When I write at home my dog is not far off.
When I read poems aloud, mine or others’,
I sometimes scare him. If I had a house I would
let him outside on such occasions,
but in my apartment, he’s stuck with me.
My dog, alas, is stuck with poetry,
as I am. I read a poem
that is a hearty call in the night.
My dog becomes morbid. I think
I’m getting an inch closer to God.
My dog thinks I’m angry at him,
doesn’t know what to do, or what to stop doing.
He just looks up and can’t help it.
I call him over in the middle of my reading,
reassure him that I am still my smelly self,
but there is something changed between us.
As soon as I begin to read out loud, he thinks
something’s wrong, or something’s about to happen.
Sancho, if I knew how, I’d write you a dog poem.
Somehow I know there is something
I can never make up to you,
that sniffing after beauty I terrorize you.
—thanks to George Herbert’s “Heaven”
O who shall show me such suffering?
Echo. Ring.
You, Echo, immortal clown all men know.
Echo. No.
Still in the mountains don’t you die away?
Echo. Way.
I wept when the King of Jews came harrowing.
Echo. Rowing.
Prophets of slavery and war I applaud:
Echo. Laud.
those who celebrate Christmas
Echo. Mass.
by first cutting down a tree
Echo. Tree.
rather than planting an evergreen.
Echo. Green.
To celebrate peace on earth
Echo. Earth.
I take gifts to the rich then sing
Echo. Sing.
Come all ye faithful. . .
Echo. Full.
Tell me what is the supreme horror?
Echo. Or.
The truth, God the clown created us
Echo. Us.
for laughter not for praise that he abhors.
Echo. Whores.
The business of the soul is live for profits.
Echo. Fits.
Onward indifference! Starvation! Fiery justice!
Echo. Ice.
A touch of kindness makes the devil fart.
Echo. Art.
I said we don’t know what your 63-year-old
schizophrenic son may do with his history:
he made fires in hospitals, called 911 “for company,”
cut himself, jumped out windows,
leaving behind feces in dresser drawers,
in and under the bed. Dreadful et ceteras.
Mostly silent, he talks sweetly to dogs
he calls by dead dogs’ names.
You said, “It snowed a foot yesterday
doesn’t mean it will snow today.”
I didn’t say, “No snowfall ever played the piano.”
We both know John Little played Bach on the piano,
went home on a weekend, killed his mother and father.
I remember, for no reason, when I was sweet and 20,
when the snow was deep in the city,
the streets at night almost empty,
I climbed the snowdrifts and sang arias from The Magic Flute,
recited lines from Hamlet and Yeats, Hart Crane.
Truth is, a good blizzard with drifts two meters high
gave me the opportunity to speak to a full house.
Snow blind, I wish I could take your hand,
I insist I can find the way through the blizzard of madness
down the road to the mailbox.
I will not crawl into a schizophrenic cage
with you and His Majesty.
What proves I am not your enemy?
Our dogs fight. Your music gets in my hair,
you think my voice has a bad odor.
Your laundry hanging or drying on the ground
looks like mine. My prayer shawl is invisible,
I’ll be buried in it—your Islamic robe
covers you with clouds. I look at your wife’s red bra,
you look at my wife’s black lace panties.
We each have handkerchiefs for weeping.
We are suspicious of cans and pots
of geraniums, blue and pink anemones.
Who brought 613 laws to the Sinai,
red ants? I don’t gloat when it rains
only on my side of the barbed wire.
When I broke my arm I thought
something in your eye twisted it.
I thought your baby was beautiful—
I don’t want her to kill anybody.
You say, “Unless I get to you first. This is
middle-class donkey shit.”
Neither of us curses in his own language.
Jehovah and Allah are lollipops
for the motherfuckers who find war
sexually attractive.
to Oliver Sacks
I borrowed a basket of grapes, I paid back in wine.
I borrowed a pail of milk, I paid my debt in Gorgonzola.
I borrowed my life, I tried to pay back in poetry:
an autumn breeze blew my poems away—
dry leaves, insufficient funds.
I’m still in debt for my life.
God is a lender, has a pawnshop,
hangs out the sun and moon, his sign.
He is in business ’round the clock:
I receive summons after summons
often in the middle of the night
demanding payment dollar for dollar,
for every year every minute and heartbeat
for every penny of my life—my death
plus interest: usurious eternity.
