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Historical brutality, you are a poppy. With a black scepter, silk wings. I see everything: the field of dew and castles’ wedding parties. Enchant me then, rabble, the leaves are opening. Drink me like wine, say moooo. Translated from the Slovenian

Hello, hello, what to tell you was The world's invisible You see only yourself, that's not the world although you are of it Are you there hello why do you have your head in a sack? a roony-bomb dream tank? Why you got a banana in your ear? You where? Brown eyes they see blue sky The world imagines you Figure it's a planet You hear? an obscure star in the middle Once you were pleasure-milk and egg Were you there Now you are eggs of milk between your legs Are you there “I am situated somewhere near the rim of a fairly large galaxy which is one of a group of same & outside of which a considerable number take their way at incredible speeds & apparently in the opposite direction...” You are a wish to squirt pleasantly You want a lot of things & they are nice & you imagine They are you and therefore you are nice You are a wish to be here Wishing yourself elsewhere “Hello. Try to talk some sense even if you don't think any It is history (your mistake: “History WAS”) now * History an explanation of why I deserve what I take * History an explanation of why I get what I deserve * (Through more or less clenched teeth): “How can you sit there & look at the faces you see in Montgomery Street wiped blank from selling whatever brains they got faces in 3rd Street blank from facing a lathe all day & TV all night African tromped-on faces Asiatic hunger faces Washington war-masks & smile at me about how after all this is a Moral Universe gives me the screaming jumping meemies I thought you were bright enough had enough work-experience yourself to have some faint idea of...” * hello. “THE WIND RATTLES THE WINDOW I CAN'T SLEEP FRIDAY NIGHT IS VERY LARGE IN SAN FRANCISCO THE LOWER CLASSES GET PAID ON FRIDAY & GET ON THEIR WAY TO SPEND IT IN UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS CLIPJOINTS THEY CLAIM AREN'T TOURIST TRAPS THE UPPER CLASSES ARE LUSHED OUT OF THEIR HEADS DOWN IN PEBBLE BEACH SUCKING EACH OTHER'S & WILL SKIP THE SHRINKER MONDAY HE'S GAY HIMSELF THE SILLY SON OF A BITCH AS LONG AS I'M NOT OUT HUSTLING SAILORS ON MARKET STREET & ONLY WHEN I'M LUSHED OUT ON MY OWN PREMISES (FOR WHICH I PAY EXCESSIVELY HIGH TAXES) I DON'T CARE” “The middle classes the middle class is mainly from out of town (that's what I like about San Francisco everybody's either up or down) they come & look at us they go away puzzled where they remain, outclassed... (they will fight the Rooshuns &c. they will fight the gooks & wogs & chinks & japs & niggers & commies & catholics & wall street & any man that tries to tell them different...)” “The upper class don't bother me a bit except why do they let themselves be buffaloed into hiring the creepy managers they do? Faceless men to represent a legal fiction? The upper well, the...” “UPPER CLASSES ARE HARMLESSLY IMBE- CILE THE CLASSES PRETEND NOT TO EXIST (& VERY NEARLY CAN'T, OUTSIDE OF JAIL) THE MIDDLE CLASS MANAGER MERCHANT BANKER PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL THE SOLID (IT'S THE CHEESE THAT MAKES IT BINDING) CALVINISTFREUDIAN DEMOC- RACY SWELLS & B L O S S O M S ! ” TERMINAL LUES ACROSS THE SHOULDERS OF THE WORLD “The Roman Empire went to hell when the Romans bought them- selves a goon-squad; bankrupted themselves trying to enforce moral and sumptuary laws...” History's now

