are you dreaming, Frederick?

"What I do know is that love reckons with the past and evil reminds us to look to the future. Evil loves tomorrow because peddling in possibility is what abusers do. At my worst, I know that I've wanted the people that I've hurt to look forward, imagining all that I can be and forgetting the contours of who I have been to them.

"Like good Americans, I told Grandma, we will remember to drink ourselves drunk on the antiquated poison of progress. We will long for 'shall's' and 'will be's' and 'hopes' for tomorrow. We will heavy-handedly help in our own deception and moral obliteration. We will forget how much easier it is to talk about gun control, mental illness and riots than it is to talk about the moral and material consequences of manufactured white American innocence.

"We will lament the numbers of folks killed in mass murders in the United States. There's a number for that. We will talk about the numbers of people killed in black-on-black murder. There's a number for that. We will never talk about the number of unemployed and underemployed hard-working black folks living in poverty. We will never talk about the numbers of black folk in prison for the kinds of nonviolent drug-related offenses my white students commit every weekend. We will never talk about the number of human beings killed by young American military men and women draped in camouflage, or the number of human beings murdered by drones across the world. We will never talk about the specific amount of money this country really owes Grandma and her friends for their decades of unpaid labor. We will never talk about the moral and monetary debt accrued by the architects of this Empire. There are shameful numbers for all of that, too."
--Kiese Laymon in an essay you can read here


"Night"
The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear night of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on unclouded nights,
The water reflects
The firmament's partial setting;

--O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.
--Louise Bogan


"Grey Eyes"

When she speaks it is like coming onto a grave
at the edge of a woods, softly, so we
do not enter or wholly
turn away. Such speech
is the breath a brush makes through hair,
opening into time
after the stroke.

A tree is bending
but the bird doesn't land.

One star,
earthbound, reports a multitude of unyielding
others. It
cannot help its   falling   falling
into the dull brown earth of someone's back yard,
where, in daylight, a hand reaches
in front of the mower and tosses it, dead stone,
aside. We who saw it fall

are still crashing with light into the housetops,
tracing in the mind that missing
trajectory, rainbow of darkness
where we were--children
murmuring--'There, over there!'--while the houses
slept on and on.

Years later she is still nesting on the light
of that plundered moment, her black hair
frozen to her head with yearning,
saying, 'Father, I am a colder green
where the mower cut a swath
and I lay down
and the birds that have no use for song
passed over me
like a shovel-fall.'

She closed her eyes. It was early morning. Daybreak.
Some bees
were dying on my wing–humming
so you could hardly hear.

--Tess Gallagher


"Learning a Language"
She's reading your minds
as you pass by, the

dipsomane déguisée en rose

While she waits
for her date
to turn up, the moon
in the man...

She know exactly what is going to happen

she'll be guided
upstairs
to a bedroom, and turning around
he will show her his
gun

He'll ask if she would like to
hold it,
which she will

amazed
at its lightness
and beauty
this thing

it must have taken 4 million years to make

squeezing it she will feel cold
and invisible light flowing
into her spine

So there is a door out of here after all

And to visit a new place creates one
in the brain

How do you say no

How do you say anything
to throw up in

Can I use this room to cry

Radiant fuel
body
of water

along which she walks, she is
walked

Why
did we leave, and how
are we ever getting back--
--Franz Wright


"Lonesome Pine Special"
I was walking out this morning with rambling on my mind.
--Sara Carter

There's a curve in the road, and a slow curve in the land,
Outside of Barbourville, Kentucky, on U.S. 25E,
I've always liked
                            each time I've passed it,
Bottomland, river against a ridge to the west,
A few farmhouses on each side of the road, some mailboxes
Next to a dirt lane that leads off through the fields.
Each time I'd think
                                How pleasant it must be to live here.
 
                                    _____
 
In Kingsport, when I was growing up,
Everyone seemed to go to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, up U.S. 23,
All the time.
                      Everyone had an uncle or aunt there,
Or played golf, or traded cars.
They were always going up there
                                                      to get married, or get liquor,
Or to get what was owed them
By someone they'd been in the service with.
 
