A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
 

2

O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!
 

3

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.

4

In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary, the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)
 

5

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris;)
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
 

6

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
 

7

(Nor for you, for one, alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:
For fresh as the morning—thus would I carol a song for you, O sane and sacred death.

All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies;
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you, and the coffins all of you, O death.)
 

8

O western orb, sailing the heaven!
Now I know what you must have meant, as a month since we walk’d,
As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic,
As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on;)
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something, I know not what, kept me from sleep;)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west, ere you went, how full you were of woe;
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze, in the cold transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul, in its trouble, dissatisfied, sank, as where you, sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
 

9

Sing on, there in the swamp!
O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes—I hear your call;
I hear—I come presently—I understand you;
But a moment I linger—for the lustrous star has detain’d me;
The star, my departing comrade, holds and detains me.
 

10

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds, blown from east and west,
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there on the prairies meeting:
These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.
 

11

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air;
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific;
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there;
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;
And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.
 

12

Lo! body and soul! this land!
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
The varied and ample land—the South and the North in the light—Ohio’s shores, and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies, cover’d with grass and corn.

Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty;
The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes;
The gentle, soft-born, measureless light;
The miracle, spreading, bathing all—the fulfill’d noon;
The coming eve, delicious—the welcome night, and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.
 

13

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid, and free, and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear......yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.
 

14

Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,
In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer preparing his crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides,—and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages;
And the streets, how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo! then and there,
Falling upon them all, and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail;
And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.
 

15

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me;
The gray-brown bird I know, receiv’d us comrades three;
And he sang what seem’d the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars, and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held, as if by their hands, my comrades in the night;
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
 

16

DEATH CAROL.

Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach, strong Deliveress!
When it is so—when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee—adornments and feastings for thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky, are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song!
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death!
 

17

To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist, and the swamp-perfume;
And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.


18

I saw askant the armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody;
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.


19

Passing the visions, passing the night;
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands;
Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul,
(Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,)
Passing, I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves;
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring,
I cease from my song for thee;
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night.


20

Yet each I keep, and all, retrievements out of the night;
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor;
With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well;
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands...and this for his dear sake;
Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.

          If many remedies are prescribed
          for an illness, you may be certain
          that the illness has no cure.
                              A. P. CHEKHOV
                             The Cherry Orchard

1  FROM THE NURSERY

When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad—even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude. 
You ruined my manners toward God:
"We're here simply to wait for death; 
the pleasures of earth are overrated."

I only appeared to belong to my mother, 
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts 
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. 
I was already yours—the anti-urge, 
the mutilator of souls.


2  BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 
The coated ones smell sweet or have 
no smell; the powdery ones smell 
like the chemistry lab at school 
that made me hold my breath.



3  SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND

You wouldn't be so depressed
if you really believed in God.



4  OFTEN

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep's 
frail wicker coracle.



5  ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT

Once, in my early thirties, I saw 
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole 
human family. We were all colors—those 
who are living now, those who have died, 
those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm, 
and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood 
you came flying to pull me out 
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear 
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.



6  IN AND OUT

The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter 
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing 
saves my life—in and out, in 
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 



7  PARDON

A piece of burned meat 
wears my clothes, speaks 
in my voice, dispatches obligations 
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying 
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night 
I feel as if I had drunk six cups 
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder 
and bitterness of someone pardoned 
for a crime she did not commit 
I come back to marriage and friends, 
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back 
to my desk, books, and chair.



8  CREDO

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work 
but I believe only in this moment 
of well-being. Unholy ghost, 
you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet 
on the coffee table, lean back, 
and turn me into someone who can't 
take the trouble to speak; someone 
who can't sleep, or who does nothing 
but sleep; can't read, or call 
for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do 
against your coming. 
When I awake, I am still with thee.



9  WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

I dreamt a dream!  What can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe was ne’er beguiled!

And I wept both night and day,
And he wiped my tears away;
And I wept both day and night,
And hid from him my heart’s delight.

So he took his wings, and fled;
Then the morn blushed rosy red.
I dried my tears, and armed my fears
With ten thousand shields and spears.

Soon my Angel came again;
I was armed, he came in vain;
For the time of youth was fled,
And grey hairs were on my head.

