Thylias Moss (born February 27, 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist

and playwright, of African American, Indian, and European heritage, who has published a number of poetry collections, childrens books, essays, and multimedia work she calls poams, products of acts of making, related to her work in Limited Fork Theory. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist's Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Council, an NEA Grant, and the Witter Bynner Award for poetry. Moss was born Thylias Rebecca Brasier, in a working-class family in Ohio. Her father was a tire recapper, and her mother a maid. Moss has said that her father chose the name Thylias because he decided she needed a name that hadnt existed before. According to Moss, her first few years of life were happy, with Moss and her family living in the upstairs rooms of an older Jewish couple named Feldman (whom Moss believes were Holocaust survivors). The Feldmans treated Moss like a grandchild. When Moss was five, the Feldmans sold their house and moved away. Her parents continued to live in the house with the new homeowners and their 13-year-old daughter, Lytta, who began to baby-sit Thylias after school. Lytta tormented Moss on a daily basis. In addition to this, as a child Moss experienced several horrific events, such as seeing a friend jump from a window to escape a would-be rapist and witnessing a boy on a bicycle get killed by a truck.[citation needed] "I never said a word of this to anybody," she later said.[citation needed] "I was there witnessing things that only happened when I left that house." [citation needed] When Moss was nine her family relocated, causing her to be sent to school in a mostly white district. Treated badly by both her teachers and classmates for a number of reasons, some of them because of her race, she withdrew from social interaction at school and did not speak freely in classes until many years later in college. [citation needed] It was during this time she gave more attention to writing poetry, an activity she had begun two years earlier. [citation needed] She attended Syracuse University. After several years of working, she enrolled in Oberlin College in 1979 and graduated in 1981. Moss later received a Master of Arts in English, with an emphasis on writing, from the University of New Hampshire. Moss is now Professor of English and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband and two sons. Her work has become more experimental and combines genres, multiple fields of study, and computer technology. Many of her Limited Fork Theory poems can be found online in podcasts, journals, and on YouTube.

ONE FOR ALL NEWBORNS By Thylias Moss They kick and flail like crabs on their backs. Parents outside the nursery window do not believe they might raise assassins or thieves, at the very worst. a poet or obscure jazz Musician whose politics spill loudly from his horn. Everything about it was wonderful, the method of conception, the gestation, the womb opening in perfect analogy to the mind's expansion. Then the dark succession of constricting years, mother competing with daughter for beauty and losing, varicose veins and hot-water bottles, joy boiled away, the arrival of knowledge that eyes are birds with clipped wings, the sun at a 30 angle and unable to go higher, parents who cannot push anymore, who stay by the window looking for signs of spring and the less familiar gait of grown progeny. I am now at the age where I must begin to pay for the way I treated my mother. My daughter is just like me.

The long trip home is further delayed, my presence keeps the plane on the ground. If I get off, it will fly. The propeller is a cross spinning like a buzz saw about to cut through me. I am haunted and my mother is not dead. The miracle was not birth but that I lived despite my crimes. I treated God badly also; he is another parent watching his kids through a window, eager to be proud of his creation, looking for signs of spring. From Small Congregations, Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ ALL IS NOT LOST WHEN DREAMS ARE 1. The dreams float like votive lilies then melt. It is the way they sing going down that I envy and to hear it I could not rescue them. A dirge reaches my ears like a corkscrew of smoke

And it sits behind my eyes like a piano roll Some say this is miracle water None say dreams made it so 2. Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for And flew out of the stream It was not dreaming It had no ambition but confusion In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl when it's broiled The Titanic is the one that got away. TORNADOS Truth is, I envy them not because they dance; I out jitterbug them as I'm shuttled through and through legs strong as looms, weaving time. They do black more justice than I, frenzy of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played instead of notes. The movement is not wrath, not hormone swarm because I saw my first forming above the church a surrogate steeple. The morning of my first baptism and salvation already tangible, funnel for the spirit coming into me without losing a drop, my black guardian angel come to rescue me before all the words get out, I looked over Jordan and what did I see coming for to carry me home. Regardez, it all comes back, even the first grade French, when the tornado stirs up the past, bewitched spoon lost in its own spin, like a roulette wheel that won't be steered like the world. They drove me underground, tornado watches and warnings, atomic bomb drills. Adult storms so I had to leave the room. Truth is the tornado is a perfect nappy curl, tightly wound, spinning wildly when I try to tamper with its nature, shunning the hot comb and pressing oil even though if absolutely straight

