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—by way of what they say From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.

for Dave Smith Our clothes are still wet from wading The Chickamunga last evening. There is heavy frost. We have Walked on the dead all night. Now in the firelight We are exchanging shells and grapeshot. I can still hear our loud huzzah When late in the day The enemy fell into full retreat Along the pine ridge to the east. . . We chased them until we were weary. Each night this week There’s been something To keep me from sleep. Just an hour ago I saw A dead sharpshooter sitting Against a rock with a scallop Of biscuit still lodged in his mouth. He wore one silk sock. Snedikerhas returned from Chattanooga With five thousand convalescents For the left wing of their musketry. We have roasted a deer With a molasses sauce and pepper. Magrill and zandt have returned From horse hunting with a sack of sugar. By morning we will have buried our dead And fed the prisoners: Joe Cotton Will hang all seven of them in one tree When he sees they’re done Licking their fingers. . . I shot a Rebel yesterday In high water just for cursing me. Just six months ago For that alone it would have meant Three days in stockade. We can see now that cannonading Has set the hillside on fire. The wounded Grays Will be burned Beyond their Christian names. . . Joe Cotton says he’d ask God For rain, but he’s got no tent And river water Has chilled him straight through To the very quick of his being.

Beauty=Nation Ugly=Nation Ladies Garden in Progress The American Visitors The New American Word The Beauty of Publicity Mother’s Mop Head Ring spots Sway Me Yes, Ma’am Gossamer=Blouse Yankee=Blouse Yes, Ma’am Sway Me Father, nice to see you Major, it’s been a hell of a ride General M & General H Mother’s Mop Head I see ring spots That’s a good sight for my old eyes Yes, Ma’am Ray-Ban Sunglasses So Sway Me Sway Me Oh Sway Me 1. Parade of the Japanese Colonial Government’s Monitors 2. Parade of the First Republic’s ROK Monitors 3. Parade of the DPRK Communist Monitors 4. Parade of the Joint ROK-UN Forces Monitors Yes, Ma’am Did I tell you I saw corpses piled up inside the well in Pyongyang? Did I tell you I helped the Communist Monitor who was also a Colonial Monitor, ROK Monitor, then later an ROK-UN Monitor drag the corpse of his brother? Monitor=For Life! General=For Life! President=For Life! However, I see buttons and ring spots Father, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Major, snap out of it. It’s August 15, 1948 He’s smiling at me Fun Hydrangeas Gossamer=Blouse and Yankee=Blouse Warmly greeted one another I see Ugly=Translators Yes, Ma’am Me=Gook

I understand, sure, hygiene, these days, if you're not paying attention, with all these sicknesses, you think I'm not aware? I'm not saying not to bathe, are you crazy? you don't want to wash? I'm just saying to not go overboard, because there's clean, that's fine, but not clean and shiny, it's just that people now, bath foams, bath salts, a bar of soap's not good enough, no, instead, sometimes, by washing too much, some things even get lost, the other day, there was one lady, I didn't know her, even if you tell me her name, she's not from here, she's from Rimini, we had met each other by chance, two months ago, then we met again, but it's not like now I'm wanting, I'm just telling you to give you an idea, it was Tuesday afternoon, at her house, her husband was away, she started to unzip me, she was wearing a dressing gown, we'd been drinking, we'd danced, then we went to bed, she climbed on top of me, sssh! and today is Thursday and I still smell her, do you understand?

That quality of the great boxers to be able to stand there and take shots, gargle with firewater, encounter intoxication at sub- and supra-atomic levels, to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s lip like Empedocles, and descend, not say: I’ll be back, not think: fifty-fifty, to vacate molehills when dwarves want space to grow, to dine alone, indivisible, and able to renounce your victory— a hymn to that man.

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Less the shadow than you a stag, sudden, through it. Less the stag breaking cover than the antlers, with which crowned. Less the antlers as trees leafless, to either side of the stag’s head, than— between them—the vision that must mean, surely, rescue. Less the rescue. More, always, the ache toward it. When I think of death, the gleam of the world darkening, dark, gathering me now in, it is lately as one more of many other nights figured with the inevitably black car, again the stranger’s strange room entered not for prayer but for striking prayer’s attitude, the body kneeling, bending, until it finds the muscled patterns that predictably, given strain and release, flesh assumes. When I think of desire, it is in the same way that I do God: as parable, any steep and blue water, things that are always there, they only wait to be sounded. And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps should ask pardon. My fears—when I have fears— are of how long I shall be, falling, and in my at last resting how indistinguishable, inasmuch as they are countless, sire, all the unglittering other dropped stones.

