As if the flow of the waters
From the triple streams of heavenly showers
So the sacred Ao of the eighth heavens
Whose flames have scorched the land.
Chorus:
Should our hearts’ love be restored
And our rights be ours once more
Then will our sacred beloved shoals of Kane
Be the firm foundation of the land.
Once, in the city of Kalamazoo,
The gods went walking, two and two,
With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion,
The speaking pony and singing lion.
For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart
Lived the girl with the innocent heart.
So won a name in this place,
handing off lath strips to a hammer's
measure, seeing the passing girls' slits
in roils of timber grain.
Mountains, barley, scaffold,
dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly
from the hoods of faraway bells
monks emerging like hairless animals.
I was birthed restless and elsewhere
gut dragging and bulging with ball lightning, slush,
broke through with branches, steel
I was bitch-monikered, hipped, I hefted
a whip rain, a swirling sheet of grit.
Scraping toward the first of you, hungering for wood, walls,
unturned skin. With shifting and frantic mouth, I loudly loved
the slow bones
of elders, fools, and willows.
We’ ve come back to the site of her
conception. She calls it why
and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.
It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —
to live so the ghosts we were
don’ t trail us and echo.
I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.
The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.
But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe
The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;
The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
The nightingale is singing from the steep;
It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold
A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.
My father’ s been dead for thirty years
but when he appears behind my shoulder
offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride
in something I’ ve done that isn’ t even thistledown
or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world
— “Albie, grip in the middle and turn
with a steady pressure” — it’ s measurable,
if not the way the wind is in a sock,
or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way
an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him
with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence,
I take the bird on the woodpile,
separate it from its function, feather
by feather. I blow up its scale.
I make a whole life out of it:
everywhere I am, its sense of loitering
lights on my shoulder.
lay sixteen bales down in front on the plank
let me set and bay at the houndog moon
lay sixteen bales down of the cotton flank
pray with me brothers that the pink
boss dont sweat me too soon
beat my leg in a round nigger peg
lord have mercy on my black pole
lay sixteen bales in the even row
let me sweat and cuss my roustabout tune
lord have mercy on my shrinkin back
let me go with the jesus mule
lay sixteen bales for the warp and loom
beat a nigger down and bury his soul
boss dont sweat me too soon
1
Four poilus in a wood austerely shitting.
Death watches them, laughing, its sides splitting.
Life is a cry followed by laughter.
The body before, the waste after.
2
Could one hear in that wood the gentle click
of the shutter like the breaking of a stick
or the safety catch on its climacteric
3
