“... it came, before the turn in the cherishedwind, what we called history, the turntowards, all of it more and moretowards – what is it that iscoming – must come – unfathomable, unbreakable – you want it so, yourfuture, no thefuture, sobadly – you standon the threshold of your century as on a highparapet, brush in hand, a ladder wrinkling the air as it rises,a kind of singing,rung by rung –all of you bowing to it saying thank you, thank you my lucky stars I am livingnow – right now –of all times this is the one now,the air ahead all tongues, they are actually red why don’t yousee it – & all will burn my friend –are you there –where are you now –is there a place to still beout therenow, in the actual future, which came aboutafter all – because none of thiswill survive, though from here see, so sun-dappled inwhat we called hours,long strings of human eagerness, & wonder curiosity hope expectation belief –(under the skin greed)(greed feeling its way into the hours)but the story above so shiny,the whole prepared-for-the-future soul nodding, saying you’re welcome, yes,you’re even more welcome[I’m letting you go now are you ready][I trust you to catch me]and the afternoon went on forever,and the path to the walled gardenwent on forever,the repast the Sunday the sunlight burning this leaf then that one,the wine on the table, burning, the bread,the thudding of the minutes inaudible,of what’s in the minutes,that greed,like a fleet of bombers actually,as the empty path filled up with men, rows and rowsstacked on the sides,bodies crying or no longer able to,a small path maintained for the stretcher-carriers,but all of this still invisible[except in the brushstroke]the one with no legs saying to no onewhat’s this all about,engines, sweat, memory of marching as one,huddled up till he’s a rag now calling for his mother,vital fluid seeping into the dirt,growling of plane circling low,what’s got you boy,nerves got you boy,till the path to this garden delivers its message,its millions of facescrying medic, crying mom, one of them whispering this was my homeonce, right in there –this hour –in our garden –where I look in my parents’ eyes and see nothing butthe surfaces of things,unbreakable,all round usthe sun perjuring itself promisingthe world cannot turn on you,gold firing on every leaf and pane,ricochet of sunstrikes on glass, twig, stone,the wall of vines all mouths whispering here you are here you are,fill your glass the promises shall be kept,& that quiet in the light, that quiet that cannot die,over our repast in the garden,over my one fear that I would spill the glassin the conflagrationof simplicities …Those who will never walk again on this earth ...”

“... The American experiment will end in 2030 she saidlooking into the cards,the charts, the stars, the mathematics of it, lookinginto our palms, into all of ourpalms, into the leaves at thebottom ofthe empty cup – searching its emptiness, its piles of deadbodies or is it grass at the edgeof the field where the abandoned radio is cracklingat the winter-stilled waters, the winter-killedwill of God – in the new world now the old world –staring quietly without emotion into the rotten meatin the abandoned shops, moving aside with one easy gesturethe broken furniture, the fourth wallsmashed& allthe private lives of the highrise apartmentsexposed to the city thenwind ...”

“... lost all the wars. By definition. Had small desires and fundamental fear. Gave ourchildren for them, paid in full, from the start of time, standard time and standardspace, with and without suspension of disbelief, hungry for the everyday, wideawake, able to bring about a state of affairs by bodily movement, not even gradually,not hesitating, not ever, gave brothers fathers sisters mothers ...”

“... Then the drone came. A small personal drone. Hung at anintimate height. Hadmuch to say. Hovering,eye to eye, lurching &chattering. Is it your time now, I thought. Thoughtit saidyou should have learned tolove but came upclose, saw it was old, had beenpatched thousands oftimes, maybe more, was medalled with debris,a tin castle, a wooden fish, a rattle – a plasticclock w/one hand – piano strings w/hooks – a miniaturetelephone pole – a brasstemplefront & golden ladder stuckin a tinywell – all shaking the air – a tinny racket –also scraps of veil – maybe tulle – seemed angry – one eye a milagrohanging there sideways – a pair oflungs or were those actualair sacs & bronchialtubes –the red drops actual –as if whistling or singing though we both weresilent ...”

“... With whom am I speaking, are you one or many, what are u, are u, do I make my-self clear, is this which we called speech what u use, are u a living form such as theform I inhabit now letting it speak me. My window tonight casts light onto the snow,I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch, tossed out to capture this shine wecast. I pull it in, into my memory store ...”

“... the river was still widening as it went, as it carried me, thick mists risingoff it all day,was still widening, yes, for a while longer, holdingthe sky in its belly and back,me on my back in the small ofmy boat, rudder jammed, oarlost or is it I tossed itsome long time agowhen I imagined myselfto be free. In the distance I see, reflected in the spooling,a pair of spyglasses liftedby the surveyor – fitted out for life – and it seems he is laughingat what he sees, so magnified, light splaying over the surfacesthe smeared faces of kingswhose lands are now vanquished,clouds folding in the waters their rolled-up blanketsno longer needed for the ceremonies, the dancing,controlling ebb, controllingflow,& like candy the benzenes the tankers before me have trailed,& like wedding veils the foam made of monies,a few millennia of monies,no slack in that accrual,no slowdown in that accumulation – we were fitted outfor life, armed with evolution & imitation,trees casting their calligraphies deeper and deeper as they try to tellthe story of the bend we are nowapproaching ...”

