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You were whiny and socially unacceptable even to loud young men whose first criterion for rock and roll was that it strike someone else as awful and repulsive and you told grim stories about such obscure affairs as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge- laden marathon runner from Zanzibar who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate sarcastic showtunes abject similes feel like a piece of burnt black toast for example threaded on a rusty wire followed up by spitting too much time to think by fusillades from rivetguns by cold and awkward bronze reverberant church bells percussive monotones 4/4 all for the five or six consumers who enjoyed both the impatience of youth and the pissiness of middle age as if you knew you had to get across your warnings against all our lives as fast as practicable before roommate or friend could get up from a couch to turn them off We barely remember you in Minnesota we love our affable Replacements who modeled a more acceptable form of rage who thought of girls and cities boys and beds and homes and cars as flawed but fixable with the right drink right mates and right guitar strings whereas you did not and nothing in your songs resolved except in a certain technical sense as a drill resolves contests between drywall and screw Your second bassist took the stage name Flour your second drummer copied a machine Somebody else in your hometown took credit for every sound you taught them how to use I write about you now since nobody else is likely to and since even appalled too-serious flat compliments like these are better than nothing and because to annoy perseverate and get under everyone's skin beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world which is to fade into silence entirely which will never happen to The Ice Machine to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown in the eyes of any audience that is I should say not until it happens to me

But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. T. S. ELIOT It was his story. It would always be his story. It followed him; it overtook him finally— The boredom, and the horror, and the glory. Probably at the end he was not yet sorry, Even as the boots were brutalizing him in the alley. It was his story. It would always be his story, Blown on a blue horn, full of sound and fury, But signifying, O signifying magnificently The boredom, and the horror, and the glory. I picture the snow as falling without hurry To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely. It was his story. It would always be his story. Lately he had wandered between St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery, Already half a spirit, mumbling and muttering sadly. O the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. All done now. But I remember the fiery Hypnotic eye and the raised voice blazing with poetry. It was his story and would always be his story— The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

Each of them must have terrified his parents by being so big, obsessive and exact so young, already gone and leaving, like a big tipper, that huge changeling’s body in his place. The prince of bone spurs and bad knees. The year I first saw them play Malone was a high school freshman, already too big for any bed, 14, a natural resource. You have to learn not to apologize, a form of vanity. You flare up in the lane, exotic anywhere else. You roll the ball off fingers twice as long as your girlfriend’s. Great touch for a big man, says some jerk. Now they’re defunct and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19, rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench, his pet of a body grown sullen as fast as it grew up. Something in you remembers every time the ball left your fingertips wrong and nothing the ball can do in the air will change that. You watch it set, stupid moon, the way you watch yourself in a recurring dream. You never lose your touch or forget how taxed bodies go at the same pace they owe, how brutally well the universe works to be beautiful, how we metabolize loss as fast as we have to.

Back to the flower-town, side by side, The bright months bring, New-born, the bridegroom and the bride, Freedom and spring. The sweet land laughs from sea to sea, Filled full of sun; All things come back to her, being free; All things but one. In many a tender wheaten plot Flowers that were dead Live, and old suns revive; but not That holier head. By this white wandering waste of sea, Far north, I hear One face shall never turn to me As once this year: Shall never smile and turn and rest On mine as there, Nor one most sacred hand be prest Upon my hair. I came as one whose thoughts half linger, Half run before; The youngest to the oldest singer That England bore. I found him whom I shall not find Till all grief end, In holiest age our mightiest mind, Father and friend. But thou, if anything endure, If hope there be, O spirit that man's life left pure, Man's death set free, Not with disdain of days that were Look earthward now; Let dreams revive the reverend hair, The imperial brow; Come back in sleep, for in the life Where thou art not We find none like thee. Time and strife And the world's lot Move thee no more; but love at least And reverent heart May move thee, royal and released, Soul, as thou art. And thou, his Florence, to thy trust Receive and keep, Keep safe his dedicated dust, His sacred sleep. So shall thy lovers, come from far, Mix with thy name As morning-star with evening-star His faultless fame.

Gently, let us steep our love In the silence deep, as thus, Branches arching high above Twine their shadows over us. Let us blend our souls as one, Hearts’ and senses’ ecstasies, Evergreen, in unison With the pines’ vague lethargies. Dim your eyes and, heart at rest, Freed from all futile endeavor, Arms crossed on your slumbering breast, Banish vain desire forever. Let us yield then, you and I, To the waftings, calm and sweet, As their breeze-blown lullaby Sways the gold grass at your feet. And, when night begins to fall From the black oaks, darkening, In the nightingale’s soft call Our despair will, solemn, sing.

