Iridium

“...he had a pair of binoculars and, back in San Francisco, during the intermission from his playing at the Jazz Workshop, we’d walk ten blocks to a field down by the freeway, and he’d start looking at the stars. He knew where the Milky Way was and everything.”
Louis-Victor Mialy on John Coltrane

for Shay

1

Upstairs someone’s mama is pretending/so a man she knows will give her money
A man whose grandfather owned her people/gone and took their names
Downstairs someone sits with his aunt meeting/the wooden rictus grin of Europe
With a touch that makes the hammers say/Didn’t She Ramble in the key of blue

The key of work Of the chained men looking/day after day for a pulse to ride
The key of the sisters at the night meetings/passing out with joy
His aunt’s fingers finding something/new between the black and white bars
Strange and unlikely as love beyond shaming/As a market where people are sold

What’s your name honey he hears her asking/that sweet thing on the other side
Of the wood and wire She’s forgotten/everything else in the room
The man with his mother spoke to him once/He plans to disfollow his counsel exactly
 Learn a decent living Don’t spend your life/fooling around with a horn

2

Someone else is in F and it’s raining/and makes him think he’s by himself
As if the woodshed weren’t so crowded/you can hardly hear yourself think
He pretends he’s alone so he won’t see/what the laughing captain is teaching the others
What someone taught the captain What/someone’s mother’s face said when she came downstairs

Is it winter or spring He can’t remember/Or what he promised the night he would do
Or the turns in the river of oblivion mapped/up and down his arms
He likes it there Where he forgets/the body he can’t inhabit or escape
And the bodies of the others he forgets/behind the rented room’s locked door

He dreams he’s walking a plain between armies/Listening in his bare feet
Where blown conches and drums make young men/do what they wouldn’t otherwise do
When he nods half awake his fingers are making/their blurred trained way through the rhythms
He’s thirsty So he has to sit up/and open his eyes and breathe

He’s playing scales and sweating What feels like/sickness comes as forgetting fades
He’s playing scales but he’s hearing bells/at the ankles of dancers with chain scars there
Playing geese caught in a net screaming/One body divided into voices
At the corner of a street he forgets and Columbus/Bells of shuffle dancers in the rain

He’s sick but he can’t stop just yet Up and down/in the tracks of the map his dream made
Remembering his aunt’s touch Forgetting/what his country taught him his body is
In his arms a curve of metal translating/breath into horses in a bolted barn burning
In his eyes the last drift of forgetting but he closes them/In his mouth a slip of cane

Wet and bound by the ligature/Supple and tight enough to sing
At the touch of his tongue To call to the flipper/gate at the thumb of his left hand
On the gold neck His right low on the body/as if guiding the opening of the bell
Where something sweet with no name keeps/pressing Trying to get through

3

First dust He gathers it in the bell/In the wrong light you could mistake it for gold
Or the flecks of a meteor passage sifting/into Friday afternoon
In a locked room with a window a little/open to traffic and the gray street shining
Wet In the woodshed In daylight Ransacking/the chords that woke him up in the night

Dust Swirling As it coalesces/he starts to taste what he’s thirsty for
And leans into the pull of it Singing/a heathen song in a foreign land
You could mistake for home if you listen/to a son of slaves sweating in his boxers
Making lightning like the first white fire/on the cherry branches in the park across the way

He’s lost something The raisins in his pocket/remind him as he plays the labyrinth
Back to the vineyard When he gets to rock/he turns and comes back another way
Architect Undoing the harmony bindings/Unfolding the silk to find the seed
Back to the field Where he closes his eyes/to watch a fox on fire running through

Four-note patternsTwelve ways till Sunday/One lifetime in each of the keys
Leaving notes to answer the question/What you gonna do when the world’s on fire
Dissolving the citadels Hushing the sentries/Filing the locks from the silos of grain
Notes in the fractures Gathering Dispersing/Finding the next question Didn’t it rain

And Ain’t that a witness To the scatter of settlements/The facet break of the pyramid tombs
The king’s body returned to the earth/and the limestone forams to the sea
The villagers dancing in the palace footprints/designed to match the footprints of the stars
The slave quarters The walls of segregation/dust under wanderers’ feet

He rides the rails inside the mouthpiece/to the delta marsh huts made of reed
Playing down the towers So the sick/heal The hungry eat The dead sing
Listening for the messenger’s signature/left between the limestones in a seam
Iridium Sign of the great dying/and birthplace of its refugees

