Poems 337 Midterm

"this poem is for bear," Gary Snyder

"As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains." A bear down under the cliff. She is eating huckleberries. They are ripe now Soon it will snow, and she Or maybe he, will crawl into a hole And sleep. You can see Huckleberries in bearsh-- if you Look, this time of year If I sneak up on the bear It will grunt and run The others had all gone down From the blackberry brambles, but one girl Spilled her basket, and was picking up her Berries in the dark. A tall man stood in the shadow, took her arm, Led her to his home. He was a bear. In a house under the mountain She gave birth to slick dark children With sharp teeth, and lived in the hollow Mountain many years. snare a bear: call him out: honey-eater forest apple light-foot Old man in the fur coat, Bear! come out! Die of your own choice! Grandfather black-food! this girl married a bear Who rules in the mountains, Bear! you have eaten many berries you have caught many fish you have frightened many people Twelve species north of Mexico Sucking their paws in the long winter Tearing the high-strung caches down Whining, crying, ******* *** (Odysseus was a bear) Bear-cubs gnawing the soft tits Teeth gritted, eyes screwed tight but she let them. Til her brothers found the place Chased her husband up the gorge Cornered him in the rocks. Song of the snared bear: "Give me my belt. "I am near death. "I came from the mountain caves "At the headwaters, "The small streams there "Are all dried up. - I think I'll go hunt bears. "hunt bears? Why s--- Snyder. You couldn't hit a bear in the a-- with a handful of rice!"

"Milton by Firelight," Gary Snyder

"O hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?" Working with an old Singlejack miner, who can sense The vein and cleavage In the very guts of rock, can Blast granite, build Switchbacks that last for years Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves. What use, Milton, a silly story Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit? The Indian, the chainsaw boy, And a string of six mules Came riding down to camp Hungry for tomatoes and green apples. Sleeping in saddle-blankets Under a bright night-sky Han River slantwise by morning. Jays squall Coffee boils In ten thousand years the Sierras Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion. Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, Only the weathering land The wheeling sky, Man, with his Satan Scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh Hell! Fire down Too dark to read, miles from a road The bell-mare clangs in the meadow That packed dirt for a fill-in Scrambling through loose rocks On an old trail All of a summer's day.

"One Should Not Talk," Gary Snyder

"ONE SHOULD NOT TALK TO A SKILLED HUNTER ABOUT WHAT IS FORBIDDEN BY THE BUDDHA" -- Hsiang-yen A gray fox, female, nine pounds three ounces. 39 5/8" long with tail. Peeling skin back (Kai reminded us to chant the Shingyo first) cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell mixed with dead-body odor starting. Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed plus one lizard foot and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel a bit of aluminum foil. The secret. and the secret hidden deep in that.

"Brazil, January 1, 1502"

. . . embroidered nature . . . tapestried landscape. --Landscape Into Art, by Sir Kenneth Clark Januaries, Nature greets our eyes exactly as she must have greeted theirs: every square inch filling in with foliage-- big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves, blue, blue-green, and olive, with occasional lighter veins and edges, or a satin underleaf turned over; monster ferns in silver-gray relief, and flowers, too, like giant water lilies up in the air--up, rather, in the leaves-- purple, yellow, two yellows, pink, rust red and greenish white; solid but airy; fresh as if just finished and taken off the frame. A blue-white sky, a simple web, backing for feathery detail: brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel, a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate; and perching there in profile, beaks agape, the big symbolic birds keep quiet, each showing only half his puffed and padded, pure-colored or spotted breast. Still in the foreground there is Sin: five sooty dragons near some massy rocks. The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts splattered and overlapping, threatened from underneath by moss in lovely hell-green flames, attacked above by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and near, "one leaf yes and one leaf no" (in Portuguese). The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes are on the small, female one, back-to, her wicked tail straight up and over, red as a red-hot wire. Just so the Christians, hard as nails, tiny as nails, glinting, in creaking armor, came and found it all, not unfamiliar: no lovers' walks, no bowers, no cherries to be picked, no lute music, but corresponding, nevertheless, to an old dream of wealth and luxury already out of style when they left home-- wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure. Directly after Mass, humming perhaps L'Homme armé or some such tune, they ripped away into the hanging fabric, each out to catch an Indian for himself-- those maddening little women who kept calling, calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?) and retreating, always retreating, behind it.

"Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams," Kenneth Koch

1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do no know what I am doing. 3 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 4 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

