The poetry of earth is never dead:
  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's—he takes the lead
  In summer luxury,—he has never done
  With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
  On a lone winter evening, when the frost
    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
    The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

O Thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops ’mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phœbus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.

And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.

I’m writing 
a love poem 
even with 
an American 
boot to 
my throat. 

I lick the croony 
sole and picture 
you in a fresh white 
wife pleaser. 

You got 
two fingers 
dripping money 
down my mouth. 

Our razor 
can do 
so much. 

is up The Met’s stone steps,
so many that I have trouble collecting 
my girthy tourist’s breaths

and my palms, all sweaty, 
smeared with ink 
from his crinkled face,

wrinkled in the brochure, and
to think I’m too underdressed 
for a pocket square,

so up goes the tee’s hem
to blot my forehead dry
enough, when, of course,

there goes my furry gut’s apron
for everyone to see 
it unfurling like the carpet

Claudia Schiffer stomped
toward that one Lagerfeld photoshoot:
her mean mien

of a pouty puss made up 
to an almost-
black face, blond braided back

under a theoretical afro, 
an aphrodisiac, you know, 
what men want, a diasporic taste

in their ladies: hot 
enough to boil a stew pot, thin 
as ladle handles, good cooks

in the bedroom—yet 
still Lagerfeld wanted
supremacy’s payload, to not see

that which was too colored 
for his pleathered hands to hold 
not but to plunder, and so here we are

staring up at his sketched waifs,
craning our necks
to take in the niched wall,

each gown an upturned urn
shelved in its own alcove, 
dressed in nothing

but archive’s bleached light, 
the mannequins’ clean faces 
looking down on us—

crowded together 
like the staggered heads 
of snaggleteeth 
in his stitched mouth.

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted
to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy’s face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors
under the weight
of peaches.

I’m not a poet anymore—
I’ve interviewed too many politicians.
All they care for is ghosts.
Breaking news, I’m breaking
up with my stupid shame.
I have dates on my calendar
just for fucking. I do this
between my 9-5. Hello, hello.
I’m quieter than I seem.
I’m a man in a suit.
Please pass the damn hookah. 
Please tell the magistrates
I’m tired of reporting.
My desire to fix this window is corrupt.
Your desire to call your looking
through this window
an act of social justice is corrupt.
At a protest, a white woman calls me fake news.
Okay, fine, I tell her back. I don’t smile
anymore. I do the job so well
I outcry the eagles. I outrun
the sad. I trouble
my brain into a blender
then hand you a cup.
My mother holds a butterfly
to the sky.
White winged glimmering mess.
Someone, please, snap a photo.
My shoes are drenched in blood.

You are standing in the minefield again.
Someone who is dead now

told you it is where you will learn
to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god’s
periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made. Then made
to survive, which means you are somebody’s

son. Which means if you open your eyes, you’ll be back
in that house, beneath a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.

Your mother’s boyfriend, his bald head ringed with red
hair, like a planet on fire, kneeling

by your bed again. Air of whiskey & crushed
Oreos. Snow falling through the window: ash returned

from a failed fable. His spilled-ink hand
on your chest. & you keep dancing inside the minefield—

motionless. The curtains fluttering. Honeyed light
beneath the door. His breath. His wet blue face: earth

spinning in no one’s orbit. & you want someone to say Hey…Hey
I think your dancing is gorgeous. A little waltz to die for,

darling. You want someone to say all this
is long ago. That one night, very soon, you’ll pack a bag

with your favorite paperback & your mother’s .45,
that the surest shelter was always the thoughts

above your head. That it’s fair—it has to be—
how our hands hurt us, then give us

the world. How you can love the world
until there’s nothing left to love

but yourself. Then you can stop.
Then you can walk away—back into the fog

-walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you
to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing

& still breathing. Believe me.