Stuck in my suburban flesh and marrow,
the static news of mass murder, Blitz, burning ghettos . . .
At fifteen I made love in deep snow
in moonlight. I did not go all the way,
betraying myself, Claire McGill and poetry.
She was seventeen, half naked, used her tongue.
It would have been a miracle, my first time,
not hers. Is she alive, does she remember?
I raved about Lorca and Rimbaud.
It would not be long. I learned to kill before I learned to rhyme.
I limp into her chamber, a goat with old horns.
I think she will recognize my ghost, young,
able to make her laugh, among the coterie
of ghosts she did it with, while I cavorted
with Maria de las Nieves, Eros of the snow,
obeyed the commandment Djuna Barnes
gave me when I was 27, waving goodbye
with her walking stick, “Follow the heart, follow the heart!”
My heart led me to illusion, but it didn’t lie.
I was manned, boyed, womaned and girled.
I learned to trust trees, blind trees, lonely trees,
forests. I rely on their wisdom—as I will after I die.
Today a child asked me, “How much love is in a kiss?”
I said: “I don’t know.” She said, “The whole world.”
No tear is commonplace.
The prophet said,
“Woman is the pupil of the eye.”
All beauty
comes from God,
butterflies
fly from and to God one by one
and to the forests of Michoacán
where Mexicans nearby make
Jesus Christ
from parrot feathers
and wings of hummingbirds.
You can hold such a God
against your cheek,
then you are as if under a wing,
a firstling,
warm and comforted.
May these words serve as a crescent moon:
in Barcelona 58 years ago today
I saw on the front page of La Vanguardia
beside the main altar of the cathedral
two polished cannons blessed by the Archbishop
in the name of Saint Barbara, patron
of Generalissimo Franco’s artillery
on this day set aside to celebrate
the Immaculate Conception.
Today in a Greek gallery off 5th Avenue
I saw Aphrodite blinded by a Christian,
a cross chiseled into her eyes and forehead.
Outside in a hard rain, Christmas season,
no taxis. I was chased by the wind
through the open door of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
Up since 4, I slept in the false Gothic darkness.
A bell announcing the Holy Spirit woke me
to a mass celebrating the Immaculate Conception.
Can a Jew by chance receive a little touch of absolution—
like a touch of a painter’s brush
like a little touch of King Harry
visiting his troops in the night before Agincourt?
I have prayers put in my head
like paper prayers in the cracks of the wailing wall.
The heart has reason, reason does not know.
ELEGY FOR THE POET REETIKA VAZIRANI AND
HER CHILD
If life were just, for strangling her two-year-old child
before murdering herself, my dear friend
would be sentenced to life at hard labor:
fifty lines a day before she sleeps
in a bare room with a good library and her son’s guitar.
When will she have a change of heart,
when will she take pity on those who love her,
when will the terror she caused her child no longer appear in the sky?
The sun and moon hang around absolutely without conscience.
NOTICES
Once an Irishman in his coffin
had to be wrapped from foot to chin
in English wool, not Irish linen.
I saw this notice: “Some striped scars on his back,
runaway slave stole himself, calls himself Jack.”
Lost in the library of Alexandria, proof
Selene the moon goddess mocked Apollo
her sun god twin, each mocking the other
about mortal offsprings—
off-summers, off-autumns, off-winters.
More than “divine,” an inadequate human word
for speaking about gods, all words
are mostly useless. A messenger whispered,
“That’s why prayers and sacrifice were invented.”
Without Apollo, simple daylight, music
and poetry, nothing on earth lives.
Beautiful beyond belief, Selene spent years
in front of her mirrors, the oceans,
so close to the earth, she said the breathing
of humans and animals sometimes kept her awake.
Crashing a feast of the gods, a mortal boy
in rapture surrendered to Selene,
who gave birth to another moonchild.
Apollo and other gods remembered
Selene had fifty daughters with Endymion.
What fools call “twenty years” passed,
the moonchild, male or female,
had a lover—pity the darling who held close
a celestial body, equally at home
on earth or sky—half a night or day,
especially since that moonchild in turn
might have a child, more mortal now
than half moon, but still mooning,
playing in the park among other children
with everyday faces.
Put the case: Apollo and a mortal beauty
could have twins that brighten the darkest room
or forest, who fight as brothers and sisters
to prove who is father or mother’s favorite—
neither so naughty to challenge Apollo at music.