When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. —Fyodor Dostoevsky I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction. The paper slept but the night in me woke up. Black letters were now alive and collectible in a material crawl. I could not decipher their intentions anymore. To what end did their shapes come forth? To seduce or speak truth? While birds swept over the water like pot-bellied angels beautiful bells rang to assist the hoist. Up they went to slake their thirst, drinking from the mist for the sound of bells seemed to free as well as hold them. Then down to scavenge the surf and eat the innocent. “I love God and the ferry too,” wrote Kerouac. Only that which exists can be spoken of. *     *     * I wonder, will our imagination remain a temple burning with candles against all odds? Behind a nipple and a bone? The simplest of glands laid in a circle around skin and liquid that stirs up imagery winged and prismed, as if blood were a wine inducing visions *     *     * Some people cry when the characters die. Then they kill themselves offstage, away from the pages that they are turning in the night. Some people sacrifice themselves on a whim and regret it later on paper. Now I see you in the window. Are you in the book I was looking for? The one who traveled back to the happy days when she could jump on a moving bus and swing in the open air clutching a worn novel in her purse . . . ? A curtain, a knife, adoring eyes? *     *     * I watched the children running and turned to Alyosha for a blessing. He was sunk in the morass of rural life I like to sit with him in the grass. Then we see the same thing at the same time, and are one mind. We two masses, one a book, one a hand. When Alyosha spoke to the boys at the end I anticipated their next question and his answer For they formed a single gesture of kindness. “Will we?” “We will.” *     *     * It seemed evil to read about people we would never meet. We tested their fortitude as if in sleep. They generally failed the challenge being strangers in a strange brain. They were baffled by the tools handed to them and by the traffic’s direction. Frankly in a dream or story, the goal is absolutely hidden from the one to whom it matters. *     *     * Eons of lily-building emerged in that one flower. Eons, eons. Pins and wool, thread and needle, all material made of itself and circumstance. It was a terrible century: consisting of blasted oil refineries and stuck ducks, fish with their lips sealed by plastic and tar in the hair of cooks. Filth had penetrated the vents. Institutions moan. Balls of used cotton from the hospital dumpster, redden. Yawning on obsolescence the computer wonders who punched in such poor grammar. First-padded virgins graduate to this suffering drama all by her-selves. Who once were cells. *     *     * History is more than just another surmising grandmother at a window or a reminiscence twisted in the scrim of translation. Some long-ago light is pulsating in a trout’s heart on a laboratory dish. That light has entered all the holes, no matter how small, because it is the light that wants to live. *     *     * Still waiting for you my sunshine of justice and mercy. If west is east of Moscow, depending where you’re going then will you ever find me coming from a northerly direction? Are you even looking at the earth? Remember the map is flat but everything else is not. Is the newest child the oldest body in creation? Does he carry more information than his mother? Does her mother, his grandmother, do I seem redundant by having arrived with less, though first? Is that why I read at night with my lips compressed? *     *     * The fact is, I never knew if anyone felt me the way Nijinsky knew how to feel. Or Nastasya. Nothing could shock that woman who had done so much wrong. As if trained in a theater, multiple personalities streamed from her tongue. This made her an exemplar for our time. She knew how others felt and became each one, forgetting who she was before. I remember her as a child. Her skirt got tangled up in a thorn bush when she watched the sky. Shaking herself free, she had to see the spiders, ants and dirt around her skirt, It was like peering into her own body and she screamed in horror. Later, consolation would be extended by a man dark and handsome: It came with his semen (when she wanted hibernation). She didn’t commit suicide this time, but ran down Nevsky Prospekt as it began to rain, and paused to lift her umbrella. For this moment we were in our soul a child rushing home to granny five floors up. *     *     * I dropped the book, wept and went to the movies. It is here where I can forgive someone for his crime. Poisoning babies for profit. Harry Lime. I can actually forgive it when he is crawling in shit. Otherwise we will stand on the ferris wheel together forever stuck in the fog and iron. I just a witness to his ironic story He will be a mix between Paul Celan and Oscar Levant when we are at our happiest and no forgiveness is asked. Neurotic, pale, and drawn to the canals, we will lean over the embankment like sister and brother who are tempted to be actors. It is here that his shoes and cat will converge in the dark. Like fish in a secular city flipping through sewers for a flash of Christ.

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran BLANC, The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone. Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing—there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven! Awake, my soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn. Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale! O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink: Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams? And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! Who called you forth from night and utter death, From dark and icy caverns called you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagg

You marched into the gray eyes of dawn feeling older than the bones that held their ground like grazing, aged cattle waiting, eyes closed to the wind, on a winter, slaughter morning. You searched through the fog for a sign, but there was no sun to burn the way, no burst of rainbow bridge to keep you from the cattle call.