Instead, let it be the echo to every footstep
drowned out by rain, cripple the air like a name

flung onto a sinking boat, splash the kapok’s bark
through rot & iron of a city trying to forget

the bones beneath its sidewalks, then through
the refugee camp sick with smoke & half-sung

hymns, a shack rusted black & lit with Bà Ngoại’s
last candle, the hogs’ faces we held in our hands

& mistook for brothers, let it enter a room illuminated
with snow, furnished only with laughter, Wonder Bread

& mayonnaise raised to cracked lips as testament
to a triumph no one recalls, let it brush the newborn’s

flushed cheek as he’s lifted in his father’s arms, wreathed
with fishgut & Marlboros, everyone cheering as another

brown gook crumbles under John Wayne’s M16, Vietnam
burning on the screen, let it slide through their ears,

clean, like a promise, before piercing the poster
of Michael Jackson glistening over the couch, into

the supermarket where a Hapa woman is ready
to believe every white man possessing her nose

is her father, may it sing, briefly, inside her mouth,
before laying her down between jars of tomato

& blue boxes of pasta, the deep-red apple rolling
from her palm, then into the prison cell

where her husband sits staring at the moon
until he’s convinced it’s the last wafer

god refused him, let it hit his jaw like a kiss
we’ve forgotten how to give one another, hissing

back to ’68, Ha Long Bay: the sky replaced
with fire, the sky only the dead

look up to, may it reach the grandfather fucking
the pregnant farmgirl in the back of his army jeep,

his blond hair flickering in napalm-blasted wind, let it pin
him down to dust where his future daughters rise,

fingers blistered with salt & Agent Orange, let them
tear open his olive fatigues, clutch that name hanging

from his neck, that name they press to their tongues
to relearn the word live, live, live—but if

for nothing else, let me weave this deathbeam
the way a blind woman stitches a flap of skin back

to her daughter’s ribs. Yes—let me believe I was born
to cock back this rifle, smooth & slick, like a true

Charlie, like the footsteps of ghosts misted through rain
as I lower myself between the sights—& pray

that nothing moves.

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn’t have 
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—

but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.

I.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

II.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

III.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain’d its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

     Old winter was gone 
In his weakness back to the mountains hoar, 
     And the spring came down
From the planet that hovers upon the shore
     Where the sea of sunlight encroaches 
On the limits of wintry night;—
 If the land, and the air, and the sea, 
     Rejoice not when spring approaches, 
  We did not rejoice in thee, 
         Ginevra! 

She is still, she is cold
     On the bridal couch, 
One step to the white deathbed, 
   And one to the bier, 
And one to the charnel—and one, oh where? 
    The dark arrow fled
    In the noon. 

Ere the sun through heaven once has rolled, 
The rats in her heart
Will have made their nest, 
And the worms be alive in her golden hair, 
While the Spirit that guides the sun, 
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
   She shall sleep. 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body’s treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason;
But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
    No want of conscience hold it that I call
    Her ‘love’ for whose dear love I rise and fall.

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                                              I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Trip the door to stick, 
we with the bag mouths

yawping in the blank
space where our joy

once lived, little blooming 
weed, purple dead nettle 

where have you gone
good flourishing? Red 

feather I found bent 
on the wildflower berm

soaked but not soaked 
simply shadowed still 

unweighted, insistent 
it belongs to flight. 

On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is what
looks like a cavity that was hollowed out
by flame. On the other side, silvery green
broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter
light and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

First, the beast showed up in the middle  
of the night, entered the gates without 

a sound, sauntering through the field as if 
this was its home, my own home. Then came

the day and refused to absolve me of my girlhood, 
which was also its own. Its lovely face filled 

the streets of my imagination, & though we are  
both exhausted, it is just getting started. It does not

know what it wants with me. Its gaze, other-worldly,  
carrying with itself the portals to my other-selves

who await us patiently, bearers of thorns and honey, 
always speaking without uttering a word, leading me

to my many crucifixions, until I am readied for my own 
wanting. It has been told before, the tale of the beast 

and the man, the beast and man, the beastman. Man  
with too many eyes, limbs far reaching beyond its moat. 

I cannot say I did not see the signs; I cannot say  
I did not sleep with a sharp blade clutched in my fists. 

When, finally, the day of the awakening comes, I rise 
girl no more. Instead, I am another, I am other. 

And the gnawing has just begun. 

A simple recipe for dodging flies

                        in the heat at a barbecue spot

is as simple as the clear shine

                        of water zipped away in plastic

hanging around the ceiling’s periphery

                        in a dining room like ornaments

or omens. Flies drive themselves to delirium 

            with the sparkle differing from diamonds

and catch their last by swaying freezer bags. 