Lone went up there more often than anyone else did,
Part of his territory for State Farm,
                                                         somebody said,
Without much conviction.
 
When the talk turned to whiskey,
                                                      and everyone dusted his best lie off,
We all know, or thought we knew, where Lone went
With his funny walk and broken back
He could hit a golf ball a ton with,
                                                        even if he did stand sideways
Like a man hauling a body out of the water,
Being the real owner, we thought, of that gas station out on the Jonesboro highway
You went to the back of
                                        for a pint after 10 p.m.,
Lone getting richer and richer until the Moose Lodge
Started to take his business away
                                                    by doing it legal, and during the daylight.
 
So Lone went back, we all thought,
To stumping around the golf course, still
Hitting it sideways, still selling whatever he could
To anyone foolish enough to play with him and pay him,
Old Lone, slicker than owl oil.
 
                                    _____
 
It was all so American,
The picket fence of wrought iron a hundred years old,
Lilacs at every corner of the lawned yard
                                                                  in great heaps and folds,
A white house and wild alfalfa in scattered knots
Between the fence the cracked sidewalk,
The wind from the Sawtooth Mountains
                                              riffling the dust in slow eddies along the street
Near the end of June in Hailey, Idaho,
The house where Pound was born,
                                                        with its red maple floors
And small windows two blocks from Idaho 75,
Hemingway ten miles on up the same road between two evergreens,
Nobody noticing either place
                                                as the cars went through town
All night and all day, going north, going south . . .
 
                                    _____
 
Another landscape I liked
Was south of Wytheville, Virginia, on U.S. 52
Just short of the Carolina line,
                                                 a steel bridge over the New River,
Pasture on both sides of the road and woods on the easy slopes,
Big shrubs and trees lining the riverbanks like fur,
The road and the river both
Angling back toward the Iron Mountains,
The valley bulging out to the east
                                                       in a graceful swirl,
The dead chestnut trees like grey candles
Wherever the woods began . . .
 
What is it about a known landscape
                                                          that tends to undo us,
That shuffles and picks us out
For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine
Seen in profusion deep in the timber
Suddenly seems to rise like a lavendar ground fog
At noon?
                What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
                            when something is given back
We didn't know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?
 
                                    _____
 
Today, at midsummer noon, I took the wooden floats
To the Yaak River, the small ones I'd carved from the larch
And cedar chips,
                             and loosed them downstream
To carry my sins away, as the palace gardians did each year at this time
In medieval Japan,
Where the river goes under the new bridge
                                                                      on County 508
And the first homesteaders took up their quarter sections.
From Sam Runyan's to Susie Speed's
Through white water and rock and the tendrilous shade
Of the tamaracks,
                              out into rubbery blotches of sunlight,
The floats' shadows hanging beneat them like odd anchors
Along the pebbled bottom, the river slowing and widening,
The floats at great distances from one another
Past Binder's cabin under the black
                                                          of the evergreen-covered dam
And over the falls and gone into foam and next year . . .
 
                                    _____
 
In the world of dirt, each tactile thing
                                                             repeats the untouchable
In its own way, and in its own time.
Just short of Tryon, North Carolina, on U. S. 176,
Going south down the old Saluda Grade,
                                                                   kudzu has grown up
And over the tops of miles of oak trees and pine trees,
A wall of vines a hundred feet high, or used to be,
Into South Carolina,
That would have gone for a hundred more with the right scaffolding,
Rising out of the rock and hard clay in thin, prickly ropes
To snake and thread in daily measurable distances
Over anything still enough long enough,
                                                                  and working its way
Out of the darkness and overhang of its own coils
To break again and again
Into the sunlight, worthless and everywhere,
                                                                        breathing, breathing,
Looking for leverage and a place to climb.
 
                                    _____
 
It's true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
                                            the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
                                       the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.
 