"Crusoe in England," Elizabeth Bishop

A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate's binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island's still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right. Well, I had fifty-two miserable, small volcanoes I could climb with a few slithery strides— volcanoes dead as ash heaps. I used to sit on the edge of the highest one and count the others standing up, naked and leaden, with their heads blown off. I'd think that if they were the size I thought volcanoes should be, then I had become a giant; and if I had become a giant, I couldn't bear to think what size the goats and turtles were, or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers —a glittering hexagon of rollers closing and closing in, but never quite, glittering and glittering, though the sky was mostly overcast. My island seemed to be a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere's left-over clouds arrived and hung above the craters—their parched throats were hot to touch. Was that why it rained so much? And why sometimes the whole place hissed? The turtles lumbered by, high-domed, hissing like teakettles. (And I'd have given years, or taken a few, for any sort of kettle, of course.) The folds of lava, running out to sea, would hiss. I'd turn. And then they'd prove to be more turtles. The beaches were all lava, variegated, black, red, and white, and gray; the marbled colors made a fine display. And I had waterspouts. Oh, half a dozen at a time, far out, they'd come and go, advancing and retreating, their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches of scuffed-up white. Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, sacerdotal beings of glass ... I watched the water spiral up in them like smoke. Beautiful, yes, but not much company. I often gave way to self-pity. "Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there a moment when I actually chose this? I don't remember, but there could have been." What's wrong about self-pity, anyway? With my legs dangling down familiarly over a crater's edge, I told myself "Pity should begin at home." So the more pity I felt, the more I felt at home. The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun rose from the sea, and there was one of it and one of me. The island had one kind of everything: one tree snail, a bright violet-blue with a thin shell, crept over everything, over the one variety of tree, a sooty, scrub affair. Snail shells lay under these in drifts and, at a distance, you'd swear that they were beds of irises. There was one kind of berry, a dark red. I tried it, one by one, and hours apart. Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects; and so I made home-brew. I'd drink the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff that went straight to my head and play my home-made flute (I think it had the weirdest scale on earth) and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats. Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all? I felt a deep affection for the smallest of my island industries. No, not exactly, since the smallest was a miserable philosophy. Because I didn't know enough. Why didn't I know enough of something? Greek drama or astronomy? The books I'd read were full of blanks; the poems—well, I tried reciting to my iris-beds, "They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss ..." The bliss of what? One of the first things that I did when I got back was look it up. The island smelled of goat and guano. The goats were white, so were the gulls, and both too tame, or else they thought I was a goat, too, or a gull. Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa ... shriek ... baa ... I still can't shake them from my ears; they're hurting now. The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies over a ground of hissing rain and hissing, ambulating turtles got on my nerves. When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves. I'd shut my eyes and think about a tree, an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere. I'd heard of cattle getting island-sick. I thought the goats were. One billy-goat would stand on the volcano I'd christened Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair (I'd time enough to play with names), and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air. I'd grab his beard and look at him. His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up and expressed nothing, or a little malice. I got so tired of the very colors! One day I dyed a baby goat bright red with my red berries, just to see something a little different. And then his mother wouldn't recognize him. Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography. Just when I thought I couldn't stand it another minute longer, Friday came. (Accounts of that have everything all wrong.) Friday was nice. Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! I wanted to propagate my kind, and so did he, I think, poor boy. He'd pet the baby goats sometimes, and race with them, or carry one around. —Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body. And then one day they came and took us off. Now I live here, another island, that doesn't seem like one, but who decides? My blood was full of them; my brain bred islands. But that archipelago has petered out. I'm old. I'm bored, too, drinking my real tea, surrounded by uninteresting lumber. The knife there on the shelf— it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. It lived. How many years did I beg it, implore it, not to break? I knew each nick and scratch by heart, the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of wood-grain on the handle ... Now it won't look at me at all. The living soul has dribbled away. My eyes rest on it and pass on. The local museum's asked me to leave everything to them: the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes, my shedding goatskin trousers (moths have got in the fur), the parasol that took me such a time remembering the way the ribs should go. It still will work but, folded up, looks like a plucked and skinny fowl. How can anyone want such things? —And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

"Rowing," Anne Sexton

A story, a story! (Let it go. Let it come.) I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender into this world. First came the crib with its glacial bars. Then dolls and the devotion to their plactic mouths. Then there was school, the little straight rows of chairs, blotting my name over and over, but undersea all the time, a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work. Then there was life with its cruel houses and people who seldom touched- though touch is all- but I grew, like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew, and then there were many strange apparitions, the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison and all of that, saws working through my heart, but I grew, I grew, and God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked, and I grew, I grew, I wore rubies and bought tomatoes and now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyeball, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table, but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside me, the gnawing pestilential rat. God will take it with his two hands and embrace it. As the African says: This is my tale which I have told, if it be sweet, if it be not sweet, take somewhere else and let some return to me. This story ends with me still rowing.

"The Black Art," Anne Sexton

A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warn the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl. A man who writes knows too much, such spells and fetiches! As if erections and congresses and products weren't enough; as if machines and galleons and wars were never enough. With used furniture he makes a tree. A writer is essentially a crook. Dear love, you are that man. Never loving ourselves, hating even our shoes and our hats, we love each other, precious , precious . Our hands are light blue and gentle. Our eyes are full of terrible confessions. But when we marry, the children leave in disgust. There is too much food and no one left over to eat up all the weird abundance.

"America," Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go f--- yourself with your atom bomb I don't feel good don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I'm sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I'm trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. I won't say the Lord's Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I'm addressing you. Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and twentyfivethousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don're really want to go to war. America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black ******s. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

"As for Poets," Gary Snyder

As for poets The Earth Poets Who write small poems, Need help from no man. The Air Poets Play out the swiftest gales And sometimes loll in the eddies. Poem after poem, Curling back on the same thrust. At fifty below Fuel oil won't flow And propane stays in the tank. Fire Poets Burn at absolute zero Fossil love pumped backup The first Water Poet Stayed down six years. He was covered with seaweed. The life in his poem Left millions of tiny Different tracks Criss-crossing through the mud. With the Sun and Moon In his belly, The Space Poet Sleeps. No end to the sky- But his poems, Like wild geese, Fly off the edge. AMind Poet Stays in the house. The house is empty And it has no walls. The poem Is seen from all sides, Everywhere, At once.

