69 QUEER POETS

Compiled by Hera Lindsay Bird 2014

I dont own any of this content
Please dont sue me/come back from the dead
and haunt me

Cunt Shakespeare
Impediments to love are not love. I have put thy
underwear up to my remover to remove: O, no! it
is thy tits swaying in rhythm, shaken to the stars.
Thy tits are every large cow and they feed me
sacredly with thoughts of heights be taken. Loves
not while I jerked off, thinking of thee covertly,
bending my sickles compass in a cove, a movie,
a restaurant, a parking garage. Love bears it out
even to the edge. I probably wouldnt have given
writ nor ever loved thee years ago. I pull down my
pants and push action til action, lust is perjured,
my tongue in thy ear for just a second, extreme,
rude, cruel, not trusting. I enjoyed no scrotum
into my ancient parchment, in front; and no
sooner I had thee, past reason, I hated giving thy
cock much attention. I the taker am mad, mad
in pursuit and in nostalgia for our past and the
desire to fuck; we had extreme bliss as proofand
proved, I ripped thy shirt open, tugging dream. All
this the world well knows; yet really I do want to
fuck the shit out of thee. Lead me to this hell, my
mistress whose eyes are vain like that; excuse me:
fuck me. I slide between thy lips red: if snow be
white, why then walls. I stick thy cock stone inside
my cunt for at least fifteen minutes. I notice that
thy breasts are dun; if hairs be wires, black opened
it over and over again until thou camest damasked,
red and white, such rose breezes and spots. I pinch
my nipples; is there more delight in breath than
in making friends with thy cock? My goddess go,
my mistress, walk on thy panties. If I hadnt read
Anas Nin Id think my love as rare; she belied
my pussy against the computer screen. I put forth
that my pussy is made of truth; I do believe her

though I reach down and unravel my wrinkles; Im

no untutored youth, unlearned in the worlds of
me and thee. Its a map. I realize my pussy thinks
me young; she knows thee right now here on the
floor beside my wherefore: not she is unjust. Im at
thy pants snarling, Give it to me. My best habit
is in seeming to trust. Age in love shouldnt take
the beautiful word fuck in vain; as I lie with thee,
and thou with me, our faults throb along thy lips
and in the centre of my sinful earth. Lord of these
rebel becauses, I want thee to fuck me within this
suffering and dearth, painting outward.

Yes of Course it Hurts

Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking.
Why else would the springtime falter?
Why would all our ardent longing
bind itself in frozen, bitter pallor?
After all, the bud was covered all the winter.
What new thing is it that bursts and wears?
Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking,
hurts for that which grows
and that which bars.
Yes, it is hard when drops are falling.
Trembling with fear, and heavy hanging,
cleaving to the twig, and swelling, sliding weight draws them down, though they go on clinging.
Hard to be uncertain, afraid and divided,
hard to feel the depths attract and call,
yet sit fast and merely tremble hard to want to stay
and want to fall.
Then, when things are worst and nothing helps
the trees buds break as in rejoicing,
then, when no fear holds back any longer,
down in glitter go the twigs drops plunging,
forget that they were frightened by the new,
forget their fear before the flight unfurled feel for a second their greatest safety,
rest in that trust
that creates the world.

The Armadillo (For Robert Lowell)

After receiving the message from the
police department as to the date of the
trial, Louise had a bad dream.
(Aug. 18) She dreamed she was a
prisoner & condemned to death, but
on the fatal day they let her go. She
was dressed in bright redtrousers
& shirtand she was going some
where on a train. She was to be
executed at a certain hourbut
not formallyanyone could do it
when the right minute came
on the train, in the station, etc., etc.

Same Difference
When I was a kid Id take a mirror and point it up, walk around staring
into the hole at my feet. It felt exhilarating like I might fall through.
Im OK if you do this with queer, though you dont really risk falling.
But even thats not true: to feel is to fall, and in one hundred years we'll
both be dead, we'll be Other. And thats why its OK to use me for your
poetics. Let the poem be the white house at the end of the road. Let it
be everything, impossible white in the dusk. The man who lived in the
house just died, and as he was the last one you didnt come out to, now
you no longer care who knows. Its a weird feeling. Its a little like youre
walking into a great light. Its nice to think there is always something to
come out of. You really like this place youre seeing, there are all kinds of
shapes, women and men, wolves, rabbits and deer. There might be a war
or a love between them and you should cover it. You dont have a job,
but if you had one, this would be it.

Image-Nation 2 (roaming
we are journeying in company with the messenger
but there, it was
there 'you' saw
the head of a horse burn,
its red eye flame 'you' stepped
to the fireplace where the metamorphosed log lay without a body
and put 'your' hand over the seeing
turned by that privacy
from such public peril as words
are, we travel in company with the messenger
the name of the bird who fell
from the hands of O-moon
is Naught if following
angels, shaped tears, nourished by
Sodom apples, we draw darkness,
a kind of mud (in the moonlight
white blossoms hastening to fall
are cut free)

POEM
Sometimes
everything
seems
so
Oh, I dont know.

TERRIBLE AT LEAVING
I say Well, I guess I should be going and nothing happens.

THE ZOO
A very sad thing happened at the zoo. Judy, Bill's mother,
became very sick and died.

Excerpt from I Remember

'I remember when a kid told me that sour clover-like leaves we used to
eat (with little yellow flowers) tasted so sour because dogs peed on them.
I remember that didn't stop me from eating them'
I remember the day Frank OHara died. I tried to do a painting somehow especially for him. (Especially good) And it turned out awful
I remember how unsexy swimming naked in gym class was
I remember saying thank you in reply to thank you and then the
other person doesnt know what to say
I remember visions (when in bed but not asleep yet) of very big objects
becoming very small and of very small objects becoming very big
I remember trying to convince Ron Padgett that I didnt believe in God
anymore but he wouldnt believe me
I remember looking at myself in a mirror and becoming a total stranger
I remember catching myself with an expression on my face that doesnt
relate to whats going on anymore
I remember, at parties, after youve said all you can think of to say to a
personbut there you both stand
I remember, eating alone in restaurants, making a point of looking
around a lot so people wouldnt think I was making a point of not looking around a lot
I remember a dream of meeting a man made out of a very soft yellow
cheese and when I went to shake his hand I just pulled his arm off
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot
pie.