Up to the troposphere Down to the mantle/He finds dust and plays the monuments broken
With the scavenger resourcefulness/of the remnant who return
Nodding and leaning Like washing clothes/on a rough rock kneeling at the edge of a river
Up and down the ziggurat terraces/Finding Dispersing Closing the gates

As he makes the neighborhood sound Joining/his river of notes to the river outside
To the river his mothers were taken from/To the river just above his head
Friday afternoon hiding it He lays down/the approaches and opens the bays
And walks across the bridge to the black place/And back And again Practicing

4

First nothing Just the time and in/No introductions Lovers can’t wait
As if there were no such thing as a stranger/or division or beginning or end
Four men on a bandstand island/with water coming up at the edges
Making ark proclamations Watching/each other’s faces to make the flood swing

Closing their eyes when the vortex pageant/makes them laugh or moan or dizzy
Handing around the ember Forgetting/who follows and who leads
Where you been man What kept you Leaning/into the places they friction and fit
Tight like that Union meeting in the village/to find those last lost notes

Left in the crevices of the project Looking/with hammers and leather and gut and reed
Practiced hands and lips pressed to it Breathing/open the message envelopes
Losing the pulse and back to its shifting/moorings Testifying from the stand
Glances to say That’s my boy He’s a beauty/isn’t he This band is burning tonight

Four men chained together Working/the strewnfield Playing the mysteries
Of a night in a minute A nomad’s shelter/Captivity songs pointing to free
The mystery of a place too narrow/but they make one body and find a passage
The mystery of provision in famine/Of four lost men found in the same time

Half the house half asleep at the altar/or arguing and walking away
But then the smooth line of a grown woman’s voice/taking a chorus Come on Bring it home
A night way to say I hope to shout glory/when this world’s on fire And Abide with me
Calling to the quartet searching the high place/with pools of sweat at their feet

Saturday night in the upper partials/into Sunday via brothel psalms
In the night club with its chits for oblivion/Its smoke and chatter Its owners to please
Another line skitters in Are they brothers/or lovers Arguing in their whisky dream
You lied to me You lied to me/Man I don’t recognize you

On the street after it’s late or early/Pulled grates and a dropped box of eggs
Flattened into shadow Two rows of six/a few feet from the kitchen door 
The milk crates where the dishwashers sat/on offclock breaks to smoke and eat
On the blue mailbox ledge curves of ripped orange peel/and half the globe of fruit

Four in the morning After the rain/they impersonate individuals again
Walking Clothes wet with the miracle/The wind lifting swirls of dust
Around the caged trees just past blossom/It gets on their shoes as they separate
The cold spring’s recombinations/Part soot and part gold green

5

They’re in D minor and he doesn’t tell them/any words or where the song came from
In the studio Tucking the messages/in envelopes to keep
First stumbling together His supple mournful/calling over dark fields as they hold him
With thunder In the toms In the gut strings’ memory/In the piano’s left hand

It’s always a translation He doesn’t/tell them the text yet so they can stay
In the sweet place together a little longer/In the galaxy of notes
Time-bound but in unbreakable circuit/Touching eyes Soaking their clothes
Reading each other’s shoulders to signal/a turn To say I’m done You go

It carries them They carry each other/held in its meshesWalking the song line
Held soft as milkweed silk/and hard as crucible steel
Opening the envelopes brought by the visitors/Pockets full of tektite amulets
They touch when he tells them the title precinct/A song for four Alabama girls

Gone With something to say to every/safety and to every division
To the four men crouched in the church basement/Sunday before dawn
Beside Pull them crackers out of bed/and kill them with axes in the middle of the street
Four other men Grown Leaving other messages/for their children’s children they won’t see

Didn’t She Ramble What they carry/as they leave the burning building together
A way to live To make relations/To make the march from the graveyard swing
It carries them They carry each other/When one breathes the others move
With you They say it three ways and he answers/You stay near me I can do anything

One with his brow gathered in fury/One showing only the keyboard his face
One swooning in the holy cathouse/joy of it Catching his lip in his teeth
One making the Sunday mothers not there/call Tell it Yes Yes Speak
Call to the men who took their daughters/Nothing you can do to take this