            A shimmer stuns the multiple views

in a fly’s eyes and misdirects their iridescent wings,

            christened from maggots and scat,

until they stutter and bump, and find their legs

            clustered like gathered stems of bouquets, 

on their backs and dried out 

            like empty green bottles on window sills  

before being swept into the trash, a heaven of sorts. 

extract longing.
                                                      fold its edges
in gold paper
                                                      to rest on a scale.

the catapult of one
                                                      plate plummets
the other swings
                                                      bobs and waits
for a leaf of one’s
                                                      want to waft down.

such gentle collisions
                                                      crush more than steel
crack more than bones             upon slight contact.

you are curled under
unconsummated kiss,
folded into the violence
of blueberries crushed
between teeth, dying
sugars of once growing
fruit, and i let it linger.

your hands map
a body that requires
no discovery,
nor conquest.

you speak softened
drama of fury and frenzy,
quiet underbelly, light
beaming into peaceful
dark interrupted by
minor collisions
bodies were built
to withstand. you,
looping daydreams
and gasps silent
under skin until
partitions of distance
and judgment lapse
into surreptitious mist.

you are the laugh
that falls orange
against my cheek
and dries slight
sweat cooling.

in the smallest fleck
of imagination, you
become a dream
i needed to recall
as muscles found
new persistence
flexing in a crucible
where the world
expands beyond
the steady scruff
of sandpaper
graded routine. you,
small map unfolding
a globe that vanished
within mundane block.

you open a door
with a word, if any,
or a pause hanging
like an ornament
in your full smirk.

First there was the blue wing
of a scraggly loud jay tucked
into the shrubs. Then the bluish-
black moth drunkenly tripping
from blade to blade. Then
the quiet that came roaring
in like the R. J. Corman over
Broadway near the RV shop.
These are the last three things
that happened. Not in the universe,
but here, in the basin of my mind,
where I’m always making a list
for you, recording the day’s minor
urchins: silvery dust mote, pistachio
shell, the dog eating a sugar
snap pea. It’s going to rain soon,
close clouds bloated above us,
the air like a net about to release
all the caught fishes, a storm
siren in the distance. I know
you don’t always understand,
but let me point to the first
wet drops landing on the stones,
the noise like fingers drumming
the skin. I can’t help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal.

Yoked to what? To whom?
Calibration. Checkmate.

Thunderous blowhard,
tiny tea kettle. Boom.

Bastion at the market,
flashlight mimicry.

Look at my phrase
making, batting eyes.

Whose hand do you hold?
Whose hand do you want?

Enough of this, ruiner.
What’s the gift of talk,

talk, talk. Where’re your
minions, battle stations.

Take out your troubled
photocopies and burn

the Pilgrim’s kiss. There’s only
one story. It always ends.

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
   The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
   And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
   When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Clown, singing

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?  
O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming  
That can sing both high and low;  
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,  
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—          
Every wise man’s son doth know.  
  
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;  
Present mirth hath present laughter;  
What’s to come is still unsure:  
In delay there lies no plenty,—          
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,  
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

The grapefruit rolls downhill,
That motion June morning.
          Fruit heavy with 7 days rain,
          Climbing ants,
          Plump, white-veined seeds.
The wide paws of the golden spaniel
Flail after it, similar to a conductor criss-crossing his arms
In a final dare of energy.  

Evolution, somewhere then and now, 
Went a little manic, did a step-ball-change tap movement 
And then the fish walked,
The seed split,
Wet, craving something more.
No.
          Take away agency.
The seed sprouted.
The sprout seeded.

There are limits to knowledge, limits to language
Describing the comedic effect of Thalia finally squashing her teeth 
          Into the fruit,
Flipping her head high and prancing by, drooling juice.

Sometimes it’s best when a poem fails us. 
Reminds us of limits. Of simplicity.
Like dog. Sunlight. Rolling grapefruit.

The sky’s white with November’s teeth,
and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree,
a cargo train speeding through, and there,
that’s me, standing in the wintering
grass watching the dog suffer the cold
leaves. I’m not large from this distance,
just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,
mares look for what’s left of green
in the pasture, a few weanlings kick
out, and theirs is the same sky, white
like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.
A few farms over, there’s our mare,
her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
mare worth her salt is carrying the next
potential stake’s winner. Ours, her coat
thicker with the season’s muck, leans against
the black fence and this image is heavy
within me. How my own body, empty,
clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,
knows we were all meant for something.

