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There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean. And the day I quit the job my father got me. And the day I stood outside a door, and listened to my girlfriend making love to someone obviously not me, inside, and I felt strange because I didn’t care. There was the morning I was born, and the year I was a loser, and the night I was the winner of the prize for which the audience applauded. Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can’t forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I’m trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance. Happiness, Joe says,is a wild red flower plucked from a river of lava and held aloft on a tightrope strung between two scrawny trees above a canyon in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Even if I still had the clothes I wore, those first twelve years, even if I had the clothes I would take off before my mother climbed the stairs toward me: the glassy Orlon sweater; the cotton dress, under its smocking my breasts-to-be accordion-folded under the skin of my chest; even if I had all the sashes, even if I had all the cotton underwear, like a secret friend, I think I could not get back to how it felt. I study the stability of the spirit — was it almost I who came back out of each punishment, back to a self which had been waiting, for me, in the cooled-off pile of my clothes? As for the condition of being beaten, what was it like: going into a barn, the animals not in stalls, but biting, and shitting, and parts of them on fire? And when my body came out the other side, and I checked myself, 10 fingers, 10 toes, and I checked whatever I had where we were supposed to have a soul, I hardly dared to know what I knew, that though I had been taken down, again, hammer and tongs, valley and range, down to the ground of my being and under that ground, it was possible that in my essence, at the center of my essence, in some tiny chamber my mother could not enter — or did not enter — I had not been changed.

Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road. In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage, back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced, reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams. I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

It was hard to sit there with my father, watching one of my sister's girls playing a set of tennis against my son or daughter because he'd forget himself and with a groan of disappointment or a grunt of sympathetic exertion make it clear that he was rooting for my sister's child and against mine. There was no use calling him on it, because he'd deny it and get angry. So I would get angry but try not to show it, until I couldn't stand it any longer and would get up and walk away. That was how it worked between us, the unspoken building up like thunderheads above the tennis court, where the kids played on, not caring who won and hardly noticing the sky had darkened.