6

Someone’s making the woman upstairs happy/As if she had the dawn robins in her throat
Telling the good news when the morning/remembers to come back and find us again
Someone’s making something so sweet/she forgets the words Someone who loves her making her
So she can’t help it Higher now Showing/late Monday afternoon her real face

In the form of a sheaf of notes Someone waits/till she begs In a line of silk and dirt
Line bent in an arc of Where you been honey/Rainbow all the way down to the street
Where the gutbucket meets the stratosphere Someone/human making her call God
Invitation to the Andromeda ringshout/summoned when she takes off her clothes

Someone’s holding her in the labyrinth/In the places no one can go alone
Making her stutter whisper in the danger/and forget all the directions and names
Someone’s taking her to the border city/called Out of This World Where she can’t stay
Her voice broken with the joy of it/Someone’s taking her there and bringing her home

Kiln

“This free look...emerges from a projection of the intimate, and treats each piece of our reality
as a way of breaking the traditional vision, in this case the exterior vision, under
the enchantments of alienation...In this way, interior vision is
revelation, and revolutionary.”

Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphaël Confiant
 In Praise of Créolite

for Regina

1

Your grave is the river Where the rockweed lifts/in currents part salt Part poison Part sweet
Where your son knelt on your birthday in April/to lower your ashes in a paper boat 
Where your ancestors mutter in Cherokee/and from the lost forests inland from Dakar 
Arguing over the fouled compact of Manhattan/beside my ancestors who betrayed them

Is this why you haven’t come to visit/Why I haven’t seen you since Valentine’s Day
The last of your eyes Last conversation/Last kiss and another as I turned at the door
Relax I said Meaning Go ahead and die/Just before last turn into last silence
Did I leave something unsaid or undone/Then or that last long night by your bed

When your son left and winter pressed the black windows/It had snowed The world’s getting white someone said
One afternoon and your lover no longer/your lover laughed Not all white I hope
He smiled and apologized His eyes on mine/The only blue eyes in the room
That guarded your last walk Taking off your clothes/The watch unclasped from your fever wrist

Your wrist less the color of the galaxy/than the color of Malabar cinnamon burned
Mine less milk than flecked pink granite/The nurses couldn’t see we were both red
The color of the revolution dream I love and you/mistrusted Of the rape at our foundations
Of last dawn after the last movement/of your breathing The color of fire

Your hands hot and damp and unresponsive/Slack on the reins of the fever mare
After days of your firm grip even in sleep/Fear of leaving Fear of your body burned
The large strong hands you shaped and painted/Beside mine Delicate Chipped Unattended
Bare in your sunroom repotting the jasmine/I gave you Gloved later to mulch dying trees

Your fingers resting on my forearm in a meeting/a moment too long As never in your kitchen
Or your car or your bedroom Or one hand on my shoulder/long enough for our colleagues to turn
And frame us there My hand raised to hold yours/Behind me Where I couldn’t see your face
Just the faces of those seeing us together/Stirred surreptitious puzzled joy

I slept beside you reading Gilgamesh/even after I’d closed my eyes
Scrawling notes while your delicate handwriting/retreated into your fingers and disappeared
What’s that you asked one of those last days/The book’s back broken from searches and falling
It’s a poem about someone whose friend dies I said/And then he has to walk a long way

Is he all right then You were falling/Your vivid eyes flashes under fluttering lids
You hated the ocean The wave sounds scared you/when I brought them for your first hospital stay
The tide of the morphine pulling you under/I couldn’t remember the other drugs’ names
Scourge I called what they poured in the port/in your chest For healing For years

The years of rehearsing before the performance/of the days without you Broken meals Broken sleep
Trying like the moon to cleave to the vastness/To touch the river without looking down
Trying to teach myself to love/all of you except your body Failing
Your hand in mine as you struggled in the waves/Yes he’s all right Go to sleep I said

2

At the supermarket in the winter for your steaks/when the poison paled you For my Irish tea
Arguing over the transitworkers’ strike/I cheered and you disapproved
You a young woman in the revolution/whose sweat and smoke I could smell as a child
You whose mother said Don’t come home/when you stopped straightening your hair

You who went to school to learn to walk/with a book on your head To be a lady
Later adding the locks son and lover/cut to cheat the poison The slight cowboy swagger
With which you moved past the meat counter/Past the pint splint baskets of dates
Before the drug poled your raft across the barrier/The thin blanket over your swollen feet