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

The sun had not yet risen  
the stars made their way to the center of the sky  
congregating on the throne of tomorrow.

The commandment of two breaths: 
Live and Pray 

            The seen and unseen.

My child reminds me 
there were once whales  
here in this expanse of sand.

            The seen and unseen.

Like the dormer that cuts through the ceiling  
and perches a body in the sky 
for the looking.

             The seen and unseen.

We float in whatever ways we can  
knowing our suspension in the sky brings us closer to our own yearnings.  
Mediates the tension of our body’s desire for earth  
and our spirit’s desire for sky. 

            The seen and unseen.

This was understood.  
Implicated in the pinnacle  
at the point of the pyramid. 

            The seen and unseen.

This was never thought of by the grave diggers  
who left their spirits to deepen their flesh into earth.

Who gave their way to the “partition of finds.”

Blinded by the seeing 
collapsing the centuries 
into cold marble halls.

If ever you see my hands in cuffs 
know that somewhere near 
a museum is burning.
 

The super worked all day
as a conductor on the subway
and in the evenings as a dominatrix.
She lived above me. I heard a mix
of pain and pleasure—impossible
to tell the difference in that studio full
of my own silence. On the front stoop
I ran into her clients, who drooped
in exhausted gratitude.
Once, I knocked.

                              When she cracked
the door I could see she’d been crying.
Behind her, a TV blued
the room; something was frying
on the stove. I had a small concern.
She told me, I’ll get to you in turn.

Phones were ringing

in the pockets of the living
and the dead

the living stepped carefully among.
The whole still room

was lit with sound—like a switchboard—
and those who could answer

said hello. Then
it was just the dead, the living

trapped inside their bloody clothes
ringing and ringing them—

and this was
the best image we had

of what made us a nation.
 

(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.

This $1,600 slice of foam,
if it stays firm, will be the last mattress
I’ll ever buy. It’s comfortable enough
for years of sleeps, for the long, thwarted hours
of scribbling sentences, or to step from
into the surrey with the fringe on top.
Given the choice between flat-lining here,
and 1,000,000 other possibilities
for the time when my pronouns and now end—
I’d pick my bed, and passing on with good dreams.

One jot, on this little blue and green globe
where life evolved, and consciousness, and hope.

I cautious scanned my little life,
I winnowed what would fade
From what would last till heads like mine
Should be a-dreaming laid.

I put the latter in a barn,
The former blew away —
I went one winter morning,
And lo! my priceless hay

Was not upon the “‘scaffold”’,
Was not upon the “beam”,
And from a thriving farmer 
A cynic I became.

Whether a thief did it —
Whether it was the wind —
Whether Deity ’s guiltless
My business is to find.

So I begin to ransack —
How is it, Heart, with thee?
Art thou within the little barn
Love provided thee?

I never felt at home below, 

And in the handsome skies

I shall not feel at home

I know,

I don’t like Paradise.

Because it’s Sunday all the time

And recess never comes,

And Eden’ll be so lonesome

Bright Wednesday afternoons.

If God could make a visit,

Or ever took a nap —

So not to see us — but they say

Himself a telescope

Perennial beholds us, —

Myself would run away

From Him and Holy Ghost and All —

But — there’s the Judgment Day!

All the letters I can write

Are not fair as this,

Syllables of velvet,

Sentences of plush,

Depths of ruby, undrained,

Hid, lip, for thee —

Play it were a hummingbird

And just sipped me !

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.