(Mather AFB, California, 1956)

When we play horses at recess, my name
is Moonlily and I’m a yearling mare.
We gallop circles around the playground,
whinnying, neighing, and shaking our manes.
We scrape the ground with scuffed saddle oxfords,
thunder around the little kids on swings
and seesaws, and around the boys’ ball games.
We’re sorrel, chestnut, buckskin, pinto, gray,
a herd in pastel dresses and white socks.
We’re self-named, untamed, untouched, unridden.
Our plains know no fences. We can smell spring.
The bell produces metamorphosis.
Still hot and flushed, we file back to our desks,
one bay in a room of palominos.

An endless stretch of blue
Flecked with wee silver lights,
A luminous, laughing ball
Brightening the inky nights.
Little brown babies tucked
Away in fleecy beds
While fleeting, fairy dreams
Dance through their drowsy heads.

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

Vexed by the machine
            the same bundle of sticks at
                                                the game
                                    landed in the chaparral

                        runs out raging — the injustice of the foul
                        meant everything has come to nothing
                              or nothing soothes, like egg white on a wound

Sixteen years old and a Benedictine

            in dark lounge suit      soft collar and tie      bright cardigan

            freshly scraped tongue

Most wear their country with a kind of uneasiness
                                                              but he was a good actor

He needed to be
            There’s no parade here

                  Tongue spliced in slivers            anti-fatherland available
                                                drowse under epidermis
                                    arenaceous entrails

                                                Tongue that shirks battle
                                    though the future
                                                                        certainly    impossible
                                                            to forget

leave home
                        deny father’s influence
                                                                        embrace motherhood
                                                                                                     brassiere

            Tongue            imagine a place you could travel to
                                                                                  just words

            Tongue            you are not mine            another inheritance

            You a blustering pester

                        Within two months         you enact the fiercest persecution

            Tongue         you detain in half-built houses in darkness
                                    squawk and cry
                                                you are not free
                                                                                    They will catch up to you
                                                                                    of course
                                                                                    at last

This time make no mistake or else the biggest mistake of all

Someone had thrown a bomb at automatic writing

                                                at meaning-making por las avenidas tradicionales
                                                            but the bomb malfunctioned
                                    and only burst into clouds of fifth-grade vocabularies

                                                or

            My tongue desperately searches
                                                                        trips mid-alleyway

            Tongue         you were photographed by the official
                                                            praying for your enemies by the pitted wall
                                                                                    coup de grace

            Tongue         you inhabit the body      you are el blanco
                                                                                                polysemic and erect
                        you emerge from a gaping, blistered mouth

                                                                                    diseased unease

The picture of your killing
had an unforeseen effect

                        Me callo y me caigo                              
                                                            I bite my tongue and fall

^{translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid}

And all that remains for me is to follow a violet darkness
on soil where myths splinter and crack.
Yes, love was time, and it too
splintered and cracked
like the face of our country.

My share of the people
is the transit of their ghosts.

عتَمات بنفسجيّة

  
ولَيْسَ سِوى أَن أَتْبَعَ عَتَماتٍ بَنَفْسَجيّة
فَوْقَ تُرْبَةٍ تَتَشَقَّقُ فيها الأَساطير 
،أَجَلْ، كانَ الحُبُّ زَمَناً وتَشَقَّقَ، هو الآخَرُ 
مِثْلَ وَجْهِ بلادِنا

.حِصَّتي مِنَ النّاس عُبورُ أَشْباحِهِم

Head in a circle of flames
Tongues long yellow petals
“I’ve already said this”
A target the center of
Somebody’s sad vicious
Fantasy life at least
The rest is silence
By which I mean to say

The betraying body
Has already been erased

I am we are fixed forever
As Spokescow for this
White dream tower of
Ivory and ice we amputated
Decorate as warning or
Admonishment Hoof It
In a Hurry we would seem
To say they will devour
Every inch of you except
The end that can talk

Once a beauty, full figured, beloved
And then a fever, sweats, water vomited
Until the body gave out. And then,

Wings and lyres and legion of other
Angels. Singing, dancing, flying about

But once a beauty remembers
Physical love and then its loss

Eternal life seems mundane
No conflict or need or desire

Thus, this Seraphim held melancholy
Gentle as a lull in a long conversation

But heaven allows only jubilance
Possibly the angel needed to return

Human:  with feelings, tears and laughter
Or find a way to shape the sadness into
A moment of beauty when the angel’s wings
Spreads and flight moves to breathing
Full of vision. There the angel’s tears bond
with the visitor’s fear, awe. It could be

a filmmaker’s perambulating Berlin,
in search of a reason to consider
the spirit, those angels set
on top of monuments 
across the handsome city

And they love the lovers.
And one remains lovingly disinterested.