In the line you asked if I remembered/how much the dates cost and I laughed Like asking
The temperature of a moonrise The width of a baby/I can tell you how they smell I said
Lifting the little basket to her face/As she turned and gave them the roll of her eyes
She gave transitworkers striking and her son/not eating when the girl he loved went away

I can tell you how sweet and I tore one half open/with my teeth In the supermarket at the edge of the city
At the edge of the confluence of the rivers where we lived/with a diesel-choked bridge between
The cashier startledYour face in its guarded/radianceThe silk bed where the date pit rests
I can tell you how beautiful they are I said/Getting out the money Not looking at you

3

Trapped on the bridge Summer Sunday traffic/He of the city between two rivers
Your driver’s grace with nothing to do/The city walls interrupted by gates
You already sick but only a little/In the king’s body the people’s splendor
Balancing the cup of death on your head/By the walls shards of cups the people had made

In the morning balancing a hymnal between us/The god who coaxed him to be her lover
On our way to your back yard to feast/The builder of walls scorning her
You were praising your grandmother’s collards and chicken/Who walked into hell to find her sister
And remembered an icebox on the Carolina porch/At each of the seven gates taking off her clothes

On a porch in Carolina when your mother left/My friend who endured dangers beside me
To work in the north and crazy with grief/I have lost acquaintance with sleep which is sweet
You broke the laws of love and transit/Oh terrible torrent that destroys the bulwarks
And they put you in the box and shut the door/Tear down your house and build a boat

It was as tall as me you said/Her sister carried down for use and pleasure
As we scattered fossil horses and branches of dates/Walls gleaming like copper Kiln-fired brick
Of ancient Mesopotamia as ash/Who took the girls in the sheep meadows
Over the river your ashes would travel/And took the shepherds as slaves

Which began to explain the blank look on your face/Ashes of a Sabbath village
In the years when you worked at the women’s jail/Ashes of Nineveh become Mosul
And someone from outside would ask/Two rockets fired Two rockets we paid for
Why do you feel at home there/With the pilot Makers of children’s graves

Steaks and watermelon Under the crabapple/The gate of grief sealed with pitch and bitumen
Whose place is marked by a scar now/How he said to the god who touched him Why be
Guard that afternoon of two women laughing/The god who protects the city with her thighs
Under whose shade we ate our red feast/your lover unless you belong to me

Praise to your hatred of chains and confinement/The shepherds in the king’s prisons
Praise to the joy of watching you eat/Honey and butter for his dead friend
To the last night of lying beside you watching/From whose body he could not part himself
Last closing of each of your body’s gates/Who wandered in the skin of a lion then

Your left eye with its skeptical brow raised/The god who touched him God of ecstasy
Your right before blurring clear as a star/God of the blind wisdoms of night
Your mouth before parching tender and guarded/God of the body’s longings and limits
The port in your chest because arm veins would burn/God of flesh God of fucking God of perish God of fire

The gates of your ears where a woman is singing/God of a voice unbound in the darkness
The gates of your nostrils the last to close/How during the crossing he held up his shirt
For your piss For your shit The gate of your cunt/to the mast to catch the least breeze Like a sail
Where the ravagement started Into the kiln/God of the lifespark God of the kiln

4

You dreamed we were walking in the woods in snow/By the little house where we didn’t live
At the end of a curved path Windows of garden/A mesh fence to keep the deer away
I can still see your hands retying the fastenings/Walking as in calmly Woods as in safe
And not Little house as in frame As in question/Deer as hunger Didn’t live as in didn’t live

I dreamed you wrote me a letter I couldn’t/openYour name and return address
Along the ruled envelope path/traveled by your tongue
Letter as in sealed place Couldn’t as in standing/beside you with my hands behind my back
Name as in bringing yourself to say/not your name but It’s me To call me Girl

You dreamed we were walking by the river with your sister/Our skin marked by our fathers’ hands
Listening to Bill Evans whom someone called/the slowest suicide in the world
I dreamed we were swimming The June dazzle/The little chop cuffs The foam churn at the break
How my daughter went under and I fished her out/by the back of her suit But not you

In this dream we’re sitting in a club downtown/Side by side so I can’t see your face
And a woman’s voice made of smoke and honey/is the path to a little house of her own
 Your mama and daddy say Once I asked/Would you like to be disreputable with me
 But long as I got you by my side I don’t/care what your people say