I'd have the longest hair in the world. Bouffant tornadic crown taking the royal path on a trip to town, stroll down Tornado Alley where it intersects Memory Lane. Smoky spiritclouds, shadows searching for what cast them. THE RAPTURE OF DRY ICE BURNING OFF SKIN AS THE MOMENT OF THE SOUL'S APOTHEOSIS How will we get used to joy if we won't hold onto it? Not even extinction stops me; when I've sufficient craving, I follow the buffalo, their hair hanging below their stomachs like fringes on Tiffany lampshades; they can be turned on so can I by a stampede, footsteps whose sound is my heart souped up, doctored, ninety pounds running off a semi's invincible engine. Buffalo heaven is Niagara Falls. There their spirit gushes. There they still stampede and power the generators that operate the Tiffany lamps that let us see in some of the dark. Snow inundates the city bearing their name; buffalo spirit chips later melt to feed the underground, the politically dredlocked tendrils of roots. And this has no place in reality, is trivial juxtaposed with the faces of addicts, their eyes practically as sunken as extinction, gray ripples like hurdlers' track lanes under them, pupils like just more needle sites. And their arms: flesh trying for a moon apprenticeship, a celestial antibody. Every time I use it the umbrella is turned inside out, metal veins, totally hardened arteries and survival without anything flowing within, nothing saying life came from the sea, from anywhere but coincidence or God's ulcer, revealed. Yet also, inside out the umbrella tries to be a bouquet, or at least the rugged wrapping for one that must endure much, without dispensing coherent parcels of scent, before the refuge of vase in a room already accustomed to withering mind and retreating skin. But the smell of the flowers lifts the corners of the mouth as if the man at the center of this remorse has lifted her in a waltz. This is as true as sickness. The Jehovah's Witness will come to my door any minute with tracts, an inflexible agenda and I won't let him in because

I'm painting a rosy picture with only blue and yellow (sadness and cowardice). I'm something of an alchemist. Extinct. He would tell me time is running out. I would correct him: time ran out; that's why history repeats itself, why we can't advance. What joy will come has to be here right now: Cheer to wash the dirt away, Twenty Mule Team Borax and Arm & Hammer to magnify Cheer's power, lemonscented bleach and ammonia to trick the nose, improved-changed-Tide, almost all-purpose starch that cures any limpness except impotence. Celebrate that there's Mastercard to rule us, bring us to our knees, the protocol we follow in the presence of the head of our state of ruin, the official with us all the time, not inaccessible in palaces or White Houses or Kremlins. Besides every ritual is stylized, has patterns and repetitions suitable for adaptation to dance. Here come toe shoes, brushstrokes, oxymorons. Joy is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers

of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers. Let hearbreak be alternative to coffeebreak, five midmorning minutes devoted to emotion. Raising a Humid Flag Enough women over thirty are at Redbones for the smell of Dixie Peach to translate the air. I drink when I'm there because you must have some transparency in this life and you can't see through the glass till it's empty. Of course I get next to men with broad feet and bull nostrils to ward off isolation. You go to Redbones after you've been everywhere else and can see the rainbow as fraud, a colorful frown. The best part is after midnight when the crowd at its thickest raises a humid flag and hotcombed hair reverts to nappy origins. I go to Redbones to put an end to denial. Dixie Peach is a heavy pomade like canned-ham gelatin. As it drips down foreheads and necks, it's like tallow dripping down candles in sacred places. From AT REDBONES, CSU Poetry Series XXIX.

Edward Hirsch (born January 20, 1950) is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City (not to be mistaken for E. D. Hirsch, Jr.). Hirsch was born in Chicago. He had a childhood involvement with poetry, which he later explored at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. Hirsch was a professor of English at Wayne State University. In 1985, he joined the faculty at the University of Houston, where he spent 17 years as a professor in the Creative Writing Program and Department of English. He was appointed the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation on September 3, 2002. He holds seven honorary degrees. Hirsch is a well-known advocate for poetry whose essays have been published in the American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He wrote a weekly column on poetry for The Washington Post Book World from 2002-2005, which resulted in his book Poets Choice (2006). His other prose books include Responsive Reading (1999) and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). He is the editor of Transforming Vision: Writers on Art (1994), Theodore Roethkes Selected Poems (2005) and To a Nightingale (2007). He is the co-editor of A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations and The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series The Writers World (Trinity University Press). Hirsch's first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second book, Wild Gratitude, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and a five-year MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. He received the William Park Riley Prize from the Modern Language Association for the best scholarly essay in PMLA for the year 1991. He has also received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Hirschs book, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), was a surprise bestseller and remains in print through multiple printings.