At night, the children would weep for their father,
busy with godly affairs.
The poor mortal mother, mostly in the kitchen
preparing meals, finally insisted on her right
to be Jew, Christian, or Muslim
or better still, she said to the sun god, “all three!”
Today I heard the sun laugh, I swear I heard
happy thunder, thunder without anger or lightning,
and the moon laughing like Sarah
hiding behind a cloud’s curtain.
I am just a has been and a will be.
What is right now, that is the question.
My fool says I should learn from today’s clouds:
“The verb ‘to be’ is English lightning—
lightning and thunder are happily married,
their vows are storms. Now, now, Uncle,
the plural is sweet company, fair weather,
then there is the conjugation, we are, they are,
the all or none, till ‘everybody’ is singular again.”
Fool, my fly is open, needs to be buttoned.
I enjoy the soufflé of la vague and le vague,
the feminine “wave” and masculine “indefinite.”
I relish the English Christmas pudding
of nouns made into verbs and verbs into nouns.
Since childhood I’ve been forested,
lost in the woods of conditional verbs,
lost in the woulds, what should I do
left wandering and wondering
where is the golden fool, the sun?
The forests one summer, inflamed by false gods,
left charcoal barrens that nourish the soil.
The trees will grow another time,
a time for rhyme, and a time to run out of time—
the hours around the clock
like hyenas around a carcass.
Tightrope walkers know
they must look at the wire a few paces ahead,
never at their feet.
Walking the high wire of poetry
you have to look at your feet,
while you can’t help keeping track
of clouds moving carefully,
a lost red-wing blackbird inside the tent
trying to get out,
a poet’s son, a French acrobat,
wire behind you, the net below,
a pretty face in the crowd, cash receipts.
All this worthless information
does not make a poem.
It’s as hard as selling old underwear
to write a poem about nothing.
I argued with a dear friend, a psychiatrist
who didn’t think dogs smile and dream.
I told him I thought butterflies, frogs and dogs dream
and smile—that the whole Bronx Zoo is like me,
but I don’t think every Greyhound bus,
cheese, beggarman and thief is named Stanley.
I’ve seen trees smiling, dreaming, kissing and kissed.
I don’t think the world is a mirror made by Jesus,
rather sooner or later, like Columbus,
every old sailor sees a mermaid, that Jesus
smiled and dreamed like us, and Judas
had a dog that smiled and dreamed like us.
My good dog Bozo ran wild with my shoes.
Because I sleep and dream old news,
secrets I keep from myself, I smile in deceit,
while my dog smiles, mounts a wolf at my feet.
Poets, step carefully, your foot, eye, ear, love
may be caught in a metaphoric trap,
like the bear’s severed foot.
Crying out or laughing is no use,
the only release is writing it off.
You don’t escape fatally wounded,
you can’t lick the blood away.
Learning languages helps—take work,
whose Chinese character includes a hand.
Too heartbroken to talk?
Every muse has eight sisters.
Where love is
or has been—words,
words spoken while making love
become flesh.
MIND
They come to mind, not of my choosing,
in several languages, women I loved,
the living and the dead, in beds here and there,
in different countries.
I remember waiting in doorways endlessly
when it seemed all love was safely abed.
Truth is, love will never come back to me from “mind”—
in my English, neuter, without gender.
Nothing I say will change anything.
I am dismayed on Christmas day.
There’s sickness in my house,
almost a black Christmas.
Deep in a snowdrift, I make myself a snowmother,
the Virgin, put a snow savior in her arms.
One day, He will melt in her arms and she in His,
they will wake up a little unresurrected pond
that will fill with water lilies in spring
if I have anything to say about it,
but I have nothing to say about it.
Bring on the snapping turtles and leeches,
evergreens, bristlecones,
that may live a thousand years.
I trust trees, I have faith in butterflies and poets,
who these days and nights live days and nights.
How can God be a cannibal and a good guy?
A High Mass sings the answers to all questions.
I swear, this spring, I’ll learn to look backward
and believe what I see, I will watch
them dance around a maypole, undismayed.
Sola una cosa tiene mala el sueño, según he oído decir,
y es que se parece a la muerte, pues de un dormido a un
muerto hay muy poca diferencia.
—Sancho Panza
It is 2 Am. I need to rest, sleep.