I remember when my father would say Keep your hands out from under the covers as he said goodnight. But he said it in a nice way.
I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen
would put you in jail.
I remember a girl in school one day who, just out of the blue, went into
a long spiel all about how difficult it was to wash her brothers pants
because he didnt wear underwear.
I remember the first time I met Frank OHara. He was walking down
Second Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing
only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue
jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very
theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.
I remember liver.
I remember the chair I used to put my boogers behind.
I remember my parents bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch
(cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the
fact that she didnt have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and
lived to be very old.
I remember Dorothy Collins.
I remember Dorothy Collins teeth.
I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the
Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.
I remember my grade school art teacher, Mrs Chick, who got so mad at
a boy one day she dumped a bucket of water over his head.

I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and
all the fish died.
I remember after people are gone thinking of things I should have said but
didnt.

SKUNK CABBAGE
Because it is soon, it has a private and quiet
spring. Before the birds come, before
another leaf or flower, it flowers; and bees
come there and enter and leave, thick
with pollen. Foetid, even in the thin chill
of a wintry spring, it stinks of livingness,
rawness. Its color also is of skin
rubbed raw by wind, by cold, by sun,
and the flesh showing through. It is the flesh
responding to warmth, to sun, to the first spring.
It looks like tenderness, the way it curves
upward and beaks over to cover within.

The Drift of the World

I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isnt an anchor anywhere.
There isnt an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
One has a feeling it is all coming to an end
no, not that. One has a feeling it is like
that war whose last battle was fought long
after the treaty was signed. the imminence
relates to a past doom. We look back
to one time, some time, something that already has
happened. Look, we are still here, but note
that nothing of moment has happened for an age, an age,
for as long as we can piece together, not
since the time it happened. Was there that time?
Once, there must have been. When will it end?

At Tikal
Mountains they knew, and jungle, the sun, the stars
these seemed to be there. But even after they slashed
the jungle and burned it and planted the comforting corn,
they were discontent. They wanted the shape of things.
They imagined a world and it was as if it were there
a world with stars in their places and rain that came
when they called. It closed them in. Stone by stone,
as they built this city, these temples, then built this world.
They believed it. This was the world, and they,
of course, were the people. Now trees make up
assemblies and crowd in the wide plazas. Trees
climb the stupendous steps and rubble them.
In the jungle, the temples are little mountains again.
It is always hard like this, not having a world,
to imagine one, to go to the far edge
apart and imagine, to wall whether in
or out, to build a kind of cage for the sake
of feeling the bars around us, to give shape to a world.
And oh, it is always a world and not the world.

Another Elegy
This is what your dying looks like.
You believe in the sun. You believe
I dont love you. Always be closing,
Said our favorite professor before
He let the gun go off in his mouth.
I turned 29 the way any man turns
In his sleep, unaware of the earth
Moving beneath him, its plates in
Their places, a dated disagreement.
Lets fight it out, baby. You have
Only so long left. A man turns
In his sleep, so I take a picture.
He wont look at it, of course. Its
His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole
In a husbands head, the O
Of his wifes mouth. Every night,
I take a pill. Miss one, and Im gone.
Miss two, and were through. Hotels
Bore me, unless I get a mountain view,
A room in which my cell wont work,
And theres nothing to do but see
The sun go down into the ground
That cradles us as any coffin can.

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1
an urban image from the eighties
when we hung out at Chez Madam Arthur
and at the back of the room
women wrapped their arms around
nights of ink and dawn
2
calendar of murmurs
vague caresses about the planet and its water
we could have confused words
but there were doors open
confetti in the midst of darkness
gentle ways
to swoon in a corner with she who
put her tongue in my mouth
3
focus on yes, on the womans
eyelids
caress not silence not word
focus beyond. Hold me back

No love
No compassion
No intelligence
No beauty
No humility
Twenty-seven years is enough
Mother too late years of meanness Im sorry
Daddy What happened?
Allen Im sorry
Peter Holy Rose Youth
Betty Such womanly bravery
Keith Thank you
Joyce So girl beautiful
Howard Baby take care
Leo Open the windows and Shalom
Carol Let it happen
Let me out now please
Please let me in

Dear God of the bent trees of Fifth Avenue

Dear God of the bent trees of Fifth Avenue
Only pour my willful dust up your veins
And Ill pound your belly-flat world
In praise of small agonies
Suck sea monsters off Tierra del Fuego
Fuck your only begotten cobalt dream
To filter golden pleasure
through your apple glutted heaven
Filter the uncircumcized sin of my heart.

Emily,
Come summer
Youll take off your
jeweled bees
Which sting me
Ill strip my stinking
jeans
Hand in hand
Well run outside
Look straight at
the sun
A second time
And get tan.

Death Im coming
Wait for me
I know youll be
at the subway station
loaded with galoshes, raincoat, umbrella, babushka
And your single simple answer
to every meaning
incorruptible institution
Listen to what she said
Theres a passage through the white cabbages
High and laughig through 3 hours
Faithful paranoid
Its all One to you
isnt it
Real, that is,
Literal
enough
To find a snoozing place among thick visions
till shell stumble
over you
Or wait till rot down

Snowshoe to Otter Creek

love lasts by not lasting
Jack Gilbert
Im mapping this new years vanishings:
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the minds lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Voyages
I
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
II
And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,

All but the pieties of lovers hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,
Hasten, while they are true,sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seals wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
III
Infinite consanguinity it bears
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light

Star kissing star through wave on wave unto

Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...
IV
Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatrosss white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.
All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June
Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught

For islands where must lead inviolably

Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.
V
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile ... What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed ... Theres
Nothing like this in the world, you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
And never to quite understand! No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.

Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;

Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
VI
Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,
Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the suns
Red kelson past the capes wet stone;
O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix breast
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
Thy derelict and blinded guest
Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.
Beyond siroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into Aprils inmost day
Creations blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,

Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!
The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.

Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono

Born, I was born.

Tears represent how much my mother loves me,

shivering and steaming like a horse in rain.
My heart as innocent as Buddha's,
my name a Parisian bandleader's,
I am trying to stand.
Father is holding me and blowing in my ear,
like a glassblower on a flame.
Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling
of formal precision and stoicism.
Growing, I am growing now,
as straight as red pines in the low mountains.
Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl.
I become distressed
watching the president's caisson.
We, we together move to the big house.
Shining, the sun is shining on my time line.
Tears, copper-hot tears,
spatter the house
when Father is drunk, irate, and boisterous.
The essence of self emerges
shuttling between parents.

Excerpt from The Pink and The Black

The oyster-white rock on which we sat.
The sleepy face that looked at me.
The crossed ankles.
The inky cloud, like an octopuss secretion, moving overhead.
The sun a watery white mess.
The dainty, crocheted net where the sea urchins slept.

