Don't bring haw into the house at night
or in any month with a red fruit in season
or when starlings bank against the light,
don't bring haw in. Don't give me reason
to think you have hidden haw about you.
Tucked in secret, may its thorn thwart you.
Plucked in blossom, powdered by your thumb,
I will smell it for the hum of haw is long,
its hold is low and lilting. If you bring
haw in, I will know you want me gone
to the fairies and their jilting. I will know
you want me buried in the deep green field

Not forced to fall for hideous Phaon,
nor to drift dreamlike from
a Victorian cliff, pursued by visions
of slender limbs, peach-soft hair,
dewy violets clustered
in an unwilling lap, not exiled
on a distant island for writing
smartly about love, not called amoral
nor forgotten, not murdered
by a jealous lover, nor weakened
from drink, did not make an incision
in the veins, never murdered
in a tavern at twenty-nine
nor thought mad, released immediately
from St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics,

Sometimes I think about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee,
Alabama to become a forester in Oregon and in so doing
became fundamentally white for the rest of his life, except
when he traveled without his white wife to visit his siblings —
now in New York, now in Harlem, USA — just as pale-skinned,
as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black. Paul never told anyone
he was white, he just didn’ t say that he was black, and who could imagine,
an Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white?

It has arrived — the long rag rug
multiply folded. On top, one alien hair.
I put my face to the folds and smell despair
palpable as salt air
in all those rooms and houses, small and smug —
enclosures I passed through on my way where?