How dreams and death and a dearth
Of joy is visible. And wings spread
And wings fall. And the beloved becomes
A man who understands a woman’s
Full figure. A man who fears fever.
A man who takes his lover in all
Her melancholy and lifts her up

And unto joy.

Rise, rise, aerial creature, fill the sky
With supreme wonder, and the bleak earth wash
With mystery! Pale, pale enchantress, steer
Thy flight high up into the purple blue,
Where faint the stars beholding — rain from there
Thy lucent influence upon this sphere!
    I fear thee, sacred mother of the mad!
With thy deliberate magic thou of old
Didst soothe the perplexed brains of idiots whipped,
And scared, and lacerated for their cure—
Ay, thou didst spread the balm of sleep on them,
Give to their minds a curvèd emptiness
Of silence like the heaven thou dwellest in;
Yet didst thou also, with thy rayless light,
Make mad the surest, draw from their smooth beds
The very sons of Prudence, maniacs
To wander forth among the bushes, howl
Abroad like eager wolves, and snatch the air!
Oft didst thou watch them prowl among the tombs
Inviolate of the patient dead, toiling
In deeds obscure with stealthy ecstasy,
And thou didst palely peer among them, and
Expressly shine into their unhinged eyes!
I fear thee, languid mother of the mad!
For thou hast still thy alien influence;
Thou dost sow forth thro’ all the fields and hills,
And in all chambers of the natural earth,
A difference most strange and luminous.
This tree, that was the river sycamore,
Is in thy pensive effluence become
But the mind’s mystic essence of a tree,
Upright luxuriance thought upon—the stream
Is liquid timeless motion undefined—
The world’s a gesture dim. Like rapturous
      thought,
Which can the rigorous concrete obscure
Unto annihilation, and create
Upon the dark a universal vision,
Thou—even on this bold and local earth,
The site of the obtruding actual—
Thou dost erect in awful purity
The filmy architecture of all dreams.
And they are perfect. Thou dost shed like light
Perfection, and a vision give to man
Of things superior to the tough act,
Existence, and almost co-equals of
His own unnamed, and free, and infinite wish!
Phantoms, phantoms of the transfixed mind!
   Pour down, O moon, upon the listening earth—
The earth unthinking, thy still eloquence!
Shine in the children’s eyes. They drink thy light,
And laugh in innocence of sorcery,
And love thy silver. I laugh not, nor gaze
With half-closed lids upon the awakened night.
Nay, oft when thou art hailed above the hill,
I learn not forth, I hide myself in tasks,
Even to the blunt comfort of routine
I cling, to drowse my soul against thy charm,
Yearning for thee, ethereal miracle!

The seraph sings before the manifest 
God-one, and in the burning of the Seven, 
And with the full life of consummate Heaven 
Heaving beneath him like a mother’s breast 
Warm with her first-born’s slumber in that nest! 
The poet sings upon the earth grave-riven: 
Before the naughty world soon self-forgiven 
For wronging him; and in the darkness prest 
From his own soul by worldly weights. Even so, 
Sing, seraph with the glory! Heaven is high— 
Sing, poet with the sorrow! Earth is low. 
The universe’s inward voices cry 
‘Amen’ to either song of joy and wo— 
Sing seraph, —poet, —sing on equally

In the house off Constant Spring Road, the one
with the short spreading Julie mango tree  
in the front yard, the lime tree  
with their dark green leaves and delicate  
white flowers; the palm-sized  
burnt orange hibiscuses,  
poisonous butter yellow allamandas,  
I remember, I remember,  
how my mother’s hands kept moving  
as she produced one white crochet doily after another.
The slender silver hook and the fragile symmetry.
A Ford Escort was parked in the garage of that house.
Oil-slicked men tried stealing that powder blue
Ford Escort one night as we slept uneasily in the house—
Discussions began immediately about leaving 
one i/land for another. The fat  
balls of thread in my mother’s lap, at her feet,
those threads already unspooling, connecting one
memory, one life, one distant country to another.

^{after the Persian of Mehdi Hamidi Shirazi}

They say when the time comes for a swan to die,
it goes where other swans have gone to die.

They say as the last night begins to fall,
it trails behind the setting sun to die.