in memory of Lorenzo Thomas How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? How Long, a city in China The nouns come toward you "Knee how," they say To the cluster of synonyms also approaching . . . has that evening train been gone? How long, how long, baby, how long? Let me know if you ever change your mind about leaving, leaving me behind or at least tell yourself before you find yourself on that train winding its way through the mountains of How Much Province The ten thousand yellow leaves of the ginkgo tree kerplumfed onto the sidewalk on East 12th Street, a deep-pile carpet of them on the roof of the parked car proving that Nature does have a sense of humor, though if a sense of humor falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it. . . . for everyone has clustered alongside the railroad track for the arrival of night and its shooting stars with trails like pigtails I am among them and I know this track is mine though it does not belong to me Nothing belongs to me for at this moment the boxes are being stacked to make way for you to move through them, reading their labels: family photos, Pick-Up Stix, miscellaneous and the song of the porcelain, the celadon, and Delft itself vibrating How long, how long will this baby take to depart? But I don't want to think about the past I want to be the past, with everything I've ever known and done spread out on a two-dimensional plane erected vertically and moving through the space I occupy on Earth There is a lot more room left in me though everyone I've ever known who's died is there My mother my father say hello to Ted and Joe and laugh with them though Joe knows they are crying too and that Ted is crying and it sounds like laughter They do this to console me and I let them do it, to console them What? I didn't hear you or rather I heard you but I couldn't make out what you said The phone lay in its cradle pretending to be asleep and the blinking light made you think that it was dreaming and that there was someone you were supposed to call— or were they supposed to call you? Supposed. What does that mean. It means no more than the contours of the landscape that is as beautiful as the contours in John Ashbery's poetry but it doesn't mean anything unless you turn your mind on its side and let it lie there inert, and from this inertia will arise a wing, the white wing of a bird that has no anything else, only this one wing that folds and unfolds itself like the magnetic field it rises above in wave after wave after wave. Then it's back to basics: If you bone or debone a chicken it comes out the same, if you dust a cake with sugar you add something but if you dust your house you take away. Oh to be a rock or a stone or even a pebble! Momentarily, for there is much that is unattractive about being a rock. For one thing, I wouldn't be able to finish this poem, I would sit here petrified until they carted me away to a park to serve as ornamental sculpture, if I were lucky. Now that you are convinced of something that you already believed, the wallpaper becomes a fact in the home of Anne and Fairfield Porter, in the upstairs hallway and the bedroom where Jimmy stayed, the wallpaper that here and there was curling off the wall so Joe could tear it off and glue it to a big white sheet of paper. There is no other wallpaper I would ever want. Now the wallpaper goes away, back on the wall in 1969 where I stood and gazed at it for a long time and then went downstairs to add coal to Fairfield's stove, the big Aga he had shipped all the way from Sweden because he was very determined to have it. All day its warmth rose up to the second floor and caressed the wallpaper. Do you mind my going on like this? You want something else, right? Perhaps you want what you think poetry should give you, but poetry doesn't give anyone anything, it simply puts the syllables on the table and lets you rearrange them in your head, which you can do unless your head is a square the size of the tabletop. So why don't you lift your head off the table and go lie down somewhere more comfortable and not worry about anything, including the list of things to worry about that you keep revising in your head, for there is a slot through which that list can slip and float down like a baby in a rocking crib, down to a comfy dreamland and be transformed into a list of gods whose jokes are wonderful. But when the alarm goes off the jokes don't seem funny now that something is missing from them— but what? (You weren't even asleep.) It's not something you feel you're going to remember, it's not as if you can go down the alphabet until you get to a letter that has a special hum because it's the first letter of the name you can't quite recall, it's not as if you can look just to the side of where you think a dim star is and thereby have it magically appear. The glow is gone, and knowing it comes back sometimes is little consolation. But I'll take it and go not to a deserted island but to the factory where they make the bottles that are washed ashore with a message inside, and though the message has been blurred by water stains it's a message, like the poetry in Valéry's saying that poetry is something written by someone other than the poet to someone other than the reader. To you, Paul Valéry,chapeau, though in some of your works no chapeau, for in them it is not a bottle but a test tube one finds one's finger stuck in. • What do you want to do with your life? is a question asked of a young person but slightly modified for an older one: What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Having control is an illusion we like to be fooled by: the pinball machine of experience has bounced us off one thing and onto another bing bing bing! Life might be like a pinball machine but it isn't one, and the trouble is that you might be like a person and you are one, as if in reverie, but then it all seems crambe. And so Sir Thomas Browne walks in with an insane look on his face, he is searching for examples of the number 5, do you have any new ones for him? If not please step aside, and out he goes into the garden, eyes locked onto the vegetation, the afternoon light on the back of his coat. You're relieved he didn't stay long. For God's sake here he comes again. Lock the door! But he performs osmosis and becomes the door and then the room and then you! And you go about the house looking for examples of the number 5 and you don't know why or where it will all lead to. But I do. Who said that? I did. Why did you say that? I didn't. You didn't what? I heard you! You mean you hurt me. No, I . . . I see there's no point in talking to you. And there wasn't for there was no one there, only the residue of an idea that lasted a few moments, like the history of Bulgaria or the rattling of bamboo trees in the wind or the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis. The water lilies float on the surface of the water unaware that they are being depicted by brushstrokes "I love to be beside your side beside the sea, beside the seaside by the beautiful sea!" we sang underwater glub glub as the propeller turned to face us and we fled because Hitler was the propeller and he was unsanitary So Père Noël took a bath whose bubbles rose up around his beard and tickled his fancy enough to keep him ho-ho-hoing throughout the holiday season, for he was in denial about his powerlessness in the face of Hitler Hitler kept a special area on his face for the powerlessness of Santa Claus, he wore it like a merit badge among the many others that covered his face so that no one could see what he really looked like, the way Santa Claus used his beard to hide the deep sadness he felt for all humanity, for if he arrived on their rooftops weeping and wailing it would not do, it would not do to bring the children model replicas of Auschwitz or dolls in the form of the Butcher of Buchenwald or even of himself with downcast eye and ashen brow. The doctor comes in and says, "What seems to be the trouble?" for the twenty-fifth time today but you are only once today so you say, "There's a pain in my chest it's been there for three days it started on Sunday night right after dinner," but the doctor is thinking about the dinner he is having tonight with an incredibly attractive woman He is more worried about her than he is about your symptom In fact he isn't worried about you at all though he might be worried about being sued by you if he tells you to go home and take an aspirin and when you do you die But maybe you were going to die anyway no matter what he said or did and the lawyer who eagerly took the case on behalf of your family was hit by a car as he crossed the street toward the courthouse steps and your entire family was killed in a plane crash on their way to a Grief Management Center in Arizona But none of this happens because the pain was due to a strained muscle in your chest and now you do remember that right after dinner you tried to stop in midsneeze Two hundred dollars for half a sneeze is the going rate these days The cost of living sticks a hose into your wallet and vacuums out the money in a trice and you are so grateful you aren't having heart surgery that you don't even notice until cold air drifts across the floor like fog in a horror film, the one you decided not to be in, and now it pursues you in the form of frozen air, the evil brother of cool air that filtered down out of the early summer evening and told you that the world is kind, that atoms rearrange themselves to make you feel better, that the sun is departing only because it felt you wanted to be alone for a while It didn't say, "I will never rise again, I will go far away and be a pinprick in the sky among the billions of others, and you will never know which I am and I will never tell you." And you will never answer back, "Sun, I do not think you have that power: only I do, and I will go away and be the sky." Is that what is meant by "aesthetic distance"? Say what? It's as if the Panama Canal had been given aesthetic distance by becoming a passageway in your brain and you floated down it and came out on the end that you started at! Hunh? I keep a ball of laughter inside that Hunh.