I’ve known some men. There was the one who dressed in wool suits, joined the circus at night & ate fire. There was the anthropology professor. The one I wish I had said—Yes, too, there was the one I watched canoe down a city street. That summer the weather was named after one. Harvey. There was the Chicano elder who introduced me to Baldwin, Fanon, X. There was the relative who said. Your laugh. Too loud. No man will want—No man will take—Though he wanted. Though he took. Some should’ve gone to jail. Some should’ve enjoyed a prison of one. There was Mister Piche. Pronounced Pee-Shay. Tenth grade honors lit. Girls’ school. Best teacher ever. Really. I was at the airport waiting for a flight when he phoned. He was upset I kept addressing him by his first name. Sixty years of tobacco in his lungs & a breathing machine on his back, he said—Why do you keep—Can’t you call me—I was concerned about the flight. How to get from one concourse to the next. Not the man who now wanted to be known as father. But hadn’t earned the title. Low man on totem pole. Take it like a man. A good man is hard to find. There were the poets. There was T. There was A. There was the photographer & wine connoisseur. She wasn’t a man but acted like one. Took that fruit inside my chest &—Well you might know the rest. They say a woman will always search for her father in a mate. I say mind your own business. I say remember that adage about the monkey & the show. The winter was unseasonably warm when they lowered the man who wanted to be known as father into the ground. The thawing grass. The birdsong. Made it all less somber. At least this is what I imagine. I wasn’t there. I was never there—

Each year she sits costumed in violent white
patent leather shoes, a starched dress so pastel pastel.
Of the yearly pageant she knows a good man died
on two pieces of wood & the good man came back to life
to save the very same folks who wished him dead.
She lives in a world full of folk & doubts
they’re all redeemable, so she’s in it for the eggs
on the kitchen table with baskets of straw, fake green grass,
gardens of marshmallow chicks, rabbits dark & lurking.
On the idiot box a masterpiece. Charlton Heston
chooses the staff instead of the sword to free the Israelites
from Egypt. As he makes his way down Mount Sinai,
a man worshipping a golden calf says pry it from
my dead cold hands. She’s a tired child but is learning
the ways of men as she watches the pharaoh & Heston.
Mouth decimated by sugar, fingertips bloody with dye—

After ice cream. Somewhere off Clear Creek &
196. Makeshift sign. Uncle Sam
white as the lines on the flag in hand mouths
love it or leave it. You must admire
the gall of white men in carjacked country.
Nearby a brief pond. Its skin a stillness.
Then up. A bird of prey searches for its—

/

Goose. On a depthless pond. Deepest tunnel
of unbecoming. How does one undrown
from the incivility of this world?
In the distant. Chimes. A musical score.
A willow bends its back toward dirt &
some star will hang low on tomorrow’s walk
& the moon. Watch it refuse my hello—

Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was

filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle

lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead

of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers

under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending

to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,

like that summer in July, when I was left again

to wonder who was the child and who the adult,

that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray

when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,

stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,

in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street watching.

Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man

he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.

Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,

how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,

how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much

liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the world

was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.

Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,

but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.

Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe it

a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man

unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up

in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights

went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back home

to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the night;

and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight—

with her unearned admixable beauty
she sat up on the porch and asked for (f)light;
answerable only to poetry—
and love—to make it thru the greyblue night

blew smoke into words and even whiter ghosts
that could see what others in this broad dark
could not: she set to make of nothing most,
better: an everenlightening mark:

ghost gave her this: a piece of flint: that if
you rubbed the right way,
the lightlessness would come down, give up, lift—
and then there would be nothing left to say.

o sterilize the lyricism of
my sentence: make me plain again my love

(my ghost)
(and dumb)

O my Love sent me a lusty list,
Did not compare me to a summer's day
Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes
But catalogued in a pretty detailed
And comprehensive way the way(s)
In which he was better than me.
"More capable of extra- and inter-
Polation. More well-traveled -rounded multi-
Lingual! More practiced in so many matters
More: physical, artistic, musical,
Politic(al) academic (I dare say!) social
(In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!"
And yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e)
And left, none-the-less, the Greater Moor of me.

The dark wood after the dark wood: the cold 
after cold in April's false November.
In that second worser place: more gone, less there,
but in that lurid present present, cast and held, 

rooted, kept, like some old false-berried yew. 
Just against; the door leading to preferment 
shut; no longer believing in still, by some, few
means, method, could be, but for the bad day set, 

left, leaning atop bad day. 
							Out- and un-

ranked, toothached, wronged— rankled corruptive thing!
Ill-wishing, in-iquitous, clipped, up-hoped, stripped: just plain: thin.
Dare thy commit: commit this final fatal sin: 
God my God, I am displeased by spring.

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—

I got your Letter, and the Birds—
The Maples never knew that you were coming—
I declare - how Red their Faces grew—
But March, forgive me—
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue—
There was no Purple suitable—
You took it all with you—

Who knocks? That April—
Lock the Door—
I will not be pursued—
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied—
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame—

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The park is filled with night and fog, 
  The veils are drawn about the world, 
The drowsy lights along the paths 
  Are dim and pearled.