Homosexuality
First I saw the round bill, like a bud;
then the sooty crested head, with avernal eyes
flickering, distressed, then the peculiar
long neck wrapping and unwrapping itself,
like pity or love, when I removed the stovepipe
cover of the bedroom chimney to free
what was there and a duck crashed into the room
(I am here in this fallen state), hitting her face,
bending her throat back (my love, my inborn
turbid wanting, at large all night), backing away,
gnawing at her own wing linings (the poison of my life,
the beast, the wolf), leaping out the window,
which I held open (now clear, sane, serene),
before climbing back naked into bed with you.

Saturdays Child
Some are teethed on a silver spoon,
With the stars strung for a rattle;
I cut my teeth as the black raccoon
For implements of battle.
Some are swaddled in silk and down,
And heralded by a star;
They swathed my limbs in a sackcloth gown
On a night that was black as tar.
For some, godfather and goddame
The opulent fairies be;
Dame Poverty gave me my name,
And Pain godfathered me.
For I was born on Saturday
Bad time for planting a seed,
Was all my father had to say,
And, One mouth more to feed.
Death cut the strings that gave me life,
And handed me to Sorrow,
The only kind of middle wife
My folks could beg or borrow.

To the Angelbeast
All that glitters isnt music.
Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.
You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.
Am I not your animal?
Youd wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.
You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.

Small Thundering
We are born with spinning coins in place of eyes,
paid-in-full to ferry Charons narrow skiffs. We redcloaked captains helming dark fits of sleep.
Our medicine bags are anchored by buffalo nickels
Sleek skulls, horns, and hooves etched by Gatlings.
How we plow and furrow the dizzying Styx
lovingly digging the dark oars
as if they were grandmothers legs
promising to take us home.
A gunnysack full of tigers wrestles in our chests
They pace, stalking our hearts, building a jail
with their stripes. Each tail a fuse. Each eye a cinder.
Chest translates to bomb.
Bomb is a song
the drums shame-hollowed lament.
Burlap is no place for prayers or hands.
The reservation is no place for a jungle.
The snow-dim prairies are garlanded with children
My people dance like pyres but do not celebrate
the bodies red as hollyhocks.
Some lay where they first fell,
enamored by warmth woven from of a blanket of blood.
Others crawled until they came undone,
petal by petal,
streaking the white field crimson.
I am bluer than a sky weeping bones
This is the way to build a flag,
a wound.
Yesterday is much closer than today,
a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades
like an itch, or the bud of a wing.

Streetlights glow, neon gourds,

electric dandelions
blow them out!
Wish hard for orange buttes and purple canyons,
moon-hoofed horses with manes made from wars,
other small thundering.

Some New Thing

The best reason to live is that there is no reason to live.
I walked to your apartment in the late night.
Flowers I didnt plant began to be flowers
and I was a color and then I was none.
Conrad said, let the train take you anywhere.
I passed all the old stops. With you I liked being nowhere
and with you I live nowhere now.
The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.
Keith Haring wrote that, it could be about us.
I go into churches and I go into bars:
I feel the time stop.
To feel you cant stop at some point.
Stop time. Time stops you.
No one will let you through if you dont walk your own sadness.
No one will let you touch them if youre a person at all.
And you. You, you, you
you can read these lines in any order
because I want to leave nothing out anymore
and theres nothing here.
Words are just words. I got nowhere.
Some new thing everything I need to feel
I feel twice and risk three of. Some new thing
how theres more here without us at all.

The Truth
Every time I use
my language, I tell
the truth. A cat
in a white collar,
like a priest with calico
fur, walks across the dead
grass of the yard, and out
through the white fence. The suns
strong, but the colors of the lawn
were washed out by the winter, not the light.
February. Stained glass window of the house
next door takes the suns full brunt.
It must look spectacular
to the neighbor in my head,
a white-haired woman with an air
of dignity and grace, who
through pools of the intensest
colors climbs the flight of stairs.
Ive never seen it,
but I know its there.

D.O.A.
You knew who I was
when I walked in the door.
You thought that I was dead.
Well, I am dead. A man
can walk and talk and even
breathe and still be dead.
Edmond OBrien is perspiring
and chewing up the scenery
in my favorite film noir,
D.O.A. I cant stop watching,
cant stop relating. When I walked down
Columbus to Endicott last night
to pick up Tors new novel,
I felt the eyes of every
Puerto Rican teen, crackhead,
yuppie couple focus on my cane
and makeup. Youre dead,
they seemed to say in chorus.
Somewhere in a dark bar
years ago, I picked up luminous
poisoning. My eyes glowed
as I sipped my drink. After that,
there was no cure, no turning back.
I had to find out what was gnawing
at my gut. The hardest parts
not even the physical effects:
stumbling like a drunk (Edmond
OBrien was one of Hollywoods
most active lushes) through
Forties sets, alternating sweats
and fevers, reptilian spots
on face and scalp. Its having
to say goodbye like the scene

where soundtrack violins go crazy

as OBrien gives his last embrace
to his girlfriend-cum-Girl
Friday, Paula, played by Pamela
Britton. Theyre filmdoms least
likely loversthe squat and jowly
alkie and the homely fundamentally
talentless actress who would hit
the height of her fame as the pillheadacting landlady on My Favorite Martian
fifteen years in the future. I dont have
fifteen years, and neither does Edmond
OBrien. He has just enough time to tell
Paula how much he loves her, then
to drive off in a convertible
for the showdown with his killer.
Id like to have a showdown too, if I
could figure out which pistol-packing
brilliantined and ruthless villain
in a hounds-tooth overcoat took
my life. Lust, addiction, being
in the wrong place at the wrong
time? Thats not the whole
story. Absolute fidelity
to the truth of what I felt, open
to the moment, and in every case
a kind of love: all of the above
brought me to this tottering
self-conscious statepneumonia,
emaciation, grisly cancer,
no future, heart of gold,
passionate engagement with a great
B film, a glorious summer
afternoon in which to pick up
the ripest plum tomatoes of the year

and prosciutto for the feast Ill cook

tonight for the man I love,
phone calls from my friends
and a walk to the park, ignoring
stares, to clear my head. A day
like any, like no other. Not so bad
for the dead.