Poor thing, she holds him on her lap, the godless hidden god, causing the lips of   those that sleep to speak. Cold shadow of   the white acanthus in its tiptoe dance. Buy the truth and sell it not. A lion is in the streets, there is a lion in the way. My niece, the little siren, taught her the slang: mad   married   fiancée. Dido has a quiver, she wears a spotted lynx skin and a belt. My undefiled is not herself tonight, but one thing’s forever: I just saw the video explaining the neighborhood applause, a book of anthems where sirens plunge into the gold of the initials at that karaoke party for her boyfriend. We cooked up all the goodies and fauns come through the windows. That’s her thing. “I like this path to darkness” she keeps saying. Whatever party fame's doing to her chances for a quick trial. Barbarella can’t touch her Goldilocks. That dog don't bird for she coming back or not.

friends! if i may interrupt right quick i know y’all working, busy smoking & busy trying not to smoke, busy with the kids & moms & busy with alone, but i have just seen two boys — yes, black — on bikes — also — summer children basketball shorts & they outside shoes, wild laughing bout something i couldn’t hear over my own holler, trying to steady the wheel & not hit they asses as they swerved frienddrunk, making their little loops, sun-lotioned faces screwed up with that first & cleanest love we forget to name as such, &, hear me out i’m not trying to dis lil dude, but in this gold hour he kind of looked like Francine off Arthur same monkey mouth & all, ole & i say hey looking-ass boy tho in a beautiful way, the best beautiful same as i know all of us have looked like something off when backlit by love. o loves, y’all ugly asses have crowned me the worst names: wayne brady, gay wiz khalifa, all kinds of bitches & fags (tho only with my bitches & fags), all kinds of shit &, once, mark of buddha that year acne scored my forehead with its bumpy faith. my niggas & my niggas who are not niggas i been almost-pissed myself, almost been boxin’ been tears & snot off your dozen wonders been the giddy swine dancing the flame. o my many hearts, y’all booty-faced weird-ass ole mojo-jojo-looking asses dusty chambers where my living dwells roast me. name me in the old ways, your shit- talk a river i wade, howling until it takes me. i can’t stop laughing, more river wades down my throat. could be drowning could be becoming the water, could be a baptism from the inside out. don’t save me, i don’t wanna be saved. i’ve died laughing before, been seen god’s face & you have her teeth, my nig. but   hers   ain’t   as   yellow   as   them   saffron   shits you   keep   stashed   in   your   gloryfoul   mouth my friend! my friends! my niggas! my wives! i got a crush on each one of your dumb faces smashing into my heart like idiot cardinals into glass but i am a big-ass glass bird, a stupid monster crashing through the window & becoming it just to make you laugh. Andrew used to say friendship is so friendship& ain’t it even after Andrew gave it on over to whatever he was still my nigga. when they turned his body to dust he was still my dusty-ass boy. don’t you hear it? the dust on the fan calls me a bum, says my hairline looks like it’s thinking about retirement. the dust in the car says i look like a chubby slave, says i look too drunk, takes my keys, drives me home. the wind is tangled with the dust of the dead homies, carrying us over to them, giggling in the mirror. hear them. hear your long-gone girl tease your hair on the bus. hear them rolling when you sweep broom across the beaten floor. i miss them. all the dead. how young. how silly to miss what you will become. i apologize. sometimes it just catches up in me. love & ghost gets caught up in us like wind & birds trapped in a sheet just the same. & my friends is some birds, some chicken-head muhfuckas who i would legit stomp a nigga for, do you feel me? when they buried my nigga i put on my timbs walked into that hot august tried to beat his name out the dirt. i beat the earth like a nigga. i threw hands at the earth like a punk muhfucka & the ground chuckled, said my nigga. what is you doing! you can’t hear the wind drunk off the kindred lent? can you hear that great roll from way off like a big nigga laughing in an alley! how your dead auntie laugh when she see you still ain’t grew into that big-ass head! like your real friend laugh when you still the same ugly as yesterday! same ugly as always! same ugly as their last life!

How many times these low feet staggered - Only the soldered mouth can tell - Try - can you stir the awful rivet - Try - can you lift the hasps of steel! Stroke the cool forehead - hot so often - Lift - if you care - the listless hair - Handle the adamantine fingers Never a thimble - more - shall wear - Buzz the dull flies - on the chamber window - Brave - shines the sun through the freckled pane - Fearless - the cobweb swings from the ceiling - Indolent Housewife - in Daisies - lain!

How much do you love me, a million bushels? Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more. And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel? Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel. And is this your heart arithmetic? This is the way the wind measures the weather.

How much chemical disorder can be survived depends                on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart                  stopped beating. Today death is                                  believed to occur 4 to 6 minutes after                                      the heart stops beating because after                                     several minutes it is difficult to resuscitate the brain. However, with new experimental treatments, more than         10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can       now be survived without brain injury.     Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s             beliefs about when death                             occurs obsolete merely transitory evidence          a stray boundary between a much longer-lasting            (invisible opposite polarities feature                                                             the fields annihilate the field tries to                        one another repel the intruder                        rapidly velocities     directly                    shine in emission visible                                                              shortly in terms of                  before brightness                              totality