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, he has published several books of poems, most recently Special Orders (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Lay Back the Darkness (2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); and The Night Parade (1989). He is also the author of the prose volumes The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt, 2002), Responsive Reading (1999), and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), which the poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, he published Poet's Choice (Harcourt, 2007), which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay-letters running in the Washington Post Book World. About his poetry, the poet Dana Goodyear wrote for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "It takes a brave poet to follow Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton into the abyss . . . Hirsch's poems [are] compassionate, reverential, sometimes relievingly ruthless." Hirsch has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Nio con auriculares Trae unos shorts bombachos y una playera a gritos y cruza Broadway tarareando en sus auriculares. De vez en vez voltea para ver si ah sigo, un padre respetable zigzagueando entre el trfico. Es un quinceaero en la urbe ni ms, ni menos pero lo pienso como un pjaro colorido y sin nombre que gorjea peculiar entre los tordos y los gorriones y va recortando vendedores a cada esquina. Siempre lo he visto como un polluelo indmito que se inclina precariamente sobre un ala y voltea a verme desde una altura sbita para salir volando encima de las frondas. ~ Algodn de azcar Cruzamos por el puente del ro Chicago a pie en lo que resultara una ltima vez, yo coma el aire dulce de un algodn de azcar esa azulada luz hilada de la nada. Fue apenas un instante, de verdad, nada ms, pero qued extasiado ante los firmes cables del puente sostenindonos y enredados mis dedos entre los largos y finos dedos de mi abuelo, un hombre viejo del Viejo Mundo

que hace mucho se hundi en la inmensidad. Y me acuerdo de ese nio de ocho aos saboreando la dulzura del aire, que ah sigue pegada a mi boca y desparece al respirar. ~ Fast Break In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984 A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop, and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather from the air like a cherished possession and spinning around to throw a strike to the outlet who is already shoveling an underhand pass toward the other guard scissoring past a flat-footed defender who looks stunned and nailed to the floor in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man letting the play develop in front of him in slow motion, almost exactly like a coach's drawing on the blackboard, both forwards racing down the court the way that forwards should, fanning out and filling the lanes in tandem, moving together as brothers passing the ball between them without a dribble, without a single bounce hitting the hardwood until the guard finally lunges out Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925) Out here in the exact middle of the day, This strange, gawky house has the expression Of someone being stared at, someone holding His breath underwater, hushed and expectant; This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed Of its fantastic mansard rooftop And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed of its shoulders and large, awkward hands. But the man behind the easel is relentless. He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes The house must have done something horrible To the people who once lived here Because now it is so desperately empty, It must have done something to the sky Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant And devoid of meaning. There are no Trees or shrubs anywhere--the house Must have done something against the earth. All that is present is a single pair of tracks Straightening into the distance. No trains pass. Now the stranger returns to this place daily Until the house begins to suspect That the man, too, is desolate, desolate And even ashamed. Soon the house starts To stare frankly at the man. And somehow The empty white canvas slowly takes on The expression of someone who is unnerved, Someone holding his breath underwater.

and commits to the wrong man while the power-forward explodes past them in a fury, taking the ball into the air by himself now and laying it gently against the glass for a lay-up, but losing his balance in the process, inexplicably falling, hitting the floor with a wild, headlong motion for the game he loved like a country and swiveling back to see an orange blur floating perfectly though the net. And then one day the man simply disappears. He is a last afternoon shadow moving Across the tracks, making its way Through the vast, darkening fields. This man will paint other abandoned mansions, And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered Storefronts on the edges of small towns. Always they will have this same expression, The utterly naked look of someone Being stared at, someone American and gawky. Someone who is about to be left alone Again, and can no longer stand it.

Early Sunday Morning I used to mock my father and his chums for getting up early on Sunday morning and drinking coffee at a local spot but now Im one of those chumps. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car. Its like this: just when you think you have forgotten that red-haired girl who left you stranded in a parking lot forty years ago, you wake up early enough to see her disappearing around the corner of your dream on someone elses motorcycle roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now Im sitting in a dimly lit caf full of early morning risers where the windows are covered with soot and the coffee is warm and bitter.