No Problem Party Poem

first glass broken on patio no problem
forgotten sour cream for vegetable no problem
Lewis MacAdams tough lower jaw no problem
cops arriving to watch bellydancer no problem
plastic bags of melted ice no problem
wine on antique tablecloth no problem
scratchy stereo no problem
neighbors dog no problem
interviewer from Berkeley Barb no problem
absence of more beer no problem
too little dope no problem
leering Naropans no problem
cigarette butts on the altars no problem
Marilyn vomiting in planter box no problem
Phoebe renouncing love no problem
Lewis renouncing Phoebe no problem
hungry ghosts no problem
absence of children no problem
heat no problem
dark no problem
arnica scattered in nylon rug no problem
ashes in bowl of bleached bone and Juniper berries no problem
lost Satie tape no problem
loss of temper no problem
arrogance no problem
boxes of empty beer cans & wine bottles no problem
thousands of styrofoam cups no problem
Gregory Curso no problem
Allen Ginsberg no problem
Diane di Prima no problem
Anne Waldmans veins no problem
Dick Gallups birthday no problem
Joanne Kygers peyote & rum no problem wine no problem

coca-cola no problem
getting it on in the wet grass no problem
running out of toilet paper no problem
decimation of pennyroyal no problem
destruction of hair clasp no problem
paranoia no problem
claustrophobia no problem
growing up on Brooklyn streets no problem
growing up in Tibet no problem
growing up in Chicano Texas no problem
bellydancing certainly no problem
figuring it all out no problem
giving it all up no problem
giving it all away no problem
devouring everything in sight no problem
what else in Allens refrigerator?
what else in Annes cupboard?
what do you know that you
havent told me yet?
No problem. No problem. No problem.
staying another day no problem
getting out of town no problem
telling the truth, almost no problem
easy to stay awake
easy to go to sleep
easy to sing the blues
easy to chant sutras
whats all the fuss about?
it decomposes - no problem
we pack it in boxes - no problem
we swallow it with water, lock it in the trunk,
make a quick getaway. NO PROBLEM.

Oread
Whirl up, sea
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us
Cover us with your pools of fir.

Eurydice
At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;
and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;
before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the suns going down
whose secret we see in a childrens game
of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

Largo (excerpt)
All friends are false but you are true: the paradox
Is perfect tense in present time, whose parallel
Extends to meeting point; where, more than friends, we fell
Together on the other side of love, where clocks
And mirrors were reversed to show
Ourselves as only we could know;
Where all the doors had secret locks
With double keys; and where the sliding panel, well
Concealed, gave us our exit through the palace wall.
There we have come and gone: twin kings, who roam at will
Behind the court, behind the backs
Of consort queens, behind the racks
On which their favorites lie who told them what to do.
For every cupid with a garland round the throne still lacks
The look I give to you.

This Loneliness for You is Like the Wound

This loneliness for you is like the wound
That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,
Smiling to soothe the general on his round
Of visits to the somehow not yet dead;
Who, after he has pinned a cross above
The bullet-bearing heart, when told that this
Is one who held the hill, bends down to give
Folly a diffident embarrassed kiss.
But once that medaled moment passes, O,
Disaster, charging on the fever chart,
Wins the last battle, takes the heights, and he
Succumbs before his reinforcements start.
Yet now, when death is not a metaphor,
Who dares to say that love is like the war?

The Prince, His Madness, He Raves at Mirrors (excerpt)

I am chilled, as though a star
Of mobs and children came by traitor's gate
And climbed the water stair to break his neck
On the axe king's block, all in winter sunshine.
His brain in ice, his guts in melting jelly,
As barefoot fellow bound for high-heel gallows,
Peer of the Presence like a spaniel licks
Cracked lips to ease his vomit back; then stumbles
On the ladder going up to hell.

My Sad Self
To Frank OHara
Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at my world, Manhattan
my buildings, streets Ive done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem
sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity
matter is water.
Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all mans
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,

traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me

waiting for a moment when ...
Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
... all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching realitys face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some windowat dusk
where I have no desire
for bonbonsor to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection
Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb
And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen

never regained or desired

in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that Ive seen must disappear.

Enebris
There is a tree, by day,
That, at night, Has a shadow,
A hand huge and black,
With fingers long and black.
All through the dark,
Against the white mans house,
In the little wind,
The black hand plucks and plucks
At the bricks.
The bricks are the color of blood
and very small.
Is it a black hand,
Or is it a shadow?

Nearly a Valediction
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bulldozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as Ive ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A newborn flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.
I dont want to remember you as that
four oclock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
Youve grown into your skin since then; youve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.
While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeineassisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dustballs in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
Shell never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didnt know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in proximity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until

the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled

through one cheeks nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.

My Sad Captains
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all
the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.
True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

The Differences
Receiting Adrienne Rich on Cole and Haight,
Your blond hair bouncing like a corner boys,
You walked with sturdy almost swaggering gait,
The short mans, looking upward with such poise,
Such bold yet friendly curiosity
I was convinced that clear defiant blue
Would have abashed a storm-trooper. To me
Conscience and courage stood fleshed out in you.
So when you gnawed my armpits, I gnawed yours
And learned to associate you with that smell
As if your exuberance sprang from your pores.
I tried to lose my self in you as well.
To lose my selfI did the opposite,
I turned into the boy with iron teeth
Who planned to eat the whole word bit by bit,
My love not flesh but in the mind beneath.
Love takes its shape within that part of me
(A poet says) where memories resides.
And just as light marks out the boundary
Of some glass outline men can see inside,
So love is formed by a dark rays invasion
From Mars, its dwelling in the mind to make.
It is a created thing, and has sensation,
A soul, and strength of will.
It is opaque.
Opaque, yet once I slept with you all night
Dreaming about youthought not quite embraced
Always in contact felt however slight.
We lay at ease, an arm loose round a waist,
Or side by side and touching at the hips,
As if we were two trees, bough grazing bough,
The twigs being the toes or fingertips.

I have not crossed your mind for three weeks now.

But think back on that night in January,
When casually distinct we shared the most
And lay upon a bed of clarity
In luminous half-sleep where the will was lost.
We woke at times and as the night got colder
Exchanged a word, or pulled the clothes again
To cover up the others exposed shoulder,
Falling asleep to the small talk of the rain.