Gold and gleaming the empty streets, 
  Gold and gleaming the misty lake, 
The mirrored lights like sunken swords, 
  Glimmer and shake.

Oh, is it not enough to be 
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I 
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. 
Oh, beauty, are you not enough?

Why am I crying after love 
With youth, a singing voice and eyes
To take earth’s wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride, 
Why am I unsatisfied, 
I for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,
I for whom all beauty burns 
Like incense in a million urns? 
Oh, beauty, are you not enough? 
Why am I crying after love?

The twilight’s inner flame grows blue and deep,
And in my Lesbos, over leagues of sea,
The temples glimmer moonwise in the trees.
Twilight has veiled the little flower face
Here on my heart, but still the night is kind
And leaves her warm sweet weight against my breast.
Am I that Sappho who would run at dusk
Along the surges creeping up the shore
When tides came in to ease the hungry beach,
And running, running, till the night was black,
Would fall forespent upon the chilly sand
And quiver with the winds from off the sea?
Ah, quietly the shingle waits the tides
Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me
Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.
I crept and touched the foam with fevered hands
And cried to Love, from whom the sea is sweet,
From whom the sea is bitterer than death.
Ah, Aphrodite, if I sing no more
To thee, God’s daughter, powerful as God,
It is that thou hast made my life too sweet
To hold the added sweetness of a song.
There is a quiet at the heart of love,
And I have pierced the pain and come to peace.
I hold my peace, my Cleïs, on my heart;
And softer than a little wild bird’s wing
Are kisses that she pours upon my mouth.
Ah, never any more when spring like fire
Will flicker in the newly opened leaves,
Shall I steal forth to seek for solitude
Beyond the lure of light Alcæus’ lyre,
Beyond the sob that stilled Erinna’s voice.
Ah, never with a throat that aches with song,
Beneath the white uncaring sky of spring,
Shall I go forth to hide awhile from Love
The quiver and the crying of my heart.
Still I remember how I strove to flee
The love-note of the birds, and bowed my head
To hurry faster, but upon the ground
I saw two wingèd shadows side by side,
And all the world’s spring passion stifled me.
Ah, Love, there is no fleeing from thy might,
No lonely place where thou hast never trod,
No desert thou hast left uncarpeted
With flowers that spring beneath thy perfect feet.
In many guises didst thou come to me;
I saw thee by the maidens while they danced,
Phaon allured me with a look of thine,
In Anactoria I knew thy grace,
I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes;
But never wholly, soul and body mine,
Didst thou bid any love me as I loved.
Now I have found the peace that fled from me;
Close, close, against my heart I hold my world.
Ah, Love that made my life a lyric cry,
Ah, Love that tuned my lips to lyres of thine,
I taught the world thy music, now alone
I sing for one who falls asleep to hear.

My swimmer’s body a slash at the door,
I listen to you thrash against the shore of sleep
I think we owe this to each other, to never dream
Alone again, to come home when asked. You would
Say I want for you the world, its favors. But the world
Is ending, its favors few. I want for us a future
No longer wrecked against the animal love made of us
I want to say I bore witness to the world
And mean I did not flinch when it felled you
I tried. I didn’t, not really. I held my hand out
Shielding only my face from the sun.
The most American disease is the dis-
ease of self-obsession. In its ruins I find
there are questions I never quite learned to ask:

How can I help?
What did you need?
How will I know?

From our house in Athlone on the Flats go up Kromboom, Crooked Tree, toward the mountain and onto the M3, then turn left for the road along the sea or right for the shorter route over Ou Kaapse Weg to get to Cape Point, the furthest part, the part where my grandparents camped at Buffelsbaai, Buffalo Bay, before it was made into nature. There they fished and swam and made a fire to cook the kabeljou and hardes and in the photos, time didn’t seem like time. Even if their way of standing shoulder touching shoulder and answering to the camera, even if their brylcreemed hair and tweed jackets weren’t from the forties, the size of the fish my grandfather caught told me they were in another world, those fat, abundant fish that are a dream of the sea now.

