Here is the city of desire, city without roofs,
city of mourning doves, of moon-colored tulips,
of rain on cement, rain drumming
on sewer covers, city of always, of the sudden
amplitude. The question on today's exam
is "The terrible doubt is also a terrible hope."
We write our answers in chalk on the black
and silver roads. We write our names
on the city walls: Melinda, Luisa, Porsche.
Etc. There is room enough.
The wind tugs at our shirt hems, it fills
our umbrellas, pulls us around like smoke.
My nails are soft, watery, and I can see
through my skin, I can see through it
what Augustine called the mass and weight
of misery. It is stone and flesh,
it is the part of us which bears witness
to the fog threading the mountains,
and which notes well, below it, the pale lines left

on the rock from so many floods.
The water stood there and there and there.
Habit is the fear of impermanence.
I raise my arms to show how far under I am:
the dark sky marked by thin, white clouds.
The geese climbing.         

Hansel and Gretel are alive and well
And they're living in Berlin
She is a cocktail waitress
He had a part in a Fassbinder film
And they sit around at night now
drinking Schnapps and gin
And she says: Hansel, you're really bringing me down
And he says: Gretel, you can really be a bitch
He says: I've wasted my life on our stupid legend
When my one and only love
was the wicked witch.


She said: what is history?
And he said: history is an angel
being blown backwards into the future
He said: history is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel
backwards into the future.
And this storm, this storm
is called
Progress.

So Long? Stevens
He lifted up, among the actuaries,
a grandee crow.  Ah ha & he crowed good.
That funny money-man.
Mutter we all must as well as we can.
He mutter spiffy.  He make wonder Henry's
wits, though, with a odd

...something...something...not there in his
  flourishing art.
O veteran of death, you will not mind
a counter-mutter.
What was it missing, then, at the man's heart
so that he does not wound?  It is our kind
to wound, as well as utter

a fact of happy world.  That metaphysics
he hefted up until we could not breathe
the physics.  On our side,
monotonous (or ever-fresh)—it sticks
in Henry's throat to judge—brilliant, he seethe;
better than us; less wide.

Disarticulated
arm torn out,
large veins cross
her shoulder intact,
her tourniquet
her blood in all-white big bands:



Can't you see
what love and heartache's done to me
I'm not the same as I used to be
this is my last affair

Mail truck or parked car
in the fast lane,
afloat at forty-three
on a Mississippi road,
Two-hundred-pound muscle on her ham bone,
'nother nigger dead 'fore noon:

Can't you see
what love and heartache's done to me
I'm not the same as I used to be
this is my last affair

Fifty-dollar record
cut the vein in her neck,
fool about her money
toll her black train wreck,
white press missed her fun'ral
in the same stacked deck:

Can't you see
what love and heartache's done to me
I'm not the same as I used to be
this is my last affair

Loved a little blackbird
heard she could sing,
Martha in her vineyard
pestle in her spring,
Bessie had a bad mouth
made my chimes ring:

Can't you see
what love and heartache's done to me
I'm not the same as I used to be
this is my last affair

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Hans, there are moments when the whole mind
Resolves into a pair of brimming eyes, or lips
Parting to drink from the deep spring of a death
That freshness they do not yet need to understand.
These are the moments, if ever, an angel steps
Into the mind, as kings into the dress
Of a poor goatherd, for their acts of charity.
There are moments when speech is but a mouth pressed
Lightly and humbly against the angel's hand.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And then shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I see the lovely images, hers, as
She passes ... passes ... passes by ...

Over me grief has thrown its veil:-
Less a creature in this world
And one more angel in the sky.

When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I think I see the image, hers,
That's not now passing ... not passing by ...

(trans. J. Griffin)

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 the soil of the fields.
Welcome roots.
Each cell has a life.
There is enough here to please a nation.
It is enough that 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 a shoe factory cursing 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 trying 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 breakfast,
one is streching 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 s*ck 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.

Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.

Then, I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them
I will look into the earth.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.


When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.


We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

I 
Among twenty snowy mountains, 
The only moving thing 
Was the eye of the blackbird. 

II 
I was of three minds, 
Like a tree 
In which there are three blackbirds. 

III 
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. 
It was a small part of the pantomime. 

IV 
A man and a woman 
Are one. 
A man and a woman and a blackbird 
Are one. 

V 
I do not know which to prefer, 
The beauty of inflections 
Or the beauty of innuendoes, 
The blackbird whistling 
Or just after. 

VI 
Icicles filled the long window 
With barbaric glass. 
The shadow of the blackbird 
Crossed it, to and fro. 
The mood 
Traced in the shadow 
An indecipherable cause. 

VII 
O thin men of Haddam, 
Why do you imagine golden birds? 
Do you not see how the blackbird 
Walks around the feet 
Of the women about you? 

VIII 
I know noble accents 
And lucid, inescapable rhythms; 
But I know, too, 
That the blackbird is involved 
In what I know. 

IX 
When the blackbird flew out of sight, 
It marked the edge 
Of one of many circles. 

X 
At the sight of blackbirds 
Flying in a green light, 
Even the bawds of euphony 
Would cry out sharply. 

XI 
He rode over Connecticut 
In a glass coach. 
Once, a fear pierced him, 
In that he mistook 
The shadow of his equipage 
For blackbirds. 

XII 
The river is moving. 
The blackbird must be flying. 

XIII 
It was evening all afternoon. 
It was snowing 
And it was going to snow. 
The blackbird sat 
In the cedar-limbs. 

His arm leaves a dent in my hood.

He lies on the pavement, smiling
to reassure me.
                      Weeks later
the leak in his brain begins.
I try to imagine his headaches,
the murmuring nurses, the priest.
By then he is dead.

                                                *

Twenty-two years.  I can't
remember his face or name.
He came from a town across the river.
We tried to visit his father and mother.

Tonight it's as though
my brakes have failed
and I roll through the hushed sirens
past white faces, past
the weary Night Dispatcher, steering
my old, slow Mercury toward
the figure across the river,
the boy from the empty farmhouse
with his smile, his trick headaches.

I would like to light him a candle.
I would like to bring him a drink of water.
I would like to yield the right of way.
I would like to call across the river.

"It's all right now?" I'd shout.

His head would bob in the wind.