And it sings ghazals, as though it wished between
the pages of its own divan to die.

They say a swan loves only once and will
return to where its love was won to die.

Making its deathbed where it first made love,
it can forget it has withdrawn to die.

Are these tales true? In the desert, where I live,
no swan has come, not a single one, to die.

But then they say that swans return to water,
in whose embrace life was begun, to die.

Open your arms, my dear, and slake my thirst:
the time has come for one more swan to die.

Reign did silence o’er the stage
       As night passed on
And destiny fraught with laurels sat,
       Sweet laurels never won,
Till was read aloud her name
       And forth the sweet voiced singer came.
While grim old night worn out with age,
       Listening to the vibrating stage,
Wept because he must pass on.

       But hark! they do applaud her so:
She bows, she smiles and then looks round,
       She opens her lips and lo!
Bursts forth a trembling sea of sound:
       A sea voluptuous in its swell.
The waves rose high and then they fell;
       While beat the etherial shores, the tide,
And ebbing then the waves subside
       To music’s gentler flow.

O’er the vast and blue expanse
       Leaped the merry music on:
Around the universe, the flow
       Of that angelic tone;
Till heaven’s shores, the tidelets lashed
       And wavelets o’er the portals dashed.
The billowy waves break forth the sounds
       Reach the great white throne and rebound
Echoing the song of home.

Buon giorno, buen dia Maria
Full of grace and wisdom and power
The Lord may be with thee, and you
May be Blessed among women but

What about the children? Not the one
In the womb that has been consecrated
As the son of God, but God, your god,
My god has many sons, daughters all

Around the world. They are not all blessed
Some are cursed and lost and under a pile
Of rubble in Ukraine, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Gaza;
Others live in the darkness of the blind, are

Plagued by hallucinations, cursed with spasms
Of a mind that plays tricks on them all day, all
Night. Imagine a predator behind you, in your
Shadow, silent, stealthy, looking over your shoulder

Or under your bed. You cannot see but you know
They are there and they mean you harm for no
Other reason than you are where you find yourself
Not for an act you perpetrated on someone else,

Just for being who you are. The luck of the draw?
And Holy Mary, Mother of God, do you pray for
The innocent as well as the sinners? The pilots,
The soldiers firing artillery rockets, are they too

Prayed for? Rockets with ranges of 30-50 miles, fired
In barrages for the most effect, the most damage.
Are they too in your prayers to god and which god
Might that be? What does that God look like, what

Does that god think, plan, why does that god never
intervene? Humans shooting hate and rockets blindly
into Ashkelon, Beersheba, under the eyes of Israeli 
drones … range is crucial for rockets, for prayers too.

Pray for us sinners and for the innocent, for my own son
Living in a world plagued with demons he cannot see
or touch or hear but knows they are there, so music
and words come to him as if a shaft of light in day

Or night, raises his voice above the din in his brain, to
Feel the lift above the iron dome of paranoia, the upsurge
Of spirits that haunt, and fly, and invade his small cot in an
Institution with cinder block walls, netted windows he can’t

See but knows they are there: the limitations, the lack
Of liberty, the outside in; the other sons and daughters
in Gaza, or Yemen or Ukraine are bombarded with a panoply
of air power used in a steadily escalating series of attacks.

What I wish for my own son is comfort, warmth, knowing
There is a meal, a roof over his head, a dog at his feet, a
Sun he can feel but not see… Mother of God, what do you
Wish for your sons, your daughters now and at the hour

Of their deaths? When will your god hear your pleas or
Have the mothers and daughters been silenced to the
Tunnels, the basements, the streets, have they lost their
Voices, their powers to heal, now and at the hour of now?

^{(“In their generation wiser than the children of Light.”)}

We spurred our parents to the kiss,
Though doubtfully they shrank from this—
Day had no courage to review 
What lusty dark alone might do—
Then were we joined from their caress 
In heat of midnight, one from two.

This night-seed knew no discontent,
In certitude his changings went;
Though there were veils about his face,
With forethought, even in that pent place,
Down towards the light his way he bent 
To kingdoms of more ample space.

Was Day prime error, that regret 
For darkness roars unstifled yet?
That in this freedom, by faith won,
Only acts of doubt are done?
That unveiled eyes with tears are wet,
They loathe to gaze upon the sun?