I risk being entertained by the clown of death
at a dream circus, I see half his face—
white and red likeness doesn’t frighten me.
I am a lie-down comedian.
It is 2 Am. Among my last thoughts:
my wife’s operable cancer . . . Marianne Moore in 1916
wore her red hair in braids . . . I don’t want the clown
to wash his face, change into my street clothes.
My wife has a cancerous node.
St. Teresa read books on chivalry.
At a tender age, she and her brother agreed
to run off to the Moors’ country, beg their bread
for love of God, to reach heaven beheaded.
At supper, an Avila spring or two before,
St. Teresa answered the first question,
“How is this night different from all other nights?”
It is 2 Am. Joy! Joy! William Carlos Williams
saw more than 2,000 babies pulled through
one way or another into the world. It is 2 Am.
I sat in at his poorly attended funeral
in Rutherford: no poets I recognized,
no words I remember, family, sons, Fanny,
scattered in the pews mostly old pretty ladies.
*
I must have fallen into eternity.
The telephone did not ring
but I was on the phone with Charlie Williams.
He was going to see Dylan Thomas.
I said I’d fly over. We’d go together.
Dylan was alive, no question.
Charlie was in Paris, did not have cancer,
no question. We would just have a good time.
Thank God for pleasant dreams.
It never crossed my mind to talk about God
with Dylan, but when we were coming downtown
in a taxi from the Academy with Carl Sandburg,
64 years ago, Dylan played God
receiving T. S. Eliot in heaven: “Come in.
I’ve read your Four Quartets.”
Dylan loved the stranger, wrote “... in praise of God,”
said he’d be “a damned fool” if he didn’t.
*
Back from my entertainments, I woke up.
Half asleep, I was in bed with my wife
and Margie my dog, named after my mother.
I saw lady sunrise, naked, with all her troubles
come into the bedroom past the apple tree.
The lights of an automobile down the road
brought me to my senses. I never served time
in an overcrowded prison, shackled to no labor.
I never complained about the weather.
There are other places, names, and matters
I do not care to remember.
I read in Don Quixote there’s an old ballad
that says King Rodrigo, alive and kicking
in a tomb filled with reptiles and vermin,
said in a low and mournful voice,
“They’re eating me,
they’re eating me in the place where I most sinned.”
Sancho did not think the most sinful place
was the brain, the mind. He did not remember
that Jesus Christ said thinking something evil
was the same as doing it. Certainly, the squire knew
we think of doing unto others more evil than we do,
he heard the devil hides behind the cross.
1.
A friend told me Jesus said,
“Go out into the fields to find your real mothers and fathers.”
I thought somehow I’d done that
since I really had two fathers, none heavenly,
a subject difficult for me to talk about.
I am confused—straighten me out.
I am old and difficult under the apple boughs.
I have planted more apple trees than I can remember.
I’ve searched but I cannot find a text that reveals
when or how Christ’s earthly father died.
I see it was from His not-blood-father, Joseph,
that Jesus was begot from patriarchs and kings—
soon the innocents were slaughtered, Joseph
took flight with the Virgin and child to Egypt
by donkey that would not eat sacred manger hay,
the beast said to have prayed when they rested.
Later, the way things happen, Joseph corrected
Aramaic speaking Jesus’ Hebrew,
taught Him Torah, morning prayer, perhaps to skip
a stone out to sea. Did Joseph teach his carpenter Son
what the boy taught the rabbis? Holy riddle.
Surely Jesus sang prayers in synagogue
and at home with windows open, stopped traffic
when he sang everyday love songs.
We know Joseph had four sons of his own blood.
He compounded with his wife,
so he and Mary kissed carnally, perhaps on the Sabbath:
he must have loved her smell, touch, taste—her breasts
from which Jesus took the milk of human kindness.
His four younger brothers sucked the same nipples.
Of course Jesus, with His knowledge and direction
of everything that happens, was, is, never jealous.
His jealousy, the devil’s suggestion.
No news that his Son embraced him when Joseph
was on his deathbed dying a happy death—
He might have brought Joseph a cup of hot chocolate
the dying in Mexico who worshipped snakes
took comfort from.
Chocolate had not yet come to Rome or Jerusalem.
Alas, Joseph is not buried beside his wife in Ephesus.
John the Divine is buried a few steps from Her tomb;
a stone’s throw away is the Temple of Artemis,
the virgin huntress-goddess, sister of Apollo.