Tonight I want to say something wonderful for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith in their legs, so much faith in the invisible arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path that leads to the stairs instead of the window, the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror. I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing to step out of their bodies into the night, to raise their arms and welcome the darkness, palming the blank spaces, touching everything. Always they return home safely, like blind men who know it is morning by feeling shadows. And always they wake up as themselves again. That's why I want to say something astonishing like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies. Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs flying through the trees at night, soaking up the darkest beams of moonlight, the music of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches. And now our hearts are thick black fists flying back to the glove of our chests. We have to learn to trust our hearts like that. We have to learn the desperate faith of sleepwalkers who rise out of their calm beds and walk through the skin of another life. We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.

Branch Library I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy who perched in the branches of the old branch library. He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor, pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching notes under his own corner patch of sky. I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles, radiating heat, singing with joy. After a Long Insomniac Night I walked down to the sea in the early morning after a long insomniac night. I climbed over the giant gull-colored rocks and moved past the trees, tall dancers stretching their limbs and warming up in the blue light. I entered the salty water, a penitent whose body was stained, and swam toward a red star rising in the eastregal, purple-robed. One shore disappeared behind me and another beckoned. I confess that I forgot the person I had been as easily as the clouds drifting overhead. My hands parted the water. The wind pressed at my back, wings and my soul floated over the whitecapped waves.

Fall Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season Changes its tense in the long-haired maples That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition With the final remaining cardinals) and then Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground. At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees In a season of odd, dusky congruencesa scarlet tanager And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance, A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything Changes and moves in the split second between

For the Sleepwalkers

summer's Sprawling past and winter's hard revision, one moment Pulling out of the station according to schedule, Another moment arriving on the next platform. It Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away From their branches and gather slowly at our feet, Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving Around us even as its colorful weather moves us, Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets. And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

Lay these words on his drowned eyelids like coins or stars, ancillary eyes. Canopy the swollen sky with sunspots while thunder addresses the ground. Syllable by syllable, clawed and handled, the words have united in grief. It is the ghostly hour of lamentation, the void's turn, mournful and absolute. Lay these words on the dead man's lips like burning tongs, a tongue of flame. A scouring eagle wheels and shrieks. Let God pray to us for this man.

Late March Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk, though I also carried a book of the Alone, which companioned me. The day was clear, unnaturally clear, like a freshly wiped pane of glass, a window over the water, and blue, preternaturally blue, like the sky in a Magritte painting, and cold, vividly cold, so that you could clap your hands and remember winter, which had left a few moments ago if you strained you could almost see it disappearing over the hills in a black parka. Spring was coming but hadn't arrived yet. I walked on the edge of the park. The wind whispered a secret to the trees, which held their breath and scarcely moved. On the other side of the street, the skyscrapers stood on tiptoe. I walked down to the pier to watch the launching of a passenger ship. Ice had broken up on the river and the water rippled smoothly in blue light. The moon was a faint smudge in the clouds, a brushstroke, an afterthought in the vacant mind of the sky. Seagulls materialized out of vapor amidst the masts and flags. Don't let our voices die on land, they cawed, swooping down for fish and then soaring back upwards.

I'm Going to Start Living Like a Mystic Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, each a station in a pilgrimagesilent, pondering. Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation. I will examine their leaves as pages in a text and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter. I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia. I shall begin scouring the sky for signs as if my whole future were constellated upon it. I will walk home alone with the deep alone, a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

In Memoriam Paul Celan Lay these words into the dead man's grave next to the almonds and black cherries--tiny skulls and flowering blood-drops, eyes, and Thou, O bitterness that pillows his head. Lay these words on the dead man's eyelids like eyebrights, like medieval trumpet flowers that will flourish, this time, in the shade. Let the beheaded tulips glisten with rain.

The kiosks were opening and couples moved slowly past them, arm in arm, festive. Children darted in and out of walkways, which sprouted with vendors. Voices greeted the air. Kites and balloons. Handmade signs. Voyages to unknown places. The whole day had the drama of an expectation. Down at the water, the queenly ship started moving away from the pier. Banners fluttered. The passengers clustered at the rails on deck. I stood with the people on shore and waved goodbye to the travelers. Some were jubilant; others were broken-hearted. I have always been both. Suddenly, a great cry went up. The ship set sail for the horizon and rumbled into the future but the cry persisted and cut the air like an iron bell ringing in an empty church. I looked around the pier but everyone else was gone and I was left alone to peer into the ghostly distance. I had no idea where that ship was going but I felt lucky to see it off and bereft when it disappeared.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room is no longer a father or a husband or a son, but a boy standing on the edge of a forest listening to the distant cry of wolves, to wild dogs, to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.