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away, Whither and why I know not nor do I care. And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter, And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air. In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye, And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink, I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going, I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.

In my little room, the emperor removes his robe and we chat about the mechanics of winning an election. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he says. When the moon comes out above the dilapidated warehouse, he asks me the profundity of going to the moon and back again to the same ghetto room. If it pleases your majesty, I say, the gods make the ghettos. “I am King,” says the emperor, “I shall have no gods.” And he shakes, nearly spilling his oolong tea. When he has calmed down enough, I drop two lumps of sugar into his cup. He marvels at my calculus book and integration theory and digital watch. “Had I one of those,” he says, “I would have timed my crossing of the Rubicon at eighteen, and what barbarian woman would not have given herself for that!” He yawns imperially over my utensils, books, and cot and asks me to cross the Rubicon with him. And I nod while doing tax equations for his majesty because the hour is late. He is delighted with the hot chocolate that I make on a hot plate and, after making a rough estimate of the roaches on the wall, he sleeps on my cot as any sovereign would. I rattle my typewriter like a machine- gun all night, partly because it is my habit, and partly to protect my friend, the emperor. For though he has crossed the Rubicon with the bravest of men, he has yet to sleep a single night in the ghetto.

In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age

every wall stood at attention even the air knew when to hold its breath the polished floors looked up defying heel marks the plastic slipcovers crinkled in discomfort in my mother’s house the window shades flapped against the glare of the world the laughter crawled like roaches back into the cracks even the humans sat— cardboard cut-outs around the formica kitchen table and with silver knives sliced and swallowed their words

Like the Necessary Evil and Enola Gay, in a sphere of air that’s calm and mildly cool, I need some last grip of blue to trigger my sleep. It was technically flawless, that mission, as they’d dropped a few dry-run pumpkins with a bird’s-eye scope. When I close my eyes under the drone of a fan, I see planes rattling in the aftermath. Smoothly soldered rivets saved the men inside. At a commemoration the captain said, “I’m proud I started with nothing and made it work as perfectly as it did.” Then, when the press persisted, red flashing his face: “Hey, I sleep clear every night.” I lie in another state, placeless in the air, with the sound of occasional sirens or barking dogs. In a magazine I read about Predators over Pakistan, our drone with fifty eyes named Gorgon Stare. The men at Langley, bombing by remote, call a person who escapes their fire, who runs from a car or burning hut, a squirter. Night is sometimes an acid, sometimes a cure. In other words,homo fabula: we’re part human, part story, but our mouths pass on in silence. I think of the men who brought that silence: Mr. Harry S. Truman, Captain Paul Tibbets, who painted his mother’s name on the nose of the plane. My dream house circles me. Peonies thrive in beds I forget to water. With pillows I lie. A white cotton sheet covers my chest. I’ve been told to sleep in peace, where the trees are crowned with plenty and where birds float through wood-lawn, broom, and shrubs. Where a found twig can be golden or mundane. To orchestrate my sleep I take a pill, and as I fade finally, at the time of night when the birds believe they’re leaves, I dream of a path in acacia season where the air smells lemony and my whole day seems to rest on the limbs of the trees. Suddenly, a siren sound. Wind ripping the valley after a flash… In Plymouth, spring of ’45, while the Pacific squadrons trained, my father was born without cataracts in his eyes—David Roderick, 7 lbs., asleep on his mother’s white gown. There must have been milk and a huge cloud of necessity in which they breathed. In August, before he could talk, neutrons sheared from a core. I’ve read what they left behind: shrines’ ashes, and the boy under his desk who sang all day while his classmates fell silent, one by one. Two concussions hit the planes. They roared away from the light they’d made, the rain. At night, when I falter again, and the pill dissolves in my veins, I think of Langley’s coffee, its infrared eyes. I think of the Enola Gay parked in the Smithsonian, where a woman smashed a jar of blood on its wing. When I signed my mortgage, I also signed for the peonies and for the shield of my yard’s tall trees. The birds daub nests of twigs and human hair. My potting shed makes its own black sense of heat. Here’s the price I pay for sleeping:Reapers circling a far-off village, my drones. To eyes at a distance, a screen lies always between a failure and a dream. In other words,homo fabula: we’re part story, part human, but only if our names are known, and only if our names, when spoken aloud, are pronounced correctly, with proper inflection, as when a mother addresses her son.