Your people as in church now but kept outdoors/before As in diving shackled from the deck
My people as in no rum enough to drown it/As in birth to death in oblivion dream
A woman’s voice as in the keys/to a place we could dance close and slow
As in mother As in sister As in lover As in/Come on in my kitchen It’s rainin outdoors

5

The moon’s our chaperone tonight as we stand/in the unfurnished room that will be the place
Of no rest and lost balance and counterfeit letters/and dancing alone when you’re gone
No lamps yet Just the changeplaying industrial/wanderer making her bound circuit
Which is not bound I am not learning this/but I can’t take my eyes off of her

The color of a crabapple petal It blooms/for a minute you said Careful or you’ll miss it
The color of the cornmeal I gave you/the day after your grandmother died
The color of the reams of blank paper/I hauled from your attic when you were discarding
Of the milkweed in the poisoned meadows/between us The lights on the bandaged bridge

The color of the jasmine blossoms opening/sweet in the dark over quarrels and traffic
She’s scattering jasmine over the rooftops/Over the river and the little boat
Knocking in the rockweed Little boat that did/and did not hold you Put your bed here
You said with jasmine where your shirt met your skin/Little boat that isn’t there

Jasmine blossoms like the stars later/I lay on the bed to worship through binoculars
The big dipper swinging low that first spring/When the sun come back Lush chariot
 If I get there before you do/Each rivet flickering cruciform Breathtaker
 I’ll cut a hole and pull you on through/Like a window into a world of white fire

6

Someone dead was playing a guitar/like he might stop the train if he bent the notes
Sweet Or if not stop it/maybe get it to turn
Or maybe get her to say his name/Or wake the dead Wake himself
Tapping the steel strings like crab claws/tapping the bottom of the sea

In a new season The first summer without you/Past the bay lapping the ferry dock
Past blackberries and rabbits in the thickets/Someone playing I Ain’t Got No Home
At the end of a path made of mistakes/Of potsherds Like Job’s to scrape himself
When one god said to another Behold/He is in thine hand

Someone I knew another April/Playing a birthday song in the dark
For his wife and their daughter curled inside her/Three weeks late to be born
His wife looking for the sweet bend now/in clay Two potter’s barns on the point
Who that first summer without him sold/his guitar to buy a kiln

The researchers’ boats come back to the harbor/with mud for her From the KT Boundary
Grand Bahama Banks Emerald Basin/The Kane Fracture Zone The Bering Sea
From core samples to study the weathers/of forty million years ago
Before our caul of combustion began to make/dying She makes glazes

That branch in the kiln like the branches of lungs/Of the paths of blood Of rivermouths
The shell bodies of ancient crustaceans/fusing with the bodies of vessels made stone
I put my hand in a bucket of slurry/from winejars in a Phoenician wreck
The hand I kept in my pocket walking/Looking for missed notes from you

Touching something you gave me A cowrie/brought back from a beach in Mombasa
My thumb along lobes smooth as porcelain/Along the ragged edges of the cleft
Someone’s castoff carapace/I gave you chestnuts and acorns and jasmine
Nothing that would last the furnace/Nothing that would stay

Forty million years lightly on the lip/of a cup Along the neck of a vase
Carapaces tapping in the brush grit/The damp white vessels waiting in the dark
In the kiln Like the Manhattan Project pile/Black bricks and timbers The messenger
 The Italian navigator has landed in/the new world and the natives are friendly he said

Two foundries One to chain the sun/to do war work Dividing Dividing
One where a woman tired as a new mother/watches at the spyhole for red
Her eyes relaxing into blackness Licks of flame/from the burner ports but these a distraction
First perceptible red a sign/that it’s safe to let the heat go

Dull red to cherry to orange to gold/to too much dazzle for naked eyes
Your foundered comrade tipping on the path/dizzier still after looking in
Magma to lava to rock to mud/to melt radiance As if the cups were dancing
As your cowrie in my pocket on/a calabash might have been

7

It’s a trysting place By the mulberries/Your old view from the bridge Your new address
The rubber wrappers on wet grass in the mornings/at the edges of your grave
When your son and I walked there before your birthday/he told me where he took his girls
On the other side Doing our dirt he called it/Looking away His shy smile yours