Poor Angels At this hour the soul floats weightlessly through the city streets, speechless and invisible, astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones of dusk suddenly filling the urban sky while the body sits listlessly by the window sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move, too weary to stand up or to lie down. At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out to the approaching night, Amaze me, amaze me, while the body sits glumly by the window listening to the clear summons of the dead transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal. Some nights it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strange, unlikely tethering, a furious grafting of the quick and the slow: when the soul flies up, the body sinks down and all nightlocked in the same cramped room they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air with the sound of a low internal burning. How long can this bewildering marriage last? At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire of stars flaming on the other side of the sky, but the body stares into an empty night sheen, a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels, feverish old loves: dont separate yet. Let what rises live with what descends.

Lay Back the Darkness My father in the night shuffling from room to room on an obscure mission through the hallway. Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream and ease his restless passage. Lay back the darkness for a salesman who could charm everything but the shadows, an immigrant who stands on the threshold of a vast night without his walker or his cane and cannot remember what he meant to say, though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy, while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

The Skokie Theater

Twelve years old and lovesick, bumbling and terrified for the first time in my life, but strangely hopeful, too, and stunned, definitely stunnedI wanted to cry, I almost started to sob when Chris Klein actually touched meoh Godbelow the belt in the back row of the Skokie Theatre. Our knees bumped helplessly, our mouths were glued together like flypaper, our lips were grinding in a hysterical grimace while the most handsome man in the world twitched his hips on the flickering screen and the girls began to scream in the dark. I didnt know one thing about the body yet, about the deep foam filling my bones, but I wanted to cry out in desolation when she touched me again, when the lights flooded in the crowded theatre and the other kids started to file into the narrow aisle, into a lobby of faded purple splendor, into the last Saturday in August before she moved away. I never wanted to move again, but suddenly we were being lifted toward the sidewalk in a crush of bodies, blinking, shy, unprepared for the ringing familiar voices and the harsh glare of sunlight, the brightness of an afternoon that left us gripping each others hands, trembling and changed

Dont desert me just because I stayed up last night watching The Lost Weekend. I know Ive spent too much time praising your naked body to strangers and gossiping about lovers you betrayed. Ive stalked you in foreign cities and followed your far-flung movements, pretending I could describe you. Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee and obsessing over your features year after jittery year. Im sorry for handing you a line and typing you on a screen, but dont let me suffer in silence. Does anyone still invoke the Muse, string a wooden lyre for Apollo, or try to saddle up Pegasus? Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess, indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic, pleasance and half wonder, hell, I have loved you my entire life without even knowing what you are or howplease help meto find you.

The Widening Sky I am so small walking on the beach at night under the widening sky. The wet sand quickens beneath my feet and the waves thunder against the shore. I am moving away from the boardwalk with its colorful streamers of people and the hotels with their blinking lights. The wind sighs for hundreds of miles. I am disappearing so far into the dark I have vanished from sight. I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body. I am so small now no one can see me. How can I be filled with such a vast love? What the Last Evening Will Be Like You're sitting at a small bay window in an empty caf by the sea. It's nightfall, and the owner is locking up, though you're still hunched over the radiator, which is slowly losing warmth. Now you're walking down to the shore to watch the last blues fading on the waves. You've lived in small houses, tight spaces the walls around you kept closing in but the sea and the sky were also yours. No one else is around to drink with you from the watery fog, shadowy depths. You're alone with the whirling cosmos. Goodbye, love, far away, in a warm place. Night is endless here, silence infinite.

To Poetry

Wild Gratitude

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey, And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth, And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens, And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air, And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight, I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart, Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing In everyone of the splintered London streets, And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude, And his grave prayers for the other lunatics, And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry. All day todayAugust 13, 1983I remembered how Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759, For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience. This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General 'And all conveyancers of letters' for their warm humanity, And the gardeners for their private benevolence And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers, And the milkmen for their universal human kindness. This morning I understood that he loved to hear As I have heardthe soft clink of milk bottles On the rickety stairs in the early morning, And how terrible it must have seemed When even this small pleasure was denied him. But it wasn't until tonight when I knelt down And slipped my hand into Zooey's waggling mouth That I remembered how he'd called Jeoffry 'the servant Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,' And for the first time understood what it meant. Because it wasn't until I saw my own cat Whine and roll over on her fluffy back That I realized how gratefully he had watched Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse, A rodent, 'a creature of great personal valour,' And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped. And only then did I understand It is Jeoffryand every creature like him Who can teach us how to praisepurring

In their own language, Wreathing themselves in the living fire.