Meaningful Love
What the bad news was
became apparent too late
for us to do anything good about it.
I was offered no urgent dreaming,
didnt need a name or anything.
Everything was taken care of.
In the medium-size city of my awareness
voles are building colossi.
The blue room is over there.
He put out no feelers.
The day was all as one to him.
Some days he never leaves his room
and those are the best days,
by far.
There were morose gardens farther down the slope,
anthills that looked like they belonged there.
The sausages were undercooked,
the wine too cold, the bread molten.
Who said to bring sweaters?
The climates not that dependable.
The Atlantic crawled slowly to the left
pinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,
a ruse for next time,
where fire and water are rampant in the streets,
the gate closedno visitors today
or any evident heartbeat.

I got rid of the book of fairy tales,

pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,
found myself back here at six oclock,
pondering possible side effects.
There was no harm in loving then,
no certain good either. But love was loving servants
or bosses. No straight road issuing from it.
Leaves around the door are penciled losses.
Twenty years to fix it.
Asters bloom one way or another.

The New Higher

You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.
Blithely passing in and out of where, blushing shyly
at the tag on the overcoat near the window where
the outside crept away, I put aside the there and now.
Now it was time to stumble anew,
blacking out when time came in the window.
There was not much of it left.
I laughed and put my hands shyly
across your eyes. Can you see now?
Yes I can see I am only in the where
where the blossoming stream takes off, under your window.
Go presently you said. Go from my window.
I am half in love with your window I cannot undermine
it, I said.

Dragging the Lake

They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks.
Where the oak throws its handful of shadows
Children are gathering fireflies.
I wait in the deep olive flux
As their cries ricochet out of the dark.
Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak.
It foists its mouthful of sibilants
On a sky involved with a stillborn moon,
On the stock-still cottages. I lean
Into the dark. On tiny splints,
One trellised rose is folding back
Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake.
Rowboats bob on the thick dark
Over my head. My fingers wave
Goodbye, remember me. I love
This cold, these captive stars. I shake
My blanket of shadows. I breathe in:
Dark replenishes my two wineskins.
My eyes are huge, two washed-out mollusks.
Oars fall, a shower of violet spray.
When will my hosts deliver me,
Tearing me with their wooden hooks?
Lights flicker where my live heart kicked.
I taste pine gum, they have me hooked.

They reel me in, a displaced anchor.

The cygnets scatter. I rise, I nod,
Wrapped in a jacket of dark weed.
I dangle, I am growing pure,
I fester on this wooden prong.
I fester on this wooden prong.
An angry nail is in my tongue.

From another reality ...

The cry for reality makes one ill.
Far too close did I get to things
so that I burnt a path through
and stand on the other side of them,
where lights not apart from the dark,
where boundaries nowhere are set,
only a silence that casts me into a universe of loneliness,
oh of incurable loneliness.
Look, I soothe my hand in the cooling grass:
That surely is reality,
that surely is reality enough for your eyes,
I though am on the other side
where grass blades are chiming bells of grief and bitter expectation.
Im holding someone by the hand,
looking hard into somebodys eyes,
but I am on the other side
where each persons a mist of loneliness and fear.
Oh, were I only a stone
where the weight of this void could be held,
were I only a star
where the pain of this void could be drunk,
but I am just someone cast out into the borderland,
and I hear the silence roar
I hear the silence cry
from worlds deeper than this one.

ONE DAY THERE WILL BE HORSES

Your eyes peered out from the wreck
Of a three-day drunk.
Your eyes say good man, works with hands,
Knows how to dance, believes in the good of people,
And wants a chance.
We talked about relationships, jobs and all the casino winners
In your family: everyone but you.
Ayyy its my turn now.
Your eyes laughed and kicked back
The afternoon sun.
You asked me to let you off near an overpass, north of town.
A creek ran parallel to the highway.
There were trees bending down
To cup the winds.
When I turned back to look you were walking west.
Work shoes and tools over your shoulder
in your broken bag.
A little rain began to fall
From sparse, lucky clouds.
Did you find a place to sleep,
And something to give your sustenance
for the long night?
Your eyes peer
Through the dark as you sing
A traveling song:
One day I will be rich.
One day I will have horses enough
To marry you with.
Hey-ya-ha
Hey-ya-ho!

Creation Story
I'm not afraid of love
or its consequence of light.
It's not easy to say this
or anything when my entrails
dangle between paradise
and fear.
I am ashamed
I never had the words
to carry a friend from her death
to the stars
correctly.
Or the words to keep
my people safe
from drought
or gunshot.
The stars who were created by words
are circling over this house
formed of calcium, of blood
this house
in danger of being torn apart
by stones of fear.
If these words can do anything
if these songs can do anything
I say bless this house
with stars.
Transfix us with love.

alternate names for black boys

1. smoke above the burning bush
2. archnemesis of summer night
3. first son of soil
4. coal awaiting spark & wind
5. guilty until proven dead
6. oil heavy starlight
7. monster until proven ghost
8. gone
9. phoenix who forgets to un-ash
10. going, going, gone
11. gods of shovels & black veils
12. what once passed for kindling
13. fireworks at dawn
14. brilliant, shadow hued coral
15. (I thought to leave this blank
but who am I to name us nothing?)
16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint
17. a mothers joy & clutched breath

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Ive known rivers:
Ive known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and Ive seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
Ive known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Bouquet
Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow

Having Left
Like my grandfather, I keep eagles.
Who believes in spiritual horseshit?
There is a common misconception
about Indian people, namely everything,
but especially sadness. One summer
the pepper tree rotted, black and twisted
licorice crawling up the ground
of my grandmothers garden a reminder
my grandfather was not my grandfather
by blood. Bikini Kill had an album called
Reject All American, which was not as good
as the CD Version of the First Two Records
or Pussy Whipped, but yielded R.I.P.
People die. Sometimes a song reminds
us about pink peppers. I feel inexorably
American, in Paris, Brooklyn, Berlin,
the reservation, despite vodka and liberal arts.
There is a common misconception about
Indians, namely everything, but especially
when pink pepper trees grow cagelike
in the valley, eagle screeching skyward,
and he in a graveyard
and Im not there.

To Death
If within my heart there's mould,
If the flame of Poesy
And the flame of Love grow cold,
Slay my body utterly.
Swiftly, pause not nor delay;
Let not my life's field be spread
With the ash of feelings dead,
Let thy singer soar away.