This time I chose the halfmoon turn up the mountain and the crags of Silvermine, some straight as blocks of slate and others stubbled and stacked but with something not of nature about them, as though they were people who had just stopped moving and had arranged themselves for us to look at, more formal than they would have been otherwise. Once I drove this way with my husband and he said, this place reminds me of Angkor Wat, and I laughed. How could this backup route we took when we didn’t have time to go along the sea, the one we hurried through on the way to the Point, how could it be compared to temples, to exalted ruins?

One day my aunt, visiting Athlone from Uitenhage, the town 500 miles away on the southeast coast where I was born, asked, Haai, maar wat is hierdie klein bergie in julle agterplaas? Hey—haai is not quite hey, but English doesn’t have a phatic for the affectionate astonishment of a sound that isn’t a word but a beginning—so, Hey, but what is this little mountain in your backyard? She meant the small rise called Table Mountain, which she couldn’t recognize because my grandparents were removed from its slopes to the lee of it, to here, behind its famous face and the tablecloth of cloud falling over its steep slopes. Unknowable from this angle. 

On the Flats, everything is background. It’s the place you leave behind to get anywhere. I left to go to school because the schools were still in the places where people lived before were removed. I left Athlone to go to the University of Cape Town on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, where the land was bequeathed by Cecil John Rhodes. Before students protested, his statue used to look from the University across the Flats all the way to Cairo. Up on Jameson Steps, you could sit and see the pepper pot towers of the cooling station just down Thornton Road from my mother’s house. I left Athlone to fall in love and leave forever. 

I know exactly when I started to notice the world, three streets from my house, when I turn left toward the mountain. From Athlone, Lansdowne—names of minor British royals banished to the Cape now pasted over the land—from the Flats, you always have to aim toward the ridge, and once you reach it, cross a kloof or neck, always go toward some impermeable barrier that demands you ford it. That is the story that the Flats was always telling me. How to leave, how to aim toward the mountain. But coming back, flying to Cape Town, you land in the Flats, have to drive through its unnerving sameness, its absence of a focal point, so you hold the mountain ahead of you like a direction through the present tense. 

What is the point of this leaving and returning, this old circle from the Flats to the peak it doesn’t recognize, and then back? 

I leave again for the mountain that someone from elsewhere showed me was smaller and closer than I knew. And then I come back. Back to the home I knew as background. The Flats with its 200 square miles of levelness, with mountains to the north and east and sea to the south, that I abandoned for school, then university, then love. In the backyard where my aunt stood looking at the mountain, fenced in by unpainted grey vibracrete walls, the only color the tired grass and the weathered side of the neighbor’s garage, a speckled white tinted by the low sun and smudged with the shadows of sparrows, the most common of birds, unnoticed birds, darting at something in the grey sand then flitting upward to meet themselves at the top of the wall. The sound is of background fluttering, murmurs, phatic noise. Everything is unimportant, passing. I am standing next to her, young, invisible—time is tangled and striated and doubled—as I see what I couldn’t see at the beginning, the ground on which she stood when she called the mountain ours.

Green pincushion proteas grow
in my memory, swaying faintly
in today’s wind. Memory snags me
through the pink pincushions I bought this morning
from the auntie in the doek by the Kwikspar
who added a king protea to the bunch,
all spikes and pins in reds and maroons,
so regal that as a child I didn’t know
they were alive
and did not water them.
My mother’s remembering
remembers them into me.

Do you remember, she asks, and then I do,
green pincushion proteas this small?
She slowly makes her fingers turn and bloom
green flowers the size of large coins
that we found here among the rocks and grey sand
under tall trees unnameable in memory, reaching
their roots into the house’s foundations,
subtle threads stretching closer and closer.

All tangles and snaggings and swayings,
green pincushion proteas prick into my mind,
thicken themselves stitch by stitch
into a place that was not, but is again.
The grey sand of memory now fervent with colour,
green blooms clamber over the rockery
and we, who did not know their beginnings,
move them to another part of the garden,
and they withdraw, and then withdraw
from memory until now, a new species of green
blossoming and unmoved.
They died, she recalls.
They don’t like their roots to be moved.

Do you remember, she asks,
and the green coins bud into the first bush
long preceding us, and careless we wrench them
from their original rocks and they die
a little and then fully.
Why did we move them to another place,
we, who were removed to here?
Do you remember, she asks.