^{The most interesting thing about emptiness is that it is preceded by fullness. —Joseph Brodsky}

1.
She leaves me outside among yellowing
aspens.  Hemlock branches
discarded     dying on this iced clod.

Corms in the ground whiten waiting for another snow.
Fissured face     the skin of me fissured.
The leather of a carriage no longer

fit to front a manor with sequoia moldings
or doors carved in California     shipped
to Louisiana to shut in that house.

Made for another girl now dead.  Her mother
made me out of that tatty carriage-seat leather.
Made me as she evoked her mother’s

country dissolved in seawater.
I’m the leavings of seawater left cold.
Forgotten in cold.

Forgotten in this northern place.
They have forgotten what I have not.
The dark is without forgetting.

That woman filled me with pink
cotton     that annual spell when
cotton explodes that gaudy hue.

I’m holding time in the dark     waiting
for the dappling of sky.
I hear them.

I know them.
They’ll do the thing that wrecks.
They’re unworthy of themselves.

This knowledge wrecks.
But a jester?
That jester?

His brashness     a theory of this land.
A quality encouraged for navigation.
I’m not protected.

Cold     unprotected at night.
Solitary at night inducing 
more creasing     more

staining as they stain themselves     as 
they beg for regression.  As
they beg for the nineteenth 

century     the century I was made.
Hold the clock’s clicking.
Turn it back     make-make America.

She leaves me to see this night.
To see blue televisions through windows.
To hear raucous commentary.

She leaves me to see this night     to
freeze among the frozen.
There’s yellow in the trees tonight.

The girl who leaves me wears 
a yellow dress.
Her boots are white.

2.
I voted for snow     frost     crystals.
I see them falling.
I’ve been falling into myself.

I see myself with myself.
I hold my own hand as I walk through snow.
I walk with my twin.

I wish for a country of twins.
Our slacks are patterned with stars.
We are partisans.

We believe in the belief.
There is only one belief.
There is only one nation.

We are the founders of the nation.
Our blood for this nation.
Our blood in this nation is the nation.

We see it in sunset.
All that we’ve given is sunset.
We aspire to what the billionaire has built.

The lavishness of pink marble 
wild in our sleep.
We want what he has.

We believe what he has is his.
We believe his dream is American.
We believe his reality can be ours.

We believe in oligarchy     ours.
We’re waiting for the chalice    that goddess’s 
slow pouring of shine.

But that frozen doll frightens me.
I’m walking away but I keep 
craning toward it.

Its face of creature     its darkness
on that which is frozen.
I leave it there.

They’re left.  They’re not me.
We voted for snow     its perpetual system.
Radically radical we voted.

3.
He wanted me away. 
I want him away from 
that public house.

In his dream     I’m the boy 
locked in steel.
There’s water in his dream.

I sank.
He saw my hands reaching 
from the steel until they didn’t.

I was a boy.
We were boys.
He wanted to kill the boy.

He wanted the boy dead 
in steel     quickly 
a man in steel.

We became men in steel.
In the paper     he bought our
capture     shouted execution.  

Years in steel.
The sky’s steel here.
It’s cold here.

My daughter is here.
I want her to play.
Be a good girl     play.

I want him away from 
that public house.
How’s he a choice?

Up in Michigan     near Lake 
Superior waiting for spirals     funnels 
of jade     ginger light.

This dawn is near but which dawn?
Which will be created?
So cold here in this north.

The north couldn’t protect.
When has it ever protected?
When has this place protected me?

But I’m trying to protect my 
north     my daughter 
in winter-white boots.  

The breeze isn’t silent. 
I want him away from 
that public house.

I stare skyward yet I see 
the glare of televisions.
My daughter’s fingers are cold. 

4.
My father is afraid 
but he doesn’t say it.
I came in from playing to see 

him     to be around him.  
His hands are colder than snow.
His hands are chapped.

Why are your hands so cold?
The past was cold.  I don’t want 
the past to permit what may come.

What?
He embraces me.  The world
is around me.

Snow     strange     I’m waiting 
for something I don’t understand.
Will you wait for me?

I’m here     forever here     around.
He’s angry at the television.
The blue of the television 

is what’s inside him.
If I could open him     an abrupt
door I could open     step into 

the blue     step into to brightness
burning my eyes.  
I’m quickly blind

within the blue of my father.
He mentions     jester.
He mentions     clown.

He mentions     criminal.
He mentions     killer.
Where’s your doll?

I’ve left her without knowing.
Left her freezing     left her among snow
without protection.

I have to find her.
Go find her.
Bring her inside.