The way things happen, Mary visited the Greek temple,
one of the seven wonders, changed by wars into Roman.
2.
I know a tree the shape of five question marks
when? how? why? which? where?
every word forbidden fruit.
A summer rain takes over my life
then simply abandons me.
I had a father whom most held in high regard
he deserved. Others called him evil.
My sister and I independently
were reminded of our father we called “father”
when we saw a newspaper photograph
of the decade’s most famous murderer.
My mother said father was always angry,
but I had a godfather, her brother, a doctor,
beside whom for me, Gabriel, Rafael, Elijah,
and all the gods were pimps.
As a child I had to be forced to eat an apple.
I have never bit an apple since I left my father’s house,
still I believe the apple does not fall far from the tree.
God of paper and writing. God of first and last drafts,
God of dislikes, God of everyday occasions—
He is not my servant, does not work for tips.
Under the dome of the Roman Pantheon,
God in three persons carries a cross on his back
as an aging centaur, hands bound behind his back, carries Eros.
Chinese God of examinations: bloodwork, biopsy,
urine analysis, grant me the grade of fair in the study of dark holes,
fair in anus, self-knowledge, and the leaves of the vagina
like the pages of a book in the vision of Ezekiel.
May I also open my mouth and read the book by eating it,
swallow its meaning. My Shepherd, let me continue to just pass
in the army of the living,
keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead.
It’s true I worshipped Aphrodite
who has driven me off with her slipper
after my worst ways pleased her.
I make noise for the Lord.
My Shepherd, I want, I want, I want.
I come close to the perfect democracy
a poet called “the kingdom of death.”
I was created and I will die free and equal.
My soul was born on the North Atlantic
between Lithuania and Philadelphia,
city of brotherly love. I don’t remember but surely
my heart can’t forget being nursed, then rocked
by my mother and the Atlantic Ocean. (What a first nanny.)
These days almost everyone’s a landlover,
who never spent days or weeks
looking out at nothing but endless ocean and horizon.
How can such a landlover know who he or she is
in the world and universe?
Almost everyone, when you cross the little brook
between life and death,
you will enter the democratic halls of death,
parliaments, congress, la Chambre des Députés,
take your seats before the Speaker, you will be
called to order, shrouded in your Sunday best,
perhaps a winding sheet or prayer shawl,
or you may sit, entombed, like the old Tatars,
with pipe, tobacco, and live dog;
some will have a clear view through the open roof
to the Sun and Moon, others, under the merciful eyes
of Jesus or Jehovah or both, are asleep in the Commons.
Most are “officer’s mess” for batallions of maggots.
Few rest in peace. Some debating good citizens
hold hell is simply a cleptocracy, the dead
are cleaned out, without a penny’s worth of anything.
Others mutter they are “never dead, not even past.”
Mr. Speaker:
I salute the eight black constituents
to the Assemblée Nationale,
in the valley with the Jews who were included
in the Declaration of the Rights of Man
thanks to one vote, now a skinless finger.
Everyone knows his or her deathday.
No one sings “Happy deathday to you”
except a few still drunk on life.
Morning. A dog seems to rest its head
on smoke that smells human.
The cock calls the role. The nays have it.
O landlovers, I wish I could bring you shipboard,
surround you with blue, purple, white,
black and mountainous turquoise breakers,
bring you to their meaning and incomprehensibility,
to see what is near and beyond.
A few stand and pray
on the floor or alone in the coatrooms,
a congregation of pure Oversouls,
the odd murderer with nothing to do.
Landlover,
you may be a farmer or a gardener, bless you,
but just between you, me and the buttercups,
the ocean is coming. Question time:
Mr. Speaker, in your democracy,
are there any little deaths after death, withouts:
no need to have supper late or early,
no lovemaking, no music? Will I be a listener,
may I play a God-made instrument?
Surely democratic God arranges for birdsong,
winds praying in trees.
I’m filibustering. Does God eat?
I hear someone say God is a vegetarian,
another is certain God eats meat.
For centuries the best cuts were set aside for Gods.
Surely lambs were and are not sacrificed without reason.
Then God eats and, since we are made in God’s image,
He defecates, urinates, wipes Himself clean.
God coughs and farts, is our Farter who art in Heaven.