"Hamlen Brook," Richard Wilbur

At the alder-darkened brink Where the stream slows to a lucid jet I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat, And see, before I can drink, A startled inchling trout Of spotted near-transparency, Trawling a shadow solider than he. He swerves now, darting out To where, in a flicked slew Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves, And butts then out of view Beneath a sliding glass Crazed by the skimming of a brace Of burnished dragon-flies across its face, In which deep cloudlets pass And a white precipice Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down Toward where the azures of the zenith drown. How shall I drink all this? Joy's trick is to supply Dry lips with what can cool and slake, Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache Nothing can satisfy.

"Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward," Anne Sexton

Child, the current of your breath is six days long. You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed; lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first hunger is not wrong. The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded down starch halls with the other unnested throng in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong. But this is an institution bed. You will not know me very long. The doctors are enamel. They want to know the facts. They guess about the man who left me, some pendulum soul, going the way men go and leave you full of child. But our case history stays blank. All I did was let you grow. Now we are here for all the ward to see. They thought I was strange, although I never spoke a word. I burst empty of you, letting you learn how the air is so. The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me and I turn my head away. I do not know. Yours is the only face I recognize. Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in. Six times a day I prize your need, the animals of your lips, your skin growing warm and plump. I see your eyes lifting their tents. They are blue stones, they begin to outgrow their moss. You blink in surprise and I wonder what you can see, my funny kin, as you trouble my silence. I am a shelter of lies. Should I learn to speak again, or hopeless in such sanity will I touch some face I recognize? Down the hall the baskets start back. My arms fit you like a sleeve, they hold catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms of your nerves, each muscle and fold of your first days. Your old man's face disarms the nurses. But the doctors return to scold me. I speak. It is you my silence harms. I should have known; I should have told them something to write down. My voice alarms my throat. "Name of father—none." I hold you and name you bastard in my arms. And now that's that. There is nothing more that I can say or lose. Others have traded life before and could not speak. I tighten to refuse your owling eyes, my fragile visitor. I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise against me. We unlearn. I am a shore rocking you off. You break from me. I choose your only way, my small inheritor and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose. Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.

"To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph," Anne Sexton

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on, testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade, and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made! There below are the trees, as awkward as camels; and here are the shocked starlings pumping past and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well. Larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings! Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea? See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

"Constantly Risking Absurdity," Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

"Mid-August at Sourdough," Gary Snyder

Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies. I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air.

"Song of the Taste," Gary Snyder

Eating the living germs of grasses Eating the ova of large birds the fleshy sweetness packed around the sperm of swaying trees The muscles of the flanks and thighs of soft-voiced cows the bounce in the lamb's leap the swish in the ox's tail Eating roots grown swoll inside the soil Drawing on life of living clustered points of light spun out of space hidden in the grape. Eating each other's seed eating ah, each other. Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread: lip to lip.

"In Celebration of My Uterus," Anne Sexton

Everyone in me is a bird. I am beating all my wings. They wanted to cut you out but they will not. They said you were immeasurably empty but you are not. They said you were sick unto dying but they were wrong. You are singing like a school girl. You are not torn. Sweet weight, in celebration of the woman I am and of the soul of the woman I am and of the central creature and its delight I sing for you. I dare to live. Hello, spirit. Hello, cup. Fasten, cover. Cover that does contain. Hello to the soil of the fields. Welcome, roots. Each cell has a life. There is enough here to please a nation. It is enough that the populace own these goods. Any person, any commonwealth would say of it, "It is good this year that we may plant again and think forward to a harvest. A blight had been forecast and has been cast out." Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia, one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note. Sweet weight, in celebration of the woman I am let me carry a ten-foot scarf, let me drum for the nineteen-year-olds, let me carry bowls for the offering (if that is my part). Let me study the cardiovascular tissue, let me examine the angular distance of meteors, let me suck on the stems of flowers (if that is my part). Let me make certain tribal figures (if that is my part). For this thing the body needs let me sing for the supper, for the kissing, for the correct yes.

"The Moose," Elizabeth Bishop

For Grace Bulmer Bowers From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins the flats' lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches, through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveller gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises. Goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold, round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hens' feathers, in gray glazed cabbages, on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves, and evening commences. One stop at Bass River. Then the Economies Lower, Middle, Upper; Five Islands, Five Houses, where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone. The Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left, a red light swims through the dark: a ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show, illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags, brisk, freckled, elderly. "A grand night. Yes, sir, all the way to Boston." She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination. . . . In the creakings and noises, an old conversation --not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents' voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad. When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. "Yes . . ." that peculiar affirmative. "Yes . . ." A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means "Life's like that. We know it (also death)." Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now, it's all right now even to fall asleep just as on all those nights. --Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus's hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses). A man's voice assures us "Perfectly harmless. . . ." Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, "Sure are big creatures." "It's awful plain." "Look! It's a she!" Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? "Curious creatures," says our quiet driver, rolling his r's. "Look at that, would you." Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam; then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.