His mother between worlds who held herself/like someone balanced on a narrow ledge
The line of her jaw when white men in Brooklyn/leaned from cars asking if she wanted work
The ache there after long nights when her sister/came to tell what happened to them both
The sister balanced on narrowness/then walking across the river just ahead

The gates of her heart stuttering with the letter/a neighbor sent calling her filth Subhuman
The heat of her liver webbed with channels/for the processing of bile
The kidney I saw Under occupation/Exhausted from the filtration of poisons
Her lungs trying to work in the whirlwind/Her breath stopping there

My moral paragon Refraining from murder/Teaching her classes on deviance
On the price of resistance Teaching her son/to be a man not entranced
By unmaking Sitting under the crabapple looking/for words Considering the subversive Turning
Away Your hands like your mother’s/but your fingers stained with ink

The moon’s rising and traveling/the length of your grave tonight Moving with the grace
With which you stood from the last litter/and bent at the last ambulance gate
The moon not really rising but turning/in its dance with the turning earth
And its solitary walkers and outside/lovers with no other place

8

The burned skin of your shoulders fusing/The selling of possessions just before famine
With the moment’s burn of the hospital dress/The doves he kept all his life Then the cage
You and not you in a bed not a bed/Avenues of dead date palms Sending forth the birds
Under the arch of firebrick/after the deluge of war made by kings

The burning temple of the salt on your skin/The grapes in the garden of the Basra doctor
The contractions to get you born again/wasted The Americans’ uranium shells
The fire your accomplice Raising your arms/No analgesics The mothers waiting
To ransom you back to the infinite/in a line at the hospital at the end of the road

Last unguent Last transfusion/The sound of bullets like the sound of traffic
Last reining Last weariness/The Nineveh constabulary report
Last word of your daughter’s quarrel with your country/Babylon is fallen That great city
Last Where do you belong Whose are you/The voice of harpers heard no more in thee

You and the fire Jasmine petals and sepals/And he shall rule them with a rod of iron
The backbend of the bud to permit/The word for shepherd and the word for scourge
The little trumpet calyx shaped like a whirlwind/How she wants to meet the American pilot
To open/who made a pasture a kiln

The incomplete combustion of carbon/The great whore that sitteth upon many waters
Making ash The temperature ramp and the flood/The waters peoples Nations Tongues
You and I in your car playing music and laughing/Made drunk with the wine of her fornication
Your cough The imbricate wall of your lung/A golden cup of filth in her hand

Your skier’s knees Your thighs Your hips/As the vessels of a potter broken
That knew how to find and praise a drum’s beat/Inquisition and punishment How he kills
Arms crossed on your chest sleeping beside me/the cedars and the bull and bombs the electricity
Your breasts in black lace in every hospital room/My beloved friend has turned to clay

But the last Your lips Your visiting sister/Shall lament when they see the smoke of her burning
Who’s just seen two women kiss in a play/The woman thou sawest That great city
Us kiss and kiss till us can’t kiss no more /So much torment and sorrow give her
I don’t remember that from the book she says/For she saith in her heart I sit a queen

Your hair you didn’t wash to let the locks grow/The braided rope that can’t be broken
The decomposition of granite to clay/How when his friend dies he moans like a dove
Abraded clay to dust To the dirt/And upon her forehead a name written Mystery
In your hair before the wasting Like meteor fragments/Unbroken from the unbroken braid

Your eyes and the vortex has all of you now/The cups’ voices How they sing if you touch them
Little boat of the bones of your brow stripped/lightly A way they recognize
Little boat of fractals Transfigured dazzle/How they call the new one Determined To Awaken
In every cleft Every rift Every fissure /Angel One Who Has Entered the Stream

9

Two sheaves of daffodils wrapped in paper/So much radiance for six dollars
Someone told me someone left her/twenty on the doorstep and they froze
She put them in a baking dish on their sides/Heads out of the water and tails in
And an aspirin and when she woke up in the morning/all but four had decided to live

For you For the rocks by your little boat’s mooring/that isn’t a mooring How sweet the sound
Of you dancing with the implicate order/Music in the wounds of grief
Discussing the first law of thermodynamics/while I lean on the mulberry remembering
Your face listening to a woman singing/I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl

Remembering you most part of this earth/in your ecstasy when the making got good
The spring of you in the well of my seeing/part of the river now
Remembering you at the place you’ve made home/The place of transit at the mouth of the rivers
Remembering you artful Intent Private / Cackling   There/Here   Found    F r e e