whole treasure.

Thus, hermit-like, his life he leads,
Nor partner of his banquet needs,
And if he meets one, only feeds
                                                The faster.

Who seeks him must be worse than blind,
(He and his house are so combin'd)
If, finding it, he fails to find
                                                Its master.

PRECEPT I.

In Things of moment, on thy self depend,
Nor trust too far thy Servant or thy Friend:
With private Views, thy Friend may promise fair,
And Servants very seldom prove sincere.

PRECEPT II.

What can be done, with Care perform to Day,
Dangers unthought-of will attend Delay;
Your distant Prospects all precarious are,
And Fortune is as fickle as she's fair.

PRECEPT III.

Nor trivial Loss, nor trivial Gain despise;
Molehills, if often heap'd, to Mountains rise:
Weigh every small Expence, and nothing waste,
Farthings long sav'd, amount to Pounds at last.

Some folk in courts for pleasure sue,
	An' some ransack the theatre:
The airy nymph is won by few;
    She's of so coy a nature.
She shuns the great bedaub'd with lace,
    Intent on rural jokin
An' spite o' breeding, deigns to grace
    A merry Airshire rockin,
			Sometimes at night.

At Halloween, when fairy sprites
    Perform their mystic gambols,
When ilka witch her neebour greets,
    On their nocturnal rambles;
When elves at midnight-hour are seen,
    Near hollow caverns sportin,
Then lads an' lasses aft convene,
    In hopes to ken their fortune,
			By freets that night.

At Jennet Reid's not long ago,
    Was held an annual meeting,
Of lasses fair an' fine also,
    With charms the most inviting:
Though it was wat, an' wondrous mirk,
    It stopp'd nae kind intention;
Some sprightly youths, frae Loudon-kirk,
    Did haste to the convention,
			Wi' glee that night.

The nuts upon a clean hearthstane,
    Were plac'd by ane anither,
An' some gat lads, an' some gat nane,
    Just as they bleez'd the gither.
Some sullen cooffs refuse to burn;
    Bad luck can ne'er be mended;
But or they a' had got a turn,
    The pokeful nits was ended
			Owre soon that night.

A candle on a stick was hung,
    An' ti'd up to the kipple:
Ilk lad an' lass, baith auld an' young,
    Did try to catch the apple;
Which aft, in spite o' a' their care,
     Their furious jaws escaped;
They touch'd it ay, but did nae mair,
     Though greedily they gaped,
			Fu' wide that night.

The dishes then, by joint advice,
     Were plac'd upon the floor;
Some stammer'd on the toom ane thrice,
     In that unlucky hour.
Poor Mall maun to the garret go,
     Nae rays o' comfort meeting;
Because sae aft she's answered no,
     She'll spend her days in greeting,
			An' ilka night.

Poor James sat trembling for his fate;
     He lang had dree'd the worst o't;
Though they had tugg'd and rugg'd till yet,
     To touch the dish he durst not.
The empty bowl, before his eyes,
     Replete with ills appeared;
No man nor maid could make him rise,
     The consequence he feared
			Sae much that night.

Wi' heartsome glee the minutes past,
     Each act to mirth conspired:
The cushion game perform'd at last,
     Was most of all admired.
From Janet's bed a bolster came,
     Nor lad nor lass was missing;
But ilka ane wha caught the same,
     Was pleas'd wil routh o' kissing,
			Fu' sweet that night.

Soon as they heard the forward clock
      Proclaim 'twas nine, they started,
An' ilka lass took up her rock;
      Reluctantly they parted,
In hopes to meet some other time,
      Exempt from false aspersion;
Nor will they count it any crime,
      To hae sic like diversion
			Some future night.

We have been friends together,  
  In sunshine and in shade;  
Since first beneath the chestnut-trees  
  In infancy we played.  
But coldness dwells within thy heart,
  A cloud is on thy brow;  
We have been friends together—  
  Shall a light word part us now?  
  
We have been gay together;  
  We have laugh'd at little jests;
For the fount of hope was gushing  
  Warm and joyous in our breasts.  
But laughter now hath fled thy lip,  
  And sullen glooms thy brow;  
We have been gay together—
  Shall a light word part us now?  
  
We have been sad together,  
  We have wept, with bitter tears,  
O'er the grass-grown graves, where slumber'd  
  The hopes of early years.
The voices which are silent there  
  Would bid thee clear thy brow;  
We have been sad together—  
  Oh! what shall part us now?

You are young, and I am older;
      You are hopeful, I am not—
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder—
      Pluck the roses ere they rot.

Teach your beau to heed the lay—
      That sunshine soon is lost in shade—
That now's as good as any day—
      To take thee, Rosa, ere she fade.

How doth the little crocodile
     Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
     On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
     How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
     With gently smiling jaws!

A Night Piece

(July, 1863)

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air
And binds the brain—a dense oppression, such
As tawny tigers feel in matted shades,
Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage.
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by.
Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought,
Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there.
The Town is taken by its rats—ship-rats.
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,
And man rebounds whole æons back in nature.
Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead,
And ponderous drag that shakes the wall.
Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll
Of black artillery; he comes, though late;
In code corroborating Calvin's creed
And cynic tyrannies of honest kings;
He comes, nor parlies; and the Town redeemed,
Give thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that Man is naturally good,
And—more—is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.