"With Mercy for the Greedy," Anne Sexton

For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession Concerning your letter in which you ask me to call a priest and in which you ask me to wear The Cross that you enclose; your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden, no thorns, this rose— I pray to its shadow, that gray place where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep. I detest my sins and I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, its solid neck, its brown sleep. True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief. All morning long I have worn your cross, hung with package string around my throat. It tapped me lightly as a child's heart might, tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born. Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote. My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

"Manuelzinho," Elizabeth Bishop

Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)— a sort of inheritance; white, in your thirties now, and supposed to supply me with vegetables, but you don't; or you won't; or you can't get the idea through your brain— the world's worst gardener since Cain. Titled above me, your gardens ravish my eyes. You edge the beds of silver cabbages with red carnations, and lettuces mix with alyssum. And then umbrella ants arrive, or it rains for a solid week and the whole thing's ruined again and I buy you more pounds of seeds, imported, guaranteed, and eventually you bring me a mystic thee-legged carrot, or a pumpkin "bigger than the baby." I watch you through the rain, trotting, light, on bare feet, up the steep paths you have made— or your father and grandfather made— all over my property, with your head and back inside a sodden burlap bag, and feel I can't endure it another minute; then, indoors, beside the stove, keep on reading a book. You steal my telephone wires, or someone does. You starve your horse and yourself and your dogs and family. among endless variety, you eat boiled cabbage stalks. And once I yelled at you so loud to hurry up and fetch me those potatoes your holey hat flew off, you jumped out of your clogs, leaving three objects arranged in a triangle at my feet, as if you'd been a gardener in a fairy tale all this time and at the word "potatoes" had vanished to take up your work of fairy prince somewhere. The strangest things happen to you. Your cows eats a "poison grass" and drops dead on the spot. Nobody else's does. And then your father dies, a superior old man with a black plush hat, and a moustache like a white spread-eagled sea gull. The family gathers, but you, no, you "don't think he's dead! I look at him. He's cold. They're burying him today. But you know, I don't think he's dead." I give you money for the funeral and you go and hire a bus for the delighted mourners, so I have to hand over some more and then have to hear you tell me you pray for me every night! And then you come again, sniffing and shivering, hat in hand, with that wistful face, like a child's fistful of bluets or white violets, improvident as the dawn, and once more I provide for a shot of penicillin down at the pharmacy, or one more bottle of Electrical Baby Syrup. Or, briskly, you come to settle what we call our "accounts," with two old copybooks, one with flowers on the cover, the other with a camel. immediate confusion. You've left out decimal points. Your columns stagger, honeycombed with zeros. You whisper conspiratorially; the numbers mount to millions. Account books? They are Dream Books. in the kitchen we dream together how the meek shall inherit the earth— or several acres of mine. With blue sugar bags on their heads, carrying your lunch, your children scuttle by me like little moles aboveground, or even crouch behind bushes as if I were out to shoot them! —Impossible to make friends, though each will grab at once for an orange or a piece of candy. Twined in wisps of fog, I see you all up there along with Formoso, the donkey, who brays like a pump gone dry, then suddenly stops. —All just standing, staring off into fog and space. Or coming down at night, in silence, except for hoofs, in dim moonlight, the horse or Formoso stumbling after. Between us float a few big, soft, pale-blue, sluggish fireflies, the jellyfish of the air... Patch upon patch upon patch, your wife keeps all of you covered. She has gone over and over (forearmed is forewarned) your pair of bright-blue pants with white thread, and these days your limbs are draped in blueprints. You paint—heaven knows why— the outside of the crown and brim of your straw hat. Perhaps to reflect the sun? Or perhaps when you were small, your mother said, "Manuelzinho, one thing; be sure you always paint your straw hat." One was gold for a while, but the gold wore off, like plate. One was bright green. Unkindly, I called you Klorophyll Kid. My visitors thought it was funny. I apologize here and now. You helpless, foolish man, I love you all I can, I think. Or I do? I take off my hat, unpainted and figurative, to you. Again I promise to try.

"Hay for the Horses," Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous Mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes. At lunchtime under Black oak Out in the hot corral, ---The old mare nosing lunchpails, Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--- "I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done."

"Arrival at Santos," Elizabeth Bishop

Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery; impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming, a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag. So that's the flag. I never saw it before. I somehow never thought of there being a flag, but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume, and paper money; they remain to be seen. And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen, descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans. Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook! Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy, a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression. Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall s, New York. There. We are settled. The customs officials will speak English, we hope, and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes. Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impression they make, or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter, the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps— wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat, either because the glue here is very inferior or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior.

"The Man-Moth"

Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

"The Fish," Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

"Alive for an Instant," Kenneth Koch

I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach And a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals And a lion in my genitals and I am after you but I have a song in my heart And my song is a dove I have man in my hands I have a woman in my shoes I have a landmark decision in my reason I have a death rattle in my nose I have summer in my brain water I have dreams in my toes This is the matter with me and the hammer of my mother and father Who created me with everything But I lack clam I lack rose Though I do not lack extreme delicacy of rose petal Who is it that I wish to astonish? In the birdcall I found a reminder of you But it was thin and brittle and gone in an instant Has nature set out to be a great entertainer? Obviously not a great reproducer? A great Nothing? Well I will leave that up to you I have a knocking woodpecker in my heart and I think I have three souls One for love one for poetry and one for acting out my insane self Not insane but boring but perpendicular but untrue but true The three rarely sing together take my hand it's active The active ingredient in it is a touch I am Lord Byron I am Percy Shelley I am Ariosto I eat the bacon I went down the slide I have a thunderstorm in my inside I will never hate you But how can this maelstrom be appealing? do you like menageries? my god Most people want a man! So here I am I have a pheasant in my reminders I have a goshawk in my clouds Whatever is it which has led all these animals to you? A resurrection? or maybe an insurrection? an inspiration? I have a baby in my landscape and I have a wild rat in my secrets from you.

"Lady Lazarus," Sylvia Plath

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?-- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot-- The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: 'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart-- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash-- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

"Her Kind," Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

"The Flower," Robert Creeley

I think I grow tensions like flowers in a wood where nobody goes. Each wound is perfect, encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom, making pain. Pain is a flower like that one, like this one, like that one, like this one.