I’m the Devil, you say! No, in the shadow cabinet
I’m the minister of parables. Every school child knows
Isis and other Gods of the dead are marble or bronze.
I’m trying to vote death out of office—
I say to the free man who praises his God,
“Without death, anarchy. Is God and his 42 names
protected by flights of angels, his Mom?”
The Lord swims in all oceans,
plays a kind of tag with jellyfish and whales,
He does not forget the least of the newborn.
His hand runs through, blesses many kinds of spawn.
I’m happy to have been born on the Atlantic,
my useful afterbirth thrown overboard.
In bedroom slippers, I tap-dance
up and down the stairs, hold onto the rail,
my pulse once a household member, now a guest,
cannot overstay his or her welcome.
My pulse cannot overstay his or her welcome.
Older, I gamble with one die,
risk rolling a one-eyed snake.
I hedge my bets with the verb “to die.”
The chances are I’ll die some daybreak,
I prefer after breakfast and a cup of coffee
to get me through the day. It would be nice
to read again The Gambler of Dostoyevski,
to play with God, but “God does not roll dice,”
flip coins—heads damnation, tails grace.
“Love the stranger” trumps where the true cross is.
He cheers for peace, not war, in a horse race,
although they are both His horses,
He collects His winnings and takes His losses.
Mercy’s a wild card.
Now I play numbers with fallen angels.
(God knows what the Devil feels.)
The Lord will not settle for a little human regard.
His new-fangled messengers with smartphones
text the laws, take selfies, see fire and brimstone.
I cheat at cards Yahweh deals.
Stuffed with flesh, blood, and bones,
I don’t applaud any God. I lift my cap,
kick off my shoes, drop a coin in the box and clap.
I see a skyscraper as a gravestone.
Walking in New York City, forgetting is hard.
There is some reason to suppose the sap
of trees will outlast human blood by mishap.
The world shoots craps. I bet, no matter how winds fly,
a kiss will keep the world from hate, by and by.
It began, midnight. It was 1956,
I arrived in Nice by train
far from the Tiber and River Styx.
Tenth of August, no beds, with Djuna my dog,
I slept in a Hotel Negresco beach chair,
Djuna on colored stones, under my chair.
Storm clouds covered the stars.
We went into a casino to escape the rain.
Djuna died a Socialist wolf in Fascist Spain.
I still grieve for my Trastevere dog,
like a child. I’m left to speak the prologue.
But pardon, it is my wish
to honor the language. I salute the verb “to die,”
its sound and meaning from Middle English.
I play with sounds, with I and eye,
homonym roulette: morning dew,
there’s do unto others and Devil his due.
Rien ne va plus. For those slated to die,
a shell game: where? when? why?
Given time, all is vanity,
the Good Shepherd will lead the universe to slaughter.
Baa, baa, baa... I put my money on last laughter:
there are many more stars in the day and night sky
than there are words in English.
My words contain dark matter,
invisible gravity, water dripping from the tap—
I bet my life. I’d like to catch a fish
that’s been swimming in the Thames since English.
I’ve caught Death, the rat, in my mousetrap—
Augustine’s sermon 261. No,
I take Death into the woods and let him go.
September, I just want to pass a pleasant day
listening in the country to my evergreen
bristlecone cousin teach a class to saplings.
I heard: be good, be good, be good,
love your neighbors in the forest—
trees, you must live in a seasonal society,
our cousinhood of woods.
Leafy branches, facing North and West
give a limosna of morning sunlight.
Brave trees, judge and stand in judgment.
There are fools who think you are ignorant
because you battle for water and sunlight,
but you know every living thing has the obligation
to protect freedom of assembly for its nation—
freedom of song for crows and nightingales,
respect for pastoral rights of brooks and waterfalls.
Dream your arboreal dream and nightmare,
terror of chainsaws, contempt for stone walls.
You have happy and tragic love affairs,
poplars and willows, arranged marriages.
The first wise gardener planted trees in pairs,
the brooks nearby taught languages.
Sometimes, trees live ghettoed in the city.
Some are Christian, celebrate the Nativity.
Most are pagan as roses and goldenrod.
The Vikings thought every tree was a God
who helped them sail longships past Cape Farewell.
Beyond wolf howls,
they sailed to a Valhalla of trees and snow owls,
to the hall of the slain, the never again,
to virgin forests, a new world,
to have intercourse with the world.