My coat like skin     fake fur on skin.
I’m running back to save 
the one I forgot.

How could I forget her?
She has been forgotten before
but I didn’t want to forget.

Everything tall     green
heavy with whiteness.
My father’s upset even 

when there are auroras
above him     above me     above
this country.

5.
It isn’t dawn when she returns.
But I thought if there would
be a return it would happen at dawn

when America shows what she
hides     what she whispers     what
she denies in conversation     what

she calls crazy in public.
I know this place.
I know its makers.

Those with soft 
hands     rough     always
rough who smile 

yet hide tundras. 
Within them tundras with paths
lined with wet spikes.

Something dead on the spikes. 
Something dying on the spikes.
She’s kissing me.

I’m being carried     kissed
among firs     snow blowing.
They will do it.

They have done it before.
Regression     angry at the lie
they can’t keep from questioning.

I’m loved by a little girl
who knows nothing of me.
I want her father to scream.

If he doesn’t     he may die early.  
He may leave his daughter early.  
So many men leave their daughters early.

Don’t be shocked.
Perhaps you’ve left your daughter?
Fissured face     the skin of me fissured.

Does she know what these fissures hold?
Does she know what she holds?
Does she know what 

her father’s holding?  
What he doesn’t say 
when he sees her     when

he sees the jester?
His hands are over his ears?
She sees him on the porch

as if holding his head together.
It could erupt.
It could combust    St. Helens.

Dust     fire     smoke like 
that mountain.  
We’re all combustible.

But first     implosion.
The birches within us falling.
Not the leaves in autumn 

but the trees themselves     falling.
Paper bark     mangled.
The hidden thump     that

crash beneath ivory cages     skin.
This isn’t greatness.
This isn’t noble.  

A terrible enactment in 
the dark     the light     the cold.
She drops me on the porch

to hold her father’s face.
Hold me.
Hold.

Hold.
Hold.
Hold.

6.
I’m cold here.
Waiting as blue hits my face.
I’ve made a fire.

Crackle.
Crackle.
My son burns marshmallows.  

They’re gooey on graham 
crackers.  Chocolate melts 
on sweet sandwiches.  

The auroras are rare.
I want my son to see the auroras     that 
which is possible in sky.

This was my place as a boy.
This was where my parents took 
me to say this is ours.  

This piece of it is ours.
We feed ducks bread.
But what bread feeds us now?

There’s poison in the bread.
We’re losing.
So much poison     poison

to survive but we 
are surviving without ourselves.
Save us.

Save us with your wealth.
Save us with the way you make wealth.
Fire what’s killing us.  Burn the ground.

Wall us in.  We are being killed.
They are killing us.
Aurora.

Aurora my love     I’m 
waiting for Aurora.
When you come     will we be saved?

Auroras in that sky swirl in the cold.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of….

7.
This is reality?
This is a reality star?
His reality isn’t our 

reality but they believe it can be.
Their reality is fake.
Their false reality exists in their minds.

They are convinced of their reality.
Some realities are based in trickery. 
They want to change a false reality.

But how can they change a reality that doesn’t exist 
other than to change the falseness of that reality 
into what’s actual?  Oh     he changed my reality     that 

reality of innocence to criminal.
My reality became prison.
His fake reality made my reality     my 

reality of childhood to manhood fugacious.
My reality of custody     trial    conviction
was his     the country’s made reality. 

The reality is     it is almost dawn.
The reality is     my daughter is sleeping.
The reality is     this place is now more dangerous for her.

The reality is     auroras are stunning.
I’m staring at the reality of stunning auroras.
I’m in a reality stunned. 

8.
Dawn gleams. 
In my dream     my father is content.
He’s unworried.  

He’s lifting me into cloying light.
I’m wearing a dress of light he has made.
So many are waving at us.

We’re waving back.
A chalice of light was poured 
into the sky.

Snow’s falling.
Snow the color of light is falling
but we aren’t cold.

Trees are evergreen

gentle winds

tickle their branches

The elders read newspapers

Children play

their mothers watch

There are rumors

another angel

committed suicide

last night

Beauty is not caused,

It is.

Chase it and it ceases.

Chase it not and it abides.

Overtake the creases

In the meadow when

The Wind

Runs his fingers thro’ it?

Deity will see to it

That you never do it.

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed
Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide,
And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed,
Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.

From off your face, into the winds of winter,
The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing;
But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter,
When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing,
And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.