"Menstruation at Forty," Anne Sexton

I was thinking of a son. The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling, but in the eleventh month of its life I feel the November of the body as well as of the calendar. In two days it will be my birthday and as always the earth is done with its harvest. This time I hunt for death, the night I lean toward, the night I want. Well then— speak of it! It was in the womb all along. I was thinking of a son ... You! The never acquired, the never seeded or unfastened, you of the genitals I feared, the stalk and the puppy's breath. Will I give you my eyes or his? Will you be the David or the Susan? (Those two names I picked and listened for.) Can you be the man your fathers are— the leg muscles from Michelangelo, hands from Yugoslavia somewhere the peasant, Slavic and determined, somewhere the survivor bulging with life— and could it still be possible, all this with Susan's eyes? All this without you— two days gone in blood. I myself will die without baptism, a third daughter they didn't bother. My death will come on my name day. What's wrong with the name day? It's only an angel of the sun. Woman, weaving a web over your own, a thin and tangled poison. Scorpio, bad spider— die! My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right— It's a warm room, the place of the blood. Leave the door open on its hinges! Two days for your death and two days until mine. Love! That red disease— year after year, David, you would make me wild! David! Susan! David! David! full and disheveled, hissing into the night, never growing old, waiting always for you on the porch ... year after year, my carrot, my cabbage, I would have possessed you before all women, calling your name, calling you mine.

"I Went into the Maverick Bar," Gary Snyder

I went into the Maverick Bar In Farmington, New Mexico. And drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer. My long hair was tucked up under a cap I'd left the earring in the car. Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables, A waitress asked us where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play "We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie" And with the next song, a couple began to dance. They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties; I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again. We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars— In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself, To the real work, to "What is to be done."

"The Rowing Endeth," Anne Sexton

I'm mooring my rowboat at the dock of the island called God. This dock is made in the shape of a fish and there are many boats moored at many different docks. "It's okay," I say to myself, with blisters that broke and healed and broke and healed-saving themselves over and over. And salt sticking to my face and arms like a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca. I empty myself from my wooden boat and onto the flesh of The Island. "On with it!" He says and thus we squat on the rocks by the sea and play-can it be true-a game of poker. He calls me. I win because I hold a royal straight flush. He wins because He holds five aces. A wild card had been announced but I had not beard it being in such a state of awe when He took out the cards and dealt. As he plunks down His five aces and I sit grinning at my royal flush, He starts to laugh, the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth and into mine, and such laughter that He doubles right over me laughing a Rejoice Chores at our two triumphs. Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs the sea laughs. The Island laughs. The Absurd laughs. Dearest dealer, I with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love.

"In the Waiting Room," Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs: the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes; then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire. Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets. A dead man slung on a pole --"Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain --Aunt Consuelo's voice-- not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I--we--were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918. I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance --I couldn't look any higher-- at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen. Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities-- boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts-- held us all together or made us all just one? How--I didn't know any word for it--how "unlikely". . . How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't? The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big black wave, another, and another. Then I was back in it. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918.

"The Day Lady Died," Frank O' Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

"The Map," Elizabeth Bishop

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains -the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause. These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods. Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves' own conformation: and Norway's hare runs south in agitation, profiles investigate the sea, where land is. Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? -What suits the character or the native waters best. Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

"Riprap," Gary Snyder

Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way, straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles— and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.

"First Psalm," Anne Sexton

Let there be a God as large as a sunlamp to laugh his heat at you...

"Live," Anne Sexton

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been here for a long time - it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize - and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

"The Language," Robert Creeley

Locate I love you some- where in teeth and eyes, bite it but take care not to hurt, you want so much so little. Words say everything. I love you again, then what is emptiness for. To fill, fill. I heard words and words full of holes aching. Speech is a mouth.

"Small Wire," Anne Sexton

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web, as doth the vine, twiggy and wooden, hold up grapes like eyeballs, as many angels dance on the head of a pin. God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love. As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. So if you have only a thin wire, God does not mind. He will enter your hands as easily as ten cents used to bring forth a Coke.

"Wedding Ring," Denise Levertov

My wedding-ring lies in a basket as if at the bottom of a well. Nothing will come to fish it back up and onto my finger again. It lies among keys to abandoned houses, nails waiting to be needed and hammered into some wall, telephone numbers with no names attached, idle paperclips. It can't be given away for fear of bringing ill-luck It can't be sold for the marriage was good in its own time, though that time is gone. Could some artificer beat into it bright stones, transform it into a dazzling circlet no one could take for solemn betrothal or to make promises living will not let them keep? Change it into a simple gift I could give in friendship?

"Praise in Summer," Richard Wilbur

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise, As sometimes summer calls us all, I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead; I said the trees are mines in air, I said See how the sparrow burrows in the sky! And then I wondered why this mad instead Perverts our praise to uncreation, why Such savour's in this wrenching things awry. Does sense so stale that it must needs derange The world to know it? To a praiseful eye Should it not be enough of fresh and strange That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

"Filling Station," Elizabeth Bishop

Oh, but it is dirty! —this little filling station, oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency. Be careful with that match! Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms, and several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him (it's a family filling station), all quite thoroughly dirty. Do they live in the station? It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it a set of crushed and grease- impregnated wickerwork; on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy. Some comic books provide the only note of color— of certain color. They lie upon a big dim doily draping a taboret (part of the set), beside a big hirsute begonia. Why the extraneous plant? Why the taboret? Why, oh why, the doily? (Embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerites, I think, and heavy with gray crochet.) Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe. Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: esso—so—so—so to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all.