Going west out of Kalispell, Montana, on U.S. 2,
If you turned at Kila,
                                   and skirted the big slough
Where Doagie Duncan killed three men some seventy years ago
After a fight over muskrat hides,
Then turned south toward the timber
                                                            and higher ground
On the dirt road to the Flathead Mine,
Past Sundelius' homestead and up toward Brown's Meadows,
Then swung down where the mine road
                                                                branches right and doubles back,
You'd come through the thinning spruce and fir
And lodgepole pine to suddenly open hillsides
And deep draws
                           of the Hog Heaven country
And start to see what I mean, the bunchgrass and bitterroot
And wild clover flattening under the wind
As you turned from the dirt road,
                                                      opened the Kansas gate
And began to follow with great care
The overgrown wagon ruts through the blowing field,
                                                                              the huge tamarack snag,
Where the tracks end and the cabin is,
Black in the sunlight's wash and flow
                                                             just under the hill's crown,
Pulling you down like weight to the front door . . .
 
The cabin is still sizable, four rooms and the walls made
Of planed lumber inside,
                                         the outside chinked with mud
And cement, everything fifty years
Past habitation, the whole structure
                                                          leaning into the hillside,
Windowless, doorless, and oddly beautiful in its desolation
And attitude, and not like
The cold and isolate misery it must have stood for
When someone lived here, and heard, at night,
This same wind sluicing the jack pines
                                                                and ruined apple trees
In the orchard, and felt the immensity
Loneliness brings moving under his skin
Like a live thing, and emptiness everywhere like a live thing
Beyond the window's reach and fire's glare . . .
 
Whoever remembers that best owns all this now.
After him it belongs to the wind again,
                          and the shivering bunchgrass, ad the seed cones.
 
                                    _____
 
There is so little to say, and so much time to say it in.
 
Once, in 1955 on an icy road in Sam's Gap, North Carolina,
Going north into Tennessee on U.S. 23,
I spun out on a slick patch
And the car turned once-and-a-half around,
Stopping at last with one front wheel on a rock
                                                                            and the other on air,
Hundreds of feet of air down the mountainside
I backed away from, mortal again
After having left myself
                                        and returned, having watched myself
Wrench the wheel toward the spin, as I'm doing now,
Stop and shift to reverse, as I'm doing now,
                                                                       and back out on the road
As I entered my arms and fingers again
Calmly, as though I had never left them,
Shift to low, and never question the grace
That had put me there and alive, as I'm doing now . . .
 
                                    _____
 
Solo Joe is a good road.
It cuts southwest off Montana 508 above Blacktail Creek,
Crosses the East Fork of the Yaak River
                                                                 and climbs toward Mount Henry.
Joe was an early prospector
Back in the days when everything came in by pack string
Or didn't come at all.
                                    One spring he shot his pet cat
On the front porch with a rifle between the eyes
As she came through the cabin door.
He later explained she was coming for him
                                                                      but he got her first.
He drank deer's blood, it was said, and kept to himself,
Though one story has him a gambler later downriver near Kalispell.
Nobody lives there now,
But people still placer-mine in the summer, and camp out
Illegally on the riverbank.
No one knows anything sure about Joe but his first name
And the brown government sign that remembers him.
And that's not so bad, I think.
                                                 It's a good road, as I say,
And worse things than that will happen to most of us.
 
                                    _____
 
The road in is always longer than the road out,
Even if it's the same road.
I think I'd like to find one
                                          impassable by machine,
A logging road from the early part of the century,
Overgrown and barely detectable.
I'd like it to be in North Carolina,
                                                       in Henderson County
Between Mount Pinnacle and Mount Anne,
An old spur off the main track
The wagons and trucks hauled out on.
Blackberry brambles, and wild raspberry and poison ivy
Everywhere; grown trees between the faint ruts;
Deadfall and windfall and velvety sassafras fans
On both sides . . .
                              It dips downhill and I follow it.
It dips down and it disappears and I follow it.

--Charles Wright


"Lot's Wife"
And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.
--Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward