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The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.

Fire isn’t allowed, for the sake of the books. The lean monk-copyist who scribes the books is slate-blue at his fingertips this steely late-November day in the year 1000. Brother Ambrosio huffs some perfunctory warmth on his stiffening hands, then bends again to his goat’s-horn of ink. For every line, he believes, he’s forgiven a sin. And now he’s at his heavy uncial letters, and will be for nine hours more, until a slab of bread and a beet relieve his transcriptual ardor. What he copies?—psalter, missal, hagiography: the predetermined and sanctioned community passions of a religious culture. Nothing like the twentieth century’s prevalent kneejerk “self-expression.” Nothing like the priest, excuse me: former priest, and former nun, on daytime talk TV, who live, she tells us, in a “trinity of love” with the former creator-of-tourist-ashtrays-out-of-catfish-heads. This is, she insists, the final and jubilant stage of a lifelong “quest to feel belongingness” initiated thirty years before by parents skittering cross-country with the military: they were wholly rootless, and so she grew up “unable to commit.” The following day, a man confesses to pedophilia because of a lesbian aunt. A woman says she robbed the Sack-N-Save of $13.42 “because of what they’re dumping in the water supply, it makes me go all freaky.” Steve was bounced out from The Chicken Shack “because I’m Scandinavian.” The culture of blame is so completely exterior in its search for cause, some days I wake to think I’ll find most people laboring under the weight of sci-fi-style mind parasites, like fleshy turbans spewing in, and feeding off, their brain blood. This (by “this” I mean of course a recognition of the magic of objective correlative boppin’ about in the spotlight) is, to some length, understandable: you can’t beat the miniscule carry-along convenience of a silicon chip invisibly set in something, BUT for sheer persuasive visual power, that can’t touch a 1940s generating plant, its giant Alcatrazian shape against the sky, and the enormous wrestling electrical crackles snaking its rooftop pylon. In the scriptorium, even —such an isolated unit of human endeavor, its limited range of reactions surely is pure—when Brother Ambrosio nods off, sleepy in his long day’s long eighth hour of thickly nibbed and careful letters, he knows it’s imps in league with Satan that keep pulling down his eyelids. If in scratching his flea-measled thigh he spills a hand’s-expanse of ink across the vellum page, the fleas are tiny devils on a guerilla mission from Hell. And once a devilkin took lodging in his belly, and there created “rumbling noises like a toad, and which, for hours, spoiled the concentration of all of the other Brothers.” We find parchment scraps with appropriate exorcisms: “Away! you flaming sow, you poisoned udder, you arse of the arch-fiend, shit-fly, stinking he-goat, out out out, away, back into thine infernal kitchen, you bestial puke!” We also find those charming marginal doodles (sprigs in flower, unicorns, seemingly every songbird in Creation): such diminutive external bodies given to the longings of these cooped-up men. And when they came to drag my friend Jess screaming to the ward, because he was beating his head on the lawyer’s steps, it was clear to us all that the chemicals in his mind had turned against him. It was clear to Jess that he was being hunted like prey by hounds from the moon.

’Cause it’s alright, alright to see a ghost. — The National Rock quartz next to a fence with upturned faces. On the hill, on the other side a storm, or plausibly, you. Time keeps its footsteps regular until it is clapped upwards: a falcon glides into view. Dissolving into the pool in a splash of white, I saw you. In summer, the town goes to the drive-in. The edges of the coin keep moving as I stare at images through goggles, they fog out. Rooms go to pieces, sometimes, quietly. Curtains are no longer red, now they’re dusty. The cat moves. The room turns ocher and shifts, as wind blows through. O Brecht’s sky of streaming blue. It’s been days since I opened the book my face is watching. Cupboards slam in another part of the flat. The room reassembles, but it’s different now — outdated.

Gushing from the mouths of stone men To spread at ease under the sky In granite-lipped basins, Where iris dabble their feet And rustle to a passing wind, The water fills the garden with its rushing, In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns. Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone, Where trickle and plash the fountains, Marble fountains, yellowed with much water. Splashing down moss-tarnished steps It falls, the water; And the air is throbbing with it; With its gurgling and running; With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur. And I wished for night and you. I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool, White and shining in the silver-flecked water. While the moon rode over the garden, High in the arch of night, And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness. Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!

In a hotel, even prayer feels adulterous, the skyline smudged in light, a distraction just before dusk. In the lobby a woman tells a stranger what she will do for three hundred dollars, what she will do for four. Some have the custom of opening a book randomly with a question in mind. Some have the custom of  forgetting. At six my friend beat his father at chess, beat his father’s friends so easily he wondered if  they tried. At seven he shook the governor’s hand. Don’t call it a failure; call it knowledge: the peculiar taste that filled his mouth as if   he had bitten his cheek. Whatever he risked did not matter, whatever he could imagine was already lost. Bored, the other boy coughed into his hands.

I would consider re-heating the tweezers if I had the chance, because, as ducks say in Ghana, “broccoli reversal gets priority.” I would consider re-heating the tweezers if Tu Fu and Cleopatra had a son named Sel. I have the chance, because, as ducks ask, “who was generated in Old Ironsides, AK?” In Ghana, broccoli reversal gets priority and grows up to be a pie dish dismisser. Tu Fu and Cleopatra had a son named Sel who was generated in Old Ironsides, AK. He grew up to be a pie dish dismisser.

In childhood Christy and I played in the dumpster across the street from Pickett & Sons Construction. When we found bricks, it was best. Bricks were most useful. We drug them to our empty backyard and stacked them in the shape of a room. For months we collected bricks, one on top another. When the walls reached as high as my younger sister’s head, we laid down. Hiding in the middle of our room, we watched the cycle of the sun, gazed at the stars, clutched hands and felt at home.

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’ They writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity Heaped up groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies in an abstract landscape of blasted trees bent statues bats wings and beaks slippery gibbets cadavers and carnivorous cocks and all the final hollering monsters of the ‘imagination of disaster’ they are so bloody real it is as if they really still existed And they do Only the landscape is changed They still are ranged along the roads plagued by legionnaires false windmills and demented roosters They are the same people only further from home on freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more strung-out citizens in painted cars and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America

in Just- spring          when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles          far          and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far          and             wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan          whistles far and wee

Not embittered even while freezing to the ice of their own lakes. The night I was leaving for Madrid into the noisy party a dazzling friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much (as a couple of kids on the dance floor want) to slow the tempo, hold there longer, to feel that seedly longing to be pressed into the soil, or that little lift the mothers get when stocking larders, even now, vestige of the primitive urge to be provided for and to provide. I went alone to see that balcony in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver tray and all but smoked them for you; after your towels had warmed in London’s best hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad, glad now for the rest of empty August and the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew, glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners that I have stood alone wondering at illuminated books, looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider at the Tate—at times the best kept universe was my own, no interceding docents or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous wandering—waif, naïf. I liked the light enormously so why did I obey the bell that called me in?