The Taxi
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

At Last
at last no one decided
and no one knocked
and no one jumped up
and no one opened
and there stood no one
and no one entered
and no one said: welcome
and no one answered: at last

The Quiet House (excerpt)

Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere
Thin shafts on sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords
have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had split your life.
I think that my soul is red
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:
But when these are dead
They have had their hour.
I shall have had mine, too,
For from head to feet
I am burned and stabbed half through,
And the pain is deadly sweet.
The things that kill us seem
Blind to the death they give:
It is only in our dream
The things that kill us live

The Wreck on the A-222 in Ravensbourne Valley

There are more things to love
than we would dare to hope for.
Richard of St. Victor
where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with
blazons of fennel
and umbels
of dill fell
through the spokes of a wheel
on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton
Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle,
sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider
and spied: saw
the very drops of sweat glittering frostily
between the shoulder blades
of a lad
on and on he spied and bled from the blades of his cycle,
small as a spider,
hiding in the fireweed, getting
wet from the skins of many human suns aground
at the Kentish river near
Tunbridge Wells,
where the dill
lulls,
and all boys
spoil

History VI:
one

about 16 lying on the grass in the sunshine

his hand
with all his might
opened,
exposed
manipulated
the others
to this day
a telescope
excites me

grew up normal men.

They

Strawberries
When you come to sleep with me
wear a black dress
printed with strawberries
and a black wide-brimmed hat
decorated with strawberries
and hold a basket of strawberries
and sell me strawberries
tell me in a sweet high voice
strawberries strawberries
who wants strawberries
dont wear anything underneath the dress
later
strings will lift you up
invisible or visible
and lower you
directly on my prick.

Poem for Haruko

I never thought Id keep a record of my pain
or happiness
like candles lighting the entire soft lace
of the air
around the full length of your hair/a shower
organized by God
in brown and auburn
undulations luminous like particles
of flame
But now I do
retrieve an afternoon of apricots
and water interspersed with cigarettes
and sand and rocks
we walked across:
How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world
Now I do
relive an evening of retreat
a bridge I left behind
where all the solid heat
of lust and tender trembling
lay as cruel and as kind
as passion spins its infinite
tergiversations in between the bitter
and the sweet
Alone and longing for you
now I do

Question
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
When Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
with cloud fir a shift
how will I hide?

All Your Horses

Say when rain
cannot make
you more wet
or a certain
thought cant
deepen and yet
you think it again:
you have lost
count. A larger
amount is
no longer a
larger amount.
There has been
a collapse; perhaps
in the night.
Like a rupture
in water (which
cant rupture
of course). All
your horses
broken out with
all your horses.

Waste
Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

Token Loss
To the dragon
any loss is
total. His rest
is disrupted
if a single
jewel encrusted
goblet has
been stolen.
The circle
of himself
in the nest
of his gold
has been
broken. No
loss is token.

Though Failure Hugged you Like Heat

Though failure hugged you like heat
and glistened like sweat
it has its winds and its change
like any atmosphere.
And though you wandered wide
and came back empty-handed
you will have as many loves
as you have doors opening in the world.
And there are many mornings
arriving so thickly veiled:
a knife between the teeth?
a rose between the teeth?

Effort at Speech Between Two People

Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :
a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.
Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.
Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid : and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.
I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.
Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death :
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.
I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me.
What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle yesterday

I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving . Take my hand. Speak to me.

A Muse
He winds through the party like wind, one of the just
who live alone in black and white, bewildered
by the eden of his body. (You, you talk like winter
rain.) Hes the meaning of almost-morning walking home
at five A.M., the difference a night makes
turning over into day, simple birds staking claims
on no sleep. Whatever they call those particular birds.
Hes the age of sensibility at seventeen, he isnt worth
the time of afternoon it takes to write this down.
Hes the friend that lightning makes, raking
the naked tree, thunder that waits for weeks to arrive;
hes the certainty of torrents in September, harvest time
and powerlines down for miles. He doesnt even know
his name. In his body hes one with air, white as a sky
rinsed with rain. Its cold there, its hard to breathe,
and drowning is somewhere to be after a month of drought.

You, Therefore,
You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you To you I say, you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Masters charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

Bitter rain in my courtyard

In the decline of Autumn,
I only have vague poetic feelings
That I cannot bring together.
They diffuse into the dark clouds
And the red leaves.
After the yellow sunset
The cold moon rises
Out of the gloomy mist.
I will not let down the blinds
Of spotted bamboo from their silver hook.
Tonight my dreams will follow the wind,
Suffering the cold,
To the jasper tower of your beautiful flesh.

Blue Prelude
Last night, the ceiling above me
ached with dance.
Music dripped down the walls
like rain in a broken house.
My eyes followed the couples steps
from one corner to the other,
pictured the press of two chests
against soft breathing, bodies slipping
in and out of candlelight.
And the hurt was exquisite.
In my empty bed, I dreamed
the records needle
pointed into my back, spinning
me into no ones song.

Movement Song
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
beyond anger or failure
your face in the evening schools of longing
through mornings of wish and ripen
we were always saying goodbye
in the blood in the bone over coffee
before dashing for elevators going
in opposite directions
without goodbyes.
Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof
as the maker of legends
nor as a trap
door to that world
where black and white clericals
hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators
twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh
and now
there is someone to speak for them
moving away from me into tomorrows
morning of wish and ripen
your goodbye is a promise of lightning
in the last angels hand
unwelcome and warning
the sands have run out against us
we were rewarded by journeys
away from each other
into desire
into mornings alone
where excuse and endurance mingle
conceiving decision.
Do not remember me

as disaster
nor as the keeper of secrets
I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars
watching
you move slowly out of my bed
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.

No ones fated or doomed to love anyone.

The accidents happen, were not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No prison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape - recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape - recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us.

Tattered Kaddish
Taurean reaper of the wild apple field
messenger from earthmire gleaning
transcripts of fog
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:
Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved
Praise to life though its windows blew shut
on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved
Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough
Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us
Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable
Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

An Attempt at Jealousy
How is your life with that other one?
Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars
and a long coastline
and the memory of me
is soon a drifting island
(not in the oceanin the sky!)
Soulsyou will be sisters
sisters, not lovers.
How is your life with an ordinary
woman? without the god inside her?
The queen supplanted
How do you breathe now?
Flinch, waking up?
What do you do, poor man?
Hysterics and interruptions
enough! Ill rent my own house!
How is your life with that other,
you, my own.
Is the breakfast delicious?
(If you get sick, dont blame me!)
How is it, living with a postcard?
You who stood on Sinai.
Hows your life with a tourist
on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?)
is it to your liking?
Hows life? Do you cough?

Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind?

How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising?
Hows kissing plaster-dust?
Are you bored with her new body?
Hows it going, with an earthly woman,
with no sixth sense?
Are you happy?
No? In a shallow pithow is your life,
my beloved? Hard as mine
with another man?