"Memories of West Street and Lepke," Robert Lowell

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston's "hardly passionate Marlborough Street," where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is "a young Republican." I have a nine months' daughter, young enough to be my granddaughter. Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear. These are the tranquilized Fifties, and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day through sooty clothesline entanglements and bleaching khaki tenements. Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz, a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan") and fly-weight pacifist, so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit. He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, the Hollywood pimps, to his diet. Hairy, muscular, suburban, wearing chocolate double-breasted suits, they blew their tops and beat him black and blue. I was so out of things, I'd never heard of the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird. "No," he answered, "I'm a J.W." He taught me the "hospital tuck," and pointed out the T-shirted back of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke, there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full of things forbidden to the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm. Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections. . . .

"Clothes," Anne Sexton

Put on a clean shirt before you die, some Russian said. Nothing with drool, please, no egg spots, no blood, no sweat, no sperm. You want me clean, God, so I'll try to comply. The hat I was married in, will it do? White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array. It's old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug, but is suits to die in something nostalgic. And I'll take my painting shirt washed over and over of course spotted with every yellow kitchen I've painted. God, you don't mind if I bring all my kitchens? They hold the family laughter and the soup. For a bra (need we mention it?), the padded black one that my lover demeaned when I took it off. He said, "Where'd it all go?" And I'll take the maternity skirt of my ninth month, a window for the love-belly that let each baby pop out like and apple, the water breaking in the restaurant, making a noisy house I'd like to die in. For underpants I'll pick white cotton, the briefs of my childhood, for it was my mother's dictum that nice girls wore only white cotton. If my mother had lived to see it she would have put a WANTED sign up in the post office for the black, the red, the blue I've worn. Still, it would be perfectly fine with me to die like a nice girl smelling of Clorox and Duz. Being sixteen-in-the-pants I would die full of questions.

"Large Bad Picture," Elizabeth Bishop

Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or some northerly harbor of Labrador, before he became a schoolteacher a great-uncle painted a big picture. Receding for miles on either side into a flushed, still sky are overhanging pale blue cliffs hundreds of feet high, their bases fretted by little arches, the entrances to caves running in along the level of a bay masked by perfect waves. On the middle of that quiet floor sits a fleet of small black ships, square-rigged, sails furled, motionless, their spars like burnt match-sticks. And high above them, over the tall cliffs' semi-translucent ranks, are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds hanging in n's in banks. One can hear their crying, crying, the only sound there is except for occasional sizhine as a large aquatic animal breathes. In the pink light the small red sun goes rolling, rolling, round and round and round at the same height in perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling, while the ships consider it. Apparently they have reached their destination. It would be hard to say what brought them there, commerce or contemplation.

"Wanting to Die," Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love whatever it was, an infection.

"Four Poems for Robin," Gary Snyder

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest I slept under rhododendron All night blossoms fell Shivering on a sheet of cardboard Feet stuck in my pack Hands deep in my pockets Barely able to sleep. I remembered when we were in school Sleeping together in a big warm bed We were the youngest lovers When we broke up we were still nineteen Now our friends are married You teach school back east I dont mind living this way Green hills the long blue beach But sometimes sleeping in the open I think back when I had you. A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji Eight years ago this May We walked under cherry blossoms At night in an orchard in Oregon. All that I wanted then Is forgotten now, but you. Here in the night In a garden of the old capital I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao I remember your cool body Naked under a summer cotton dress. An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji Last night watching the Pleiades, Breath smoking in the moonlight, Bitter memory like vomit Choked my throat. I unrolled a sleeping bag On mats on the porch Under thick autumn stars. In dream you appeared (Three times in nine years) Wild, cold, and accusing. I woke shamed and angry: The pointless wars of the heart. Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter. The first time I have Ever seen them close. December at Yase You said, that October, In the tall dry grass by the orchard When you chose to be free, "Again someday, maybe ten years." After college I saw you One time. You were strange. And I was obsessed with a plan. Now ten years and more have Gone by: I've always known where you were-- I might have gone to you Hoping to win your love back. You still are single. I didn't. I thought I must make it alone. I Have done that. Only in dream, like this dawn, Does the grave, awed intensity Of our young love Return to my mind, to my flesh. We had what the others All crave and seek for; We left it behind at nineteen. I feel ancient, as though I had Lived many lives. And may never now know If I am a fool Or have done what my karma demands.

"The Abortion," Anne Sexton

Somebody who should have been born is gone. Just as the earth puckered its mouth, each bud puffing out from its knot, I changed my shoes, and then drove south. Up past the Blue Mountains, where Pennsylvania humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair, its roads sunken in like a gray washboard; where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly, a dark socket from which the coal has poured, Somebody who should have been born is gone. the grass as bristly and stout as chives, and me wondering when the ground would break, and me wondering how anything fragile survives; up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man, not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all... he took the fullness that love began. Returning north, even the sky grew thin like a high window looking nowhere. The road was as flat as a sheet of tin. Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward...this baby that I bleed.

"The Wings," Denise Levertov

Something hangs in back of me, I can't see it, can't move it. I know it's black, a hump on my back. It's heavy. You can't see it. What's in it? Don't tell me you don't know. It's what you told me about-- black inimical power, cold whirling out of it and around me and sweeping you flat. But what if, like a camel, it's pure energy I store, and carry humped and heavy? Not black, not that terror, stupidity of cold rage; or black only for being pent there? What if released in air it became a white source of light, a fountain of light? Could all that weight be the power of flight? Look inward: see me with embryo wings, one feathered in soot, the other blazing ciliations of ember, pale flare-pinions. Well-- could I go on one wing, the white one?

