“I saw the sky descending, black and white,Not blue, on Boston where the winters woreThe skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates,And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers toreThe chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waitsIts victim and tonightThe worms will eat the deadwood to the footOf Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;The wild ingrafted olive and the rootAre withered, and a winter drifts to whereThe Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spansCharles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles.I saw my city in the Scales, the pansOf judgement rising and descending. PilesOf dead leaves char the air—And I am a red arrow on this graphOf Revelations. Every dove is sold.The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its holdOn serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph.In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:“Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beastWho fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.”At the high altar, goldAnd a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beatMy cheek. What can the dove of Jesus giveYou now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.”

“I saw the spiders marching through the air,Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed dayIn latter August when the hayCame creaking to the barn. But whereThe wind is westerly,Where gnarled November makes the spiders flyInto the apparitions of the sky,They purpose nothing but their ease and dieUrgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;”

“Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gently tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die--when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.”

“I HAD a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving; Sweet little red feet! why should you die - Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why? You liv'd alone in the forest-tree, Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me? I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas; Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?”

“I stand above the tree level I am a tree I catch wind storm breaths My branches claw I drink sky It stretches me I don't care I catch jokes and luck from tall thin blue air”

“My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,a captive as Racine, the man of craft,drawn through his maze of iron compositionby the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.When I was troubled in mind, you made for my bodycaught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself--to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.”

“Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!”