“... before the storm isthe storm. Our waiting tunnelling outward, chewing at the as-yet-not-here, wild,& in it thenot-yet,that phantom, hovering, scribbling hints in the dusty airshafts where weawait rain whichonce again will not come, though something we think of as the stormwill. Steeped in no-colour colour. Smothering hopes with falsepromises, as wind comes up and we feel our soul turn franticin us, craning this way and that, yes the soul can twist, can winch itself into knots,why not, there is light but no warmth, we are alone yetnot, no trace but the feeling oftrace, who wouldn’t be a child again,teach me how to work, how to be kind, teach me ignorance, sweet ignorance,the roads lie down in us, all the roads taken, they knot up,they went nowhere, cld that be true,they made a shapeless burden we carried around calling it lived-experience ...”

“... It is entirely in my hands now as it returns like blood to remind me – the chains so soft from wear, in my right, in my left – the first time I, trying for perfection, of balance, of symmetry, strap your twenty-two pounds of eyes, blood, hair, bone – so recently inside me – into the swing – and the sun still in the sky though it being so late as I look up to see where this small package is to go sent up by these two hands into the evening that won’t stop won’t lower as it should into the gloam is it going to last forever, and the grace that I feel at the centre of my palms as if my hands were leaves and light were coursing through some hole in their grasp, the machine of time coming in, as chlorophyll could – I was not yet so tired of believing – I was still in the very beginning of being human, the thing no one can tell another – he didn’t find what he searched for, she didn’t understand what she desired – the style of the story being the very wind which comes up now as I glide down the chains to the canvas bucket to pull you to me, eyes closed as your eyes close, and for the first time in this lifetime lift you back and up as far as I can, as high as I can, then let you collapse so suddenly as I push you away from me, with more force than gravity as I summon from within what I try to feel is an accurate amount, a right fraction, of my strength, not too much promise, not too much greed or ambition or sense of beginning or capacity for dream – no – just the amount to push you by that corresponds to pity, who knows how to calculate that strong firm force, as if I were sending a message forth that has to be delivered and the claimant expects it, one of so many, accompanied by my prayer that you be spared from anything at all, from everything, and of course also its opposite, that everything happen to you in large sheets of experience as I tug back the chain-ends and push you out telling you to put out your legs and pump although you do not know what I am saying as you have not yet spoken your first word, not yet on that day that seems even now it will never end as you come back to me and I catch you and this time of course as I am human I push a little harder as if the news I was shouting-out had not quite been heard, as if the next push were the real one the one that asks for the miracle – will I live or die if I pick this fruit as it is sent back to my waiting hands and this time it’s stronger, the yes is taking over, your yes and my yes and our greed to overcome what, into this first-ever solstice with you in the born world, let no one dare pick this fruit I think as I cast the roundness of you up again now so high into a mouth of sky agape yet without wonder as if it eats everything and anything and does not know what day is or time – this is our time – or that this next-on meal is being fed it, as just under you the oval puddle from the recent rain lies in the worn declivity where each one before you has dug in her feet to push off or to stop – and in it you flash as you go by giving me for that instant an eye you its iris blinking, the crucible of a blink in the large unflinching eye, eye opened by the hundreds of small hopes taking on gravity at push-off, and then the fatigue when for all the pumping and rising, and how you could see over the tops of the houses up and over to where your own house is down there – and the housing development, and the millions of leaves, and the slower children                           lagging behind on the small road beneath – until the world stills, and you alone are life, a huge bloom, a new force entering – how then – even then – the sensation of enough swarms, and thought or something like it, resumes, and your mind is again in your hard grip on the chains which had been until then as if unknown to your body during what might have been the interglacial lull, or the period during which the original ooze grew single-cell organisms, which grew small claws and feet and then had to have eyes, till your hands become again hard, heavy, and all the yearning re-enters you as lifetime, and your feet learn to brake by scratching the ground a bit more each time – and that is where the eye comes from, the final oscillations, the desire to be done with vision, what this morning’s rain reminds us is still there beneath us in an earth that will only swallow us entire no matter what we push into it as here you and I again and again redo the moment nine months ago you first began to push and cry-out into the visible world ...”

“... Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would say screen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry. In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just cried eyes. Cried now now ...”

“... Praying (Attempt of 6 June ’03) I wake and one of them is still there, still talking, sudden jolts of hand as if to slap open the air, garbage waiting at the curb, myself a slave, still, yes, I check, a slave, mist on the hedgerows, stubblefields between. A slave. Beyond, the village still asleep. That I can say the word village. Thorns disappearing now under the last of the blossoming ...”

“... The Complex Mechanism of the Break From here, ten to fourteen rows of folding and branching. Up close, the laving in overlappings that pool sideways as well as suck back. Filamentary green-trims where the temporary furthest coming-forward is lost. Suctions in three or four different directions back from pinnacle-point. Encounter of back-suck by the foremost, low-breaking, upstitching really, arrivals, where it seems pebblings of sandbits ruffle up and are ruffled back into the foam of the breakwater browning it ...”

“... me, and will not go away’ – surely got its bearings from Thomas’s last lines.Jorie Graham, who followed Heaney as Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1999, returned to that same Thomas poem in her collection Runaway. ‘The Hiddenness of the World’ works back through Thomas’s lines and dwells especially on ...”

“... James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts all her chosen subjects into writers of lyric poetry ...”

“... The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it touches, almost affectionately, the zodiacal globe it is about to spin. Although the star-gazer cannot make physical contact with his remote field of vision, the caressing way his finger lies on the surface of the globe suggests his intense intimacy with the sky ...”

“... of image, knew, if people take your projections seriously they will probably take you seriously. Jorie Graham, who is by no means a reticent ironist, takes poetry very seriously and, given that The Dream of the Unified Field has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, clearly that’s how many people take her. We often expect poems with grand titles to be ...”