"Soy Sauce," Gary Snyder

Standing on a stepladder up under hot ceiling tacking on wire net for plaster, a day's work helping Bruce and Holly on their house, I catch a sour salt smell and come back down the ladder. "Deer lick it nights" she says, and shows me the frame of the window she's planing, clear redwood, but dark, with a smell. "Scored a broken-up, two-thousand-gallon redwood soy sauce tank from a company went out of business down near San Jose." Out in the yard the staves are stacked: I lean over, sniff them, ah! it's like Shinshu miso, the darker saltier miso paste of the Nagano uplands, central main island, Japan-- it's like Shinshu pickles! I see in mind my friend Shimizu Yasushi and me, one October years ago, trudging through days of snow crossing the Japan Alps and descending the last night, to a farmhouse, taking a late hot bath in the dark--and eating a bowl of chill miso radish pickles, nothing ever so good! Back here, hot summer sunshine dusty yard, hammer in hand. But I know how it tastes to lick those window frames in the dark, the deer.

"The Ache of Marriage," Denise Levertov

The ache of marriage: thigh and tongue, beloved, are heavy with it, it throbs in the teeth We look for communion and are turned away, beloved, each and each It is leviathan and we in its belly looking for joy, some joy not to be known outside it two by two in the ark of the ache of it.

"One Art," Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

"April Inventory," W.D. Snodgrass

The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more. In one whole year I haven't learned A blessed thing they pay you for. The blossoms snow down in my hair; The trees and I will soon be bare. The trees have more than I to spare. The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach. The pear tree lets its petals drop Like dandruff on a tabletop. The girls have grown so young by now I have to nudge myself to stare. This year they smile and mind me how My teeth are falling with my hair. In thirty years I may not get Younger, shrewder, or out of debt. The tenth time, just a year ago, I made myself a little list Of all the things I'd ought to know, Then told my parents, analyst, And everyone who's trusted me I'd be substantial, presently. I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars. And smile above their starchy collars. I taught my classes Whitehead's notions; One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's. Lacking a source-book or promotions, I showed one child the colors of A luna moth and how to love. I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying. I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die. I have not learned there is a lie Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger; That my equivocating eye Loves only by my body's hunger; That I have forces true to feel, Or that the lovely world is real. While scholars speak authority And wear their ulcers on their sleeves, My eyes in spectacles shall see These trees procure and spend their leaves. There is a value underneath The gold and silver in my teeth. Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists.

"The Shampoo," Elizabeth Bishop

The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. For Time is nothing if not amenable. The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? -- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.

"Questions of Travel," Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. --For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, aren't waterfalls yet, in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road, really exaggerated in their beauty, not to have seen them gesturing like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. --Not to have had to stop for gas and heard the sad, two-noted, wooden tune of disparate wooden clogs carelessly clacking over a grease-stained filling-station floor. (In another country the clogs would all be tested. Each pair there would have identical pitch.) --A pity not to have heard the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird who sings above the broken gasoline pump in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: three towers, five silver crosses. --Yes, a pity not to have pondered, blurr'dly and inconclusively, on what connection can exist for centuries between the crudest wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. --Never to have studied history in the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. --And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians' speeches: two hours of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: "Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room? Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?"

"Paradoxes and Oxymorons," John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What's a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

"Vapor Trails," Gary Snyder

Twin streaks twice higher than cumulus, Precise plane icetracks in the vertical blue Cloud-flaked light-shot shadow arcing Field of all future war, edging off to space. Young expert U.S.pilots waiting The day of criss-cross rockets And white blossoming smoke of bomb, The air world torn and staggered for these Specks of brushy land and ant-hill towns— I stumble on the cobble rockpath, Passing through temples, Watching for two-leaf pine —spotting that design.

"The Bath," Gary Snyder

Washing Kai in the sauna, The kerosene lantern set on a box outside the ground-level window, Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the washtub down on the slab Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops brushed by on the pile of rocks on top He stands in warm water Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach "Gary don't soap my hair!" —his eye-sting fear— the soapy hand feeling through and around the globes and curves of his body up in the crotch, And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus, his penis curving up and getting hard as I pull back skin and try to wash it Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around, I squat all naked too, is this our body? Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out sierra forest ridges night— Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air sweep down from the door a deep sweet breath And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down her hair falling hiding one whole side of shoulder, breast, and belly, Washes deftly Kai's head-hair as he gets mad and yells— The body of my lady, the winding valley spine, the space between the thighs I reach through, cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind, a soapy tickle a hand of grail The gates of Awe That open back a turning double-mirror world of wombs in wombs, in rings, that start in music, is this our body? The hidden place of seed The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers milk and peaks up in a nipple—fits our mouth— The sucking milk from this our body sends through jolts of light; the son, the father, sharing mother's joy That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss As Kai laughs at his mother's breast he now is weaned from, we wash each other, this our body Kai's little scrotum up close to his groin, the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him In flows that lifted with the same joys forces as his nursing Masa later, playing with her breast, Or me within her, Or him emerging, this is our body: Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch out on the redwood benches hearts all beating Quiet to the simmer of the stove, the scent of cedar And then turn over, murmuring gossip of the grasses, talking firewood, Wondering how Gen's napping, how to bring him in soon wash him too— These boys who love their mother who loves men, who passes on her sons to other women; The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow this is our body. Fire inside and boiling water on the stove We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches wrap the babies, step outside, black night & all the stars. Pour cold water on the back and thighs Go in the house—stand steaming by the center fire Kai scampers on the sheepskin Gen standing hanging on and shouting, "Bao! bao! bao! bao! bao!" This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames drinking icy water hugging babies, kissing bellies, Laughing on the Great Earth Come out from the bath.