From Dreams
My cheerless friend,
you too remember me
just once a year,
on St. John's day when
the parting-grass,
the parting-grass,
the parting-grass
flowers!

Witch Wife
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.


Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last years leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last years bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, There is no memory of him here!
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

continental divide
had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road
its surface gaining, trickle in late thawis nothing amiss?
this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle
and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white
past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would
poor sinners in redemption songshed their tainted leaves

I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions:

the smell of a bare neck in summer
a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs
the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill
in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields
the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty
if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not near them
anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract
the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks
that was all

and yes, someone took me in his car. and another against the low fence
in the park at the end of our block. under the willow branches
where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away
I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains
the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing
the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night

granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted
and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart
for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing:
a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink
a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass

we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly
backs


you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink
half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green
you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us

you open the earth for me, receiving these amber last leaves

corydon & alexis, redux

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself
and grows in clusters
oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white
as gods own ribs
what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for dont birds covet the seeds of the
honey locust
and doesnt the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats
foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me
by the nape
guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs
and brush
what was his name? Id ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, Id expire with him
on my tongue
silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided
preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our
sleepy eyes

I just knew in a quiet way I was ruined. If I agreed to be female. There

was so much evidence on the screen and in books. I read Doris Lessing
in literature class and that depressed the shit out of me too. I just hated
reading work by women or about women because it always added up the
same. Loss of self, endless self-abnegation even as the female was trying
to be an artist, she wound up pregnant, desperate, waiting on some man.
A Marxist guy, perhaps. When would it end.

Sorry
I cant remember the 2nd
time I hurt you
it was dark & someplace
in that darkness
was the thing I did.
You werent the target, I
know that, though
you mightve been the bow
& the tension
I really think is love.
Nothing ever sends me away.
Ive got your pain
in my pocket &
it glows in the dark
and in the light
its the softest kind
of singing womans voice.
Thats who you are. To me, I mean.
Let me hold your shoulders
back so you look
arrogant & beautiful
welcoming me into the warm
sad party. Let this
be the unfortunate hat
I hang outside the door
if only you will
allow me to come in.

Growing Dark
Last night in
bed I read.
You came to
my room and
said, Isnt
the world
terrible? My
dear I
said. It could be
and has been
worse. So
beautiful and
things keep getting
in between. When
I was young I
hurt others. Now,
others have hurt
me.

Sleep
The friends who come to see you
and the friends who dont.
The weather in the window.
A pierced ear.
The mounting tension and the spasm.
A paper-lace doily on a small plate.
Tangerines.
A day in February: heartshaped cookies on St. Valentines.
Like Christopher, a discarded saint.
A tough woman with black hair.
I got to set my wig straight.
A gold and silver day begins to wane.
A crescent moon.
Ice on the window.
Give my love to, oh, anybody.

Lana Turner has Collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see the headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

ANIMALS
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

Want
She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last centurys lesbians; I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe; I want
a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley
reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the rivers
reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice. She wants goats,
chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.
She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.
I want words like lasers. She wants a mothers
tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.
I want a womans wit swift as a fox.
Shes in her city, meeting
her deadline; Im in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.
Weve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Dear you,
fuck
you.
From a letter to Ernest Hemingway dated March 1922

WHY DO YOU FEEL DIFFERENTLY.

Why do you feel differently about a very little snail and a big one.
Why do you feel differently about a medium sized turkey and a very
large one.
Why do you feel differently about a small band of sheep and several
sheep that are riding.
Why do you feel differently about a fair orange tree and one that has
blossoms as well.
Oh very well.
All nice wives are like that.

A Renewal
Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.
You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.

Last Words
Your life, your light green eyes
Have lit me with joy.
Theres nothing I dont know
Or shall not know again,
Over and over again.
Its noon, its dawn, its night,
I am the dog that dies
In the deep street of Troy
Tomorrow, long ago
Part of me dims with pain,
Becomes the stinging flies,
The bent head of the boy.
Part looks into your light
And lives to tell you so.

A Book of Music
Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

Billy the Kid Part IX

So the heart breaks
Into small shadows
Almost so random
They are meaningless
Like a diamond
Has at the center of it a diamond
Or a rock
Rock.
Being afraid
Love asks its bare question
I can no more remember
What brought me here
Than bone answers bone in the arm
Or shadow sees shadow
Deathward we ride in the boat
Like someone canoeing
In a small lake
Where at either end
There are nothing but pine-branches
Deathward we ride in the boat
Broken-hearted or broken-bodied.
The choice is real. The diamond. I
Ask it.

Gacela of Unexpected Love

No one understood the perfume
of the shadow magnolia of your belly.
No one knew you crushed completely
a humming-bird of love between your teeth.
There slept a thousand little persian horses
in the moonlight plaza of your forehead,
while, for four nights, I embraced there
your waist, the enemy of snowfall.
Between the plaster and the jasmines,
your gaze was a pale branch, seeding.
I tried to give you, in my breastbone,
the ivory letters that say ever.
Ever, ever: garden of my torture,
your body, flies from me forever,
the blood of your veins is in my mouth now,
already light-free for my death.

Romance Novel (excerpt)

I
Youre never serious at 17.
One great night, full of pints and lemonade,
Youve had enough of cafs, so you stroll
Beneath green lime trees on the promenade.
The lime trees smell so good at night in June!
Sometimes the airs so soft it makes you blink.
The wind from off the town is charged with noise
And smells of grape, of ale and stronger drink . . .
II
Look there, you see a tiny handkerchief
Of dark blue, framed by branches in the night,
Pierced by a hapless star that melts away
With one soft shudder, beautifully white . . .
Youre 17! In June! It gets you high
The saps champagne: it makes your whole head ring . . .
You ramble suddenly you feel a kiss
That flutters on your lips like a live thing . . .

SCHEHERAZADE
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
Its not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
its more like a song on a policemans radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means its noon, that
means
were inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me well never get used to it.

