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In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love and peace are holy and are coming to town. I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone? Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up? I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me. All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly then I become another. Transfigured. Words sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.” I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white biblical rose. And my hands like two doves on the cross hovering and carrying the earth. I don’t walk, I fly, I become another, transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I? I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?” Then what? A woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you? I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.

i knew you before you had a mother, when you were newtlike, swimming, a horrible brain in water. i knew you when your connections belonged only to yourself, when you had no history to hook on to, barnacle, when you had no sustenance of metal when you had no boat to travel when you stayed in the same place, treading the question; i knew you when you were all eyes and a cocktail, blank as they sky of a mind, a root, neither ground nor placental; not yet red with the cut nor astonished by pain, one terrible eye open in the center of your head to night, turning, and the stars blinked like a cat.   we swam in the last trickle of champagne before we knew breastmilk—we shared the night of the closet, the parasitic closing on our thumbprint, we were smudged in a yellow book. son, we were oak without mouth, uncut, we were brave before memory.

In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.

In a culvert by the airport under crumbling slag wine colored water seeps to this pool the two does drink from: each sipping as the other keeps look out. The skyline is a blur of  barcode and microchip. Even at home we hold the narrowest purchase. No arcs of tracer fire. No caravans of fleeing families. Only this suspicion ripples through our circles of lamp glow (as you sweep the faint sweat from your forehead and flip another page in your novel) this sense that all we own is the invisible web of our words and touches silence and fabulation all make believe and real as the two does out scavenging through rose hips and shattered drywall: their presence in the space around them liveliest just before they vanish.

Dead deer a week now by the snowy gate. Do I have to watch it be eaten? Do I have to see who comes first, who quarrels, who stays? And there is the question of the night, what flesh preferred by which creature— what sinew and fat, the organs, the eyes. These appetites: it’s enough to know the swoop and cut of wings over the snarl of something leaping away. Do I have to see the icy figure fused to the ground, scrabbled snow, not lovely or deep, but the surface of something spoiled? By now the rib bones arch above it all, unbroken light shining between them, above the black cavity. And I hear the crows, complaint, complaint splitting the morning, hunched over the skull. They know their offices.

Perhaps, this morning, we’re there, normal and soon forgotten, as news is when it’s passed over breakfast, like love, something that’s always cast, too heavy to hold for long. We breathe it in, the bacon, the coffee. We listen to the little quavers as the local tongues, water over rock, rise and fall, like stones skipping soft into the white that smoothed them. The women speak like grandmothers, softly opening their mouths, opening and drawing advice from themselves, like biscuits, and offering in kindness a little more than anyone could ask, more than anyone can take. I know their pitying. It looks like patience, the look on everyone’s faces as the peddler shuffles in his blindness, black hand held open, everyone awaiting the hiss of door, the whisper in everyone’s throats, breaking from patience into pleasure.

were some quite creepy men — one used to lie down on the dayroom floor, then get us all to pile on top of him — and a basilisk- eyed matron in a blue uniform with a watch dangling beneath her right collarbone.Thump thump thump went her footsteps, making the asbestos ceiling tiles quiver, and me want to hide, or run like a rabbit in a fire . . . What we lost, we lost forever. A minor devil played at chess with us, forcing the pieces to levitate and hover, flourishing swords, in midair. I’d grasp them now, the orotund bishop, the stealthy knight, the all- knowing queen, but they dissolve in my fingers, refuse to return to the board, to their squares.

In love, his grammar grew rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell madly from the sky like pheasants for the peasantry, and he, as sated as they were, lolled under shade trees until roused by moonlight and the beautiful fraternal twins and and but. Oh that was when he knew he couldn’t resist a conjunction of any kind. One said accumulate, the other was a doubter who loved the wind and the mind that cleans up after it. For love he wanted to break all the rules, light a candle behind a sentence named Sheila, always running on and wishing to be stopped by the hard button of a period. Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look toward a mannequin or a window dresser with a penchant for parsing. But mostly he wanted you, Sheila, and the adjectives that could precede and change you:bluesy,fly-by-night, queen of all that is and might be.

I O what a physical effect it has on me To dive forever into the light blue sea Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends, Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still, It is beautiful, when October Is over, and February is over, To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.” Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian? Aren’t my eyes bigger than love? Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins? Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight! Is love what we are, Or has happiness come to me in a private car That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there? 2 We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you. I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism. 3 Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill, I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing Appear and reappear—electricity! I’d love to be how You are, as if The world were new, and the selves were blue Which we don Until it’s dawn, Until evening puts on The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . . Water! your tear-colored nail polish Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new As a calm On the sea, where, like pigeons, I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated— Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!

Like the stamen inside a flower The steeple stands in lovely blue And the day unfolds around its needle; The flock of swallows that circles the steeple Flies there each day through the same blue air That carries their cries from me to you; We know how high the sun is now As long as the roof of the steeple glows, The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin; Up there in the wind, where the wind is not Turning the vane of the weathercock, The weathercock silently crows in the wind.