Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild,
A woman swept by us, bearing a child;
In her eye was the night of a settled despair,
And her brow was o’ ershaded with anguish and care.
She was nearing the river — in reaching the brink,
She heeded no danger, she paused not to think!
For she is a mother — her child is a slave —
And she’ ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave!
Very soon the Yankee teachers
Came down and set up school;
But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it, —
It was agin’ their rule.
Our masters always tried to hide
Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge did’ nt agree with slavery —
’ Twould make us all too wise.
PART I
I
In a far country, and a distant age,
Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth,
A boy was born of humble parentage;
The stars that shone upon his lonely birth
Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame —
Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
I never made a poem, dear friend
I never sat me down, and said,
This cunning brain and patient hand
Shall fashion something to be read.
Men often came to me, and prayed
I should indite a fitting verse
For fast, or festival, or in
Some stately pageant to rehearse.
(As if, than Balaam more endowed,
I of myself could bless or curse.)
Reluctantly I bade them go,
Ungladdened by my poet-mite;
My heart is not so churlish but
Its loves to minister delight.
The shell of objects inwardly consumed
Will stand, till some convulsive wind awakes;
Such sense hath Fire to waste the heart of things,
Nature, such love to hold the form she makes.
Thus, wasted joys will show their early bloom,
Yet crumble at the breath of a caress;
The golden fruitage hides the scathèd bough,
Snatch it, thou scatterest wide its emptiness.
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?
Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?
Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’ s shop,
And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors.
How pale you would be, and startling —
How quiet;
But your curves would spring upward
Like a clear jet of flung water,
You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,
It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down.
It broke like a hen’ s egg on the sidewalk.
The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my
oblivious siblings.
A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind.
A gush of yolk and then darker.
Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala — vinyl seats, the rear- view,
headrests and you, your hand through your hair.
An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.
The grave has more power than the eyes of the beloved.
An open grave with all its magnets.
This weight on the wings. The sky is waiting for an airship.
I have the feeling that I haven’ t got much life left.
Three hours after the celestial attack.
Why don’ t I respond when I’ m being offended?
Because my religion doesn’ t allow me to.
Exterior maps: geography. Interior maps: psychography.
And in your hard cathedral I kneel.
Mountains pass camels pass
like the history of wars in antiquity.
When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my
manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of
fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to
destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but
never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called
poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his
back as torrential downpours of power filled the bowl and drowned
him. I have always know that constipation is essential to
poetry, though what I did not realize, until recently,
They dropped the charges of homicide, filed new charges of
terrorism, dropped the charges of terrorism, filed
new charges of public nudity, dropped the charges of
public nudity, filed new charges of lewd and
lascivious behavior. A spokesman for the FBI
said they found him on the hood of an SUV in a part
of town known as the “Fruit Loop”. His penis was in another
man’ s mouth and in the front seat were vials containing a rare
strand of bacteria known to cause blindness in rats. They
dropped the charges of public nudity and filed new