10
(Translated by Anne Carson)
]
]
]
]
]running away
]bitten
]
]
]you
]makes a way with the mouth
]beautiful gifts children
]song delighting clear sounding lyre
]all my skin old age already
hair turned white after black
]knees do not carry
]like fawns
]but what could I do?
]not possible to become
]Dawn with arms of roses
]bringing to the ends of the earth
]yet seized
]wife
]imagines
]might bestow
But I love delicacy
and this to me
the brilliance and beauty of the sundesire has allotted

Nothing
My mother is scared of the world.
She left my father after forty years.
She was like, Happy anniversary, goodbye;
I respect that.
The moon tonight is dazzling, is full
of itself but not quite full.
A man should not love the moon, said Milosz.
Not exactly. He translated himself
into saying it. A man should not love translation;
theres so much I cant know. An hour ago,
marking time with someone I would like to like,
we passed some trees and there were crickets
(crickets!) chirping right off Divisadero.
I touched his hand, and for a cold moment
I was like a child again,
nothing more, nothing less.

To a Boy
Boy,
you are a hidden watering place under the trees
where, as the day darkens, gentle beasts with calm eyes
appear one after another.
Even if the sun drops flaming at the end of the fields where grass stirs
greenly
and a wind pregnant with coolness and night-dew agitates your leafy
bush,
it is only a premonition.
The tree of solitude that soars with ferocity,
crowned with a swirling night,
still continues in your dark place.

excerpt from Foreskin

And with the tounge tip sharpened like a needle, everts the wrapping
cloth
A bandage would tightly round and round the ring finger
The bandages for an abscess, the bandages rolling up a fireman burned
all over
The bandages that wrap the invisible man, the bandages with a mummified boy- king sleeping in [them
The white cover-cloth a leper has pulled over himself, from head to toe
The flowering stalk of a butterbur, a peapod, skin-covers of a bamboo
shoot
A miscanthus roll, a taffy in a bamboo leaf, a butterball wrapped in cellophane
A hat, the Pope's miter, a cardinal's hat, the hood for a child in the snow
country
The chef 's somewhat grimy white toque
The K.K.K. hood, socks, a rubber thimble
A rubber glove everted like a pelt of gelatin
A god's glove that has fallen from heaven toward the sea of chaos
A turban, a calpec, the hood of the Eskimo parka
Roofs rising in the Kremlin, in rows as if in a fairy tale
In the Kremlin, from the balcony
Soviet elders wave to May Day crowds in Red Square
All in uniform caps
At Buckingham Palace, guards swagger in bearskins
Pericles' helmet, Napoleon's hat
The Pohai Emperor's hat, the Egyptian priest's headdress
The Old Blossomer's cap, Mr. Ebisu's cap
The fearful shoes, the shoes that, once put on, can't be removed
The rubber boots worn by a young cock in the fish market
The riding boots made to fit the legs closely
Each time the rider walks its spurs clack, clack
A hill-fresh yam wearing a maxicoat
A wandering yakuza's slightly soiled cape

A man rolled in a mattress carried by thugs to be dumped in the river

One unhooks the beltless, pulls the zipper
And recklessly pulls down the pants
A gaiter unwound swiftly, the leather chaps
A shutter pulled down with a rattle, a curtain, a double-leaf louver door
Concealing a man, panting, his hairy shins showing, a surgical intern in
white
A noncommissioned offer's cap pulled down to the eyes, his uniform
well-creased
The armor hiding the young blond knight, his Lordship
On a morning when each exhaled breath visibly turns into steam, white
misty droplets
An auto repairman's one-piece workwear
The zipper extending down its stained cloth from neck to crotch
When one pulls it down in one breath
There, vividly, jumps out the young flesh, flushed with cold
The leaping pink flesh wrapped in a lobster shell
The pelty diving suit, a suede suit
Skinned with a stone and bloody, a wild animal pelt
An antelope, a wolf, a coyote, their pelts
The membrane that wraps the bloody heart of a wild animal
The membrane of the morning haze that wraps the bloody daybreak

Sleeping Wrestler
You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way its just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, its thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: Im one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If youre going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler

Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Astrodome
As real grass withers in the Astrodome [at Houston, Texas] it has been
replaced by Astrograss. (news item)
all is not grass that astrograss
that astrograss is not all grass
that grass is not all astrograss
astrograss is not all that grass
is that astrograss not all glass
all that glass is not astrograss
that is not all astrograss glass
that glass is not all fibreglass
not all that fibreglass is glass
fibreglass is not all that glass
is that not all fibreglass glass
that fibreglass is not all grass
glass is not all that fibreglass
is all astrograss not that glass
all is not grass that fibreglass

The Glass
To love you in shadow as in the light
is light itself. In subterranean night
you sow the fields with fireflies of delight.
Lanarkshire holds you, under its grim grass.
But I hold what you were, like a bright glass
I carry brimming through the darkening pass.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-birds throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his
bed wanderd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the showerd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were
alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I
heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with
tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arousd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.
Once Paumanok,
When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this seashore in some briers,
Two featherd guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,

And every day the she-bird crouchd on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.
Shine! shine! shine!
Pour down your warmth, great sun!
While we bask, we two together.
Two together!
Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.
Till of a sudden,
May-be killd, unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouchd not on the nest,
Nor returnd that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appeard again.
And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.
Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up sea-winds along Paumanoks shore;
I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.
Yes, when the stars glistend,
All night long on the prong of a moss-scallopd stake,
Down almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

He calld on his mate,

He pourd forth the meanings which I of all men know.
Yes my brother I know,
The rest might not, but I have treasurd every note,
For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights
after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listend long and long.
Listend to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
Following you my brother.
Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.
Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
It is laggingO I think it is heavy with love, with love.
O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love.
O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?
Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!
High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
Surely you must know who is here, is here,
You must know who I am, my love.

Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
O moon do not keep her from me any longer.
Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again
if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.
O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.
O throat! O trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth,
Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.
Shake out carols!
Solitary here, the nights carols!
Carols of lonesome love! deaths carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless despairing carols.
But soft! sink low!
Soft! let me just murmur,
And do you wait a moment you husky-noisd sea,
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.
Hither my love!
Here I am! here!
With this just-sustaind note I announce myself to you,
This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

Do not be decoyd elsewhere,

That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,
Those are the shadows of leaves.
O darkness! O in vain!
O I am very sick and sorrowful.
O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea!
O throat! O throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.
O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.
The aria sinking,
All else continuing, the stars shining,
The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
On the sands of Paumanoks shore gray and rustling,
The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the
sea almost touching,
The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously
bursting,
The arias meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boys souls questions sullenly timing

some drownd secret hissing,

To the outsetting bard.
Demon or bird! (said the boys soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongues use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and
more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.
O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in
the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arousd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent upwhat is it?I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisperd me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,
Lispd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arousd childs heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
Which I do not forget,
But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanoks gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs at random,
My own songs awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments,
bending aside,)
The sea whisperd me.