"Autobiographia Literaria," Frank O' Hara

When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out "I am an orphan." And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

"Not Leaving the House," Gary Snyder

When Kai is born I quit going out Hang around the kitchen - make cornbread Let nobody in. Mail is flat. Masa lies on her side, Kai sighs, Non washes and sweeps We sit and watch Masa nurse, and drink green tea. Navajo turquoise beads over the bed A peacock tail feather at the head A badger pelt from Nagano-ken For a mattress; under the sheet; A pot of yogurt setting Under the blankets, at his feet. Masa, Kai, And Non, our friend In the garden light reflected in Not leaving the house. From dawn till late at night making a new world of ourselves around this life.

"Daddy," Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

"The Riverman," Elizabeth Bishop

[A man in a remote Amazonian village decides to become a sacaca, a witch doctor who works with water spirits. The river dolphin is believed to have supernatural powers; Luandinha is a river spirit associated with the moon; and the pirarucú is a fish weighing up to four hundred pounds. These and other details on which this poem is based are from Amazon Town, by Charles Wagley] I got up in the night for the Dolphin spoke to me. He grunted beneath my window, hid by the river mist, but I glimpsed him - a man like myself. I threw off my blanket, sweating; I even tore off my shirt. I got out of my hammock and went through the window naked. My wife slept and snored. Hearing the Dolphin ahead, I went down to the river and the moon was burning bright as the gasoline-lamp mantle with the flame turned up too high, just before it begins to scorch. I went down to the river. I heard the Dolphin sigh as he slid into the water. I stood there listening till he called from far outstream. I waded into the river and suddenly a door in the water opened inward, groaning a little, with wter bulging above the lintel. I looked back at my house, white as a piece of washing forgotten on the bank, and I thought once of my wife, but I knew what I was doing. They gave me a shell of cachaça and decorated cigars. The smoke rose like mist through the water, and our breaths didn't make any bubbles. We drank cachaça and smoked the green cheroot. The room filled with grey-green smoke and my head couldn't have been dizzier. Then a tall, beautiful serpent in elegant white satin, with her big eyes green and gold like the lights on the river steamers— yes, Luandinha, none other— entered and greeted me. She complimented me in a language I didn't know; but when she blew cigar smoke into my ears and nostrils I understood, like a dog, although I can't speak it yet. They showed me room after room and took me from here to Belém and back again in a minute. In fact, I'm not sure where I went, but miles, under the river. Three times now I've been there. I don't eat fish any more. There is fine mud on my scalp and I know from smelling my comb that the river smells in my hair. My hands and feet are cold. I look yellow, my wife says, and she brews me stinking teas I throw out, behind her back. Every moonlit night I'm to go back again. I know some things already, but it will take years of study, it is all so difficult. They gave me a mottled rattle and a pale-green coral twig and some special weeds like smoke. (They're under my canoe.) When the moon shines on the river, oh, faster than you can think it we travel upstream and downstream, we journey from here to there, under the floating canoes, right through the wicker traps, when the moon shines on the river and Luandinha gives a party. Three times now I've attended. Her rooms shine like silver with the light from overhead, a steady stream of light like at the cinema. I need a virgin mirror no one's ever looked at, that's never looked back at anyone, to flash up the spirit's eyes and help me to recognize them. The storekeeper offered me a box of little mirrors, but each time I picked one up a neighbor looked over my shoulder and then that one was spoiled— spoiled, that is, for anything but the girls to look at their mouths in, to examine their teeth and smiles. Why shouldn't I be ambitious? I sincerely desire to be a serious sacaca like Fortunato Pombo, or Lúcio, or even the great Joaquim Sacaca. Look, it stands to reason that everything we need can be obtained from the river. It drains the jungles; it draws from the trees and plants and rocks from half around the world, it draws from the very heart of the earth the remedy for each of the diseases— one just has to know how to find it. But everything must be there in that magic mud, beneath the multitudes of fish, deadly or innocent, the giant pirarucús, the turtles and crocodiles, tree trunks and sunk canoes, with the crayfish, with the worms with tiny electric eyes turning on and off and on. The river breathes in salt and breathes it out again, and all is sweetness there in the deep, enchanted silt. When the moon burns white and the river makes that sound like a primus pumped up high— that fast, high whispering like a hundred people at once— I'll be there below, as the turtle rattle hisses and the coral gives a sign, travelling fast as a wish, with my magic cloak of fish swerving as I swerve, following the veins, the river's long, long veins, to find the pure elixirs. Godfathers and cousins, your canoes are over my head; I hear your voices talking. You can peer down and down or dredge the river bottom but never, never catch me. When the moon shines and the river lies across the earth and sucks it like a child, then I will go to work to get you health and money. The Dolphin singled me out; Luandinha seconded it.

Marin-an," Gary Snyder

sun breaks over the eucalyptus grove below the wet pasture, water's about hot, I sit in the open window & roll a smoke. distant dogs bark, a pair of cawing crows; the twang of a pygmy nuthatch high in a pine - from behind the cypress windrow the mare moves up, grazing. a soft continuous roar comes out of the far valley of the six-lane highway - thousands and thousands of cars driving men to work.