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Sound of the rain so I know there’s constraint sound of  the train so I know commerce has not come to a standstill now they raise the barrier now they set it back in place What coats the bottom of  the surface of  the sound when the swifts come in when the clerks come home who will bathe the children who will bake the bread when the luff is tight when the mainsheet starts the boat underway whatever you do don’t let the tongue slip from its moorings what’s that song? love lift us up where we belong I ate the pill and the pill was real

Sound of the rain so I know there's constraint sound of the train so I know commerce has not come to a standstill now they raise the barrier now they set it back in place What coats the bottom of the surface of the sound when the swifts come in when the clerks come home who will bathe the children who will bake the bread when the luff is tight when the mainsheet starts the boat underway whatever you do don't let the tongue slip from its moorings what's that song? love lift us up where we belong I ate the pill and the pill was real

I wanted to make myself like the ravine so that all good things would flow into me. Because the ravine is lowly, it receives an abundance. This sounds wonderful to everyone who suffers from lacking, but consider, too, that a ravine keeps nothing out: in flows a peach with only one bite taken out of it, but in flows, too, the body of a stiff mouse half cooked by the heat of the stove it was toughening under. I have an easygoing way about me. I’ve been an inviting host — meaning to, not meaning to. Oops — he’s approaching with his tongue already out and moving. Analyze the risks of becoming a ravine. Compare those with the risks of becoming a well with a well-bolted lid. Which I’d prefer depends largely on which kinds of animals were inside me when the lid went on and how likely they’d be to enjoy the water, vs. drown, freeze, or starve. The lesson: close yourself off at exactly the right time. On the day that you wake up under some yellow curtains with a smile on your face, lock the door. Live out your days untroubled like that.

30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox and look here, they write, you are a dupe for the state, the church, you are in the ego-dream, read your history, study the monetary system, note that the racial war is 23,000 years old. well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor, his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest, the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up, a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed, but actually a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor, but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes and watching the backs of houses come down in flames, but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough, large or small enough, or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy fell through, and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed with his wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars and then I went inside to the bars, and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew, how all he did was sew on buttons and talk, and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us he gave way because his bladder would not go on, and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice, she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope, and she had a very nice figure, very good legs, but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as their ideas and that ideas were governments turned into men; and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution, nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind, rattled like sabers, cracked like cannon, and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox across the fields under the sun, and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly and knew that soon      very soon      I would have to get very drunk      again.

I was always leaving, I was about to get up and go, I was on my way, not sure where. Somewhere else. Not here. Nothing here was good enough. It would be better there, where I was going. Not sure how or why. The dome I cowered under would be raised, and I would be released into my true life. I would meet there the ones I was destined to meet. They would make an opening for me among the flutes and boulders, and I would be taken up. That this might be a form of death did not occur to me. I only know that something held me back, a doubt, a debt, a face I could not leave behind. When the door fell open, I did not go through.

Yesterday I lost a country. I was in a hurry, and didn't notice when it fell from me like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. Please, if anyone passes by and stumbles across it, perhaps in a suitcase open to the sky, or engraved on a rock like a gaping wound, or wrapped in the blankets of emigrants, or canceled like a losing lottery ticket, or helplessly forgotten in Purgatory, or rushing forward without a goal like the questions of children, or rising with the smoke of war, or rolling in a helmet on the sand, or stolen in Ali Baba's jar, or disguised in the uniform of a policeman who stirred up the prisoners and fled, or squatting in the mind of a woman who tries to smile, or scattered like the dreams of new immigrants in America. If anyone stumbles across it, return it to me, please. Please return it, sir. Please return it, madam. It is my country. . . I was in a hurry when I lost it yesterday.

Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered. No, you never see me have one with olives—your father likes olives but I can’t stand them. No, cocktail onions are just picked small. Turn that down, Dan. Avocados, toothpicks. Coleus, root sprawl. The diffident glints of a late-day sun, rays splintered by leaves: they shake and, in their shaking, streak the light. Transparent murk of glasses at the glass. Would you move just one inch over? There. The light was in my eye.

I was made erect and lone, And within me is the bone; Still my vision will be clear, Still my life will not be drear, To the center all is near. Where I sit there is my throne. If age choose to sit apart, If age choose, give me the start, Take the sap and leave the heart.

Wheel me down to the shore where the lighthouse was abandoned and the moon tolls in the rafters. Let me hear the wind paging through the trees and see the stars flaring out, one by one, like the forgotten faces of the dead. I was never able to pray, but let me inscribe my name in the book of waves and then stare into the dome of a sky that never ends and see my voice sail into the night.

I was passionate, filled with longing, I searched far and wide. But the day that the Truthful One found me, I was at home.