Now she is lost. She was always alone.
Lampshades ask the street for her, quietly.
No directory lists her address or phone.

She would like the way the flowers have blown
around this year. She loved flowers slightly

                 1.
    Believing together
    is more than a launch of boats,
    the dew on dandelions,
    the sorrow of worry;
    getting there is more than the drive
    in a car that blazes forward
    on the road's sunset of oil.

Making it is glazing a pot with running stars.

Success in this private congress
is natural as the pomegranate, fallen
heart up, dying in the road; the fence
that blows toward invisibility at dusk,

Why do they admit pale
rain to spill on pentacles,
to inherit the dominion
of burning as though great
dominoes of dark sputtered

    Here I am where I said I would be:
    surrounded by ghosts of young war
    veterans.  Tattered flags, more desolate
    than flags that survived the worst battles,
    wave goodbye to you.

It looks tough, but what hasn't been?
As long as "A love supreme...
a love supreme" is in my mind, I'll be okay.

Entering the room, eyeing the turnout
of mostly white people, I know what's
going on: it's the usual academic nuts
and their students, who have to be here,
and the locals, whom the schoolboys ignore.

    Speak softly when you speak of Bessie there.
    Leave her poor soul alone.
    Can't you see the woman's had her last affair?
    Well, I'll tell you, you should have known.

Deeper and deeper into your own distance
you tumble, swinging a dented dipper
into buckets of smoke.  What's the answer?
You don't believe in water, only
in secrets if you can't have one.  So the fire
is transgressing, and you turn around inside it,

He stands there
in a raincoat of humility--
the rain is
his rain, and the trees
he thinks about are rubber
from their roots
to where he sees the branches
sweat. Clouds
always threaten war
to the blind; and the leaves wave
goodbye to the statues of their comrades;
Lorca wrapped in a sheet.

You remembered everything:
the frozen archangel,
the faces of the ocean,
the skulls of horses.

Your memory is a root,
growing up through this,