(For Barbara Crosby) While it is true (though only in a factual sense) That in the wake of a Her-I-can comes a Shower Surely I am not The gravitating force that keeps this house full of panthers Why, LBJ has made it quite clear to me He doesn’t give a Good goddamn what I think (else why would he continue to masterbate in public?) Rhythm and Blues is not The downfall of a great civilization And I expect you to Realize That the Temptations have no connection with The CIA We must move on to the true issues of Our time like the mini-skirt Rebellion And perhaps take a Closer look at Flour power It is for Us to lead our people out of the Wein-Bars into the streets into the streets (for safety reasons only) Lord knows we don’t Want to lose the support of our Jewish friends So let us work for our day of Presence When Stokely is in The Black House And all will be right with Our World

In art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career— strongly spent is synonymous with kept. — Robert Frost She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy. And the medicinal uses of herbs: Fenugreek opens up a stuffy head; goldenseal lubricates the cracked mucous membranes. Over a circa 1820 American dropleaf table, she told me asparagus was the broom of the kidneys. I hadn't understood at first and thought she'd used a German word I pictured as brüm and not as the little stalks standing on their heads, sweeping out the impurities. I learned to make the perfect roux for soufflé and became her efficient assistant in the kitchen—dicing and chopping, she once told me, with unparalleled patience. Then one day she began to accidentally break my Depression glassware, and I recalled how she'd giggled when she told me that in two years of marriage she had single-handedly decimated her husband's glass collection dating from 1790 to 1810, including a rare wedding goblet. In the doorway to the back porch she stated simply that my presence made her feel strangled, it was nothing I was doing or could do. We saw a therapist for six years, while my collection dwindled then became memory. With unparalleled patience I jumped through hoop after burning hoop, the therapist pointed out, but I heard that as praise for my prowess and continued to balance Bauer plates on my nose on command; hold growling tigers off with Windsor dining room chairs; juggle career, job, hope, and nightly tempests with unparalleled dexterity. I could reassemble anything: shattered pictures of us crossing the street with canes in the future, my hand under her elbow. My heart. But what I lacked, I can see now, was the ability to dissemble. Finally, she brought home a Cuisinart food processor, and I started hearing the minutes slicing away with ferocious velocity, time doing its soft-shoe faster and faster like Fred Astaire on amphetamines. Memories of flowers and herbs were sacrificed to the angry god of its vortex. Your voice is like acid on my skin, she said after twelve years, then grabbed her Cuisinart and left me behind like so much history.

Our stone wall was built by slaves and my bones, my bones are paid for. We have two of everything, twice heavy in our pockets, warming our two big hands. This is the story, as I know it. One morning: the ships came, as foretold, and death pearl-handled, almost and completely. How cheap a date I turned out to be. Each finger weak with the memory: lost teeth, regret. Our ghosts walk the shoulders of the road at night. I get the feeling you’ve been lying to me.

Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin and of course organs, some members dismembered to shake at strangers and their evil, and there is no way to imagine that a man shaking a dried penis would ever utter the word darling. Of course personal, add starch for pain, add bluing, of course hang the laundry in the basement, there are thieves in the backyard, of course departing trains, carload after carload of sorrow, the man on top of a boxcar waving, his rifle silhouetted against the white sky, its color draining the way warmth left the Bosnian after he’d burned the last page of the last book, knowing he had reached the end of something though it was not end enough. Of course kisses, the stages of kissing like running borders, endless conversations, stations of the cross, till even the promise of kissing bores you, of course teeth gnashing, ethnic cleansing. The cynical will shrug off the past, the future, the whole left hip of Ecuador slashed for six days of oil, of course an X on the coats of the sick so they would stand apart for deportation, of course rogue tumors over the body politic, the same bodies that took Egyptian mummies and powdered them to use as food seasoning, bon vivant cannibalism, and yes civilized men tossed living penguins into furnaces to fuel their ships. Of course partitions so that after the new territories were defined, families had to line up on a cliff with bullhorns to talk to their people on the other side, of course courage, at times a weapon against yearning, surrender another, a mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plates, and a friend will say gently of course I want to ride with you to the funeral, of course of course of course of course, now then, negotiations, whatever, palisades, the end of whimsy, but then one evening though it is wartime, a man climbs the hill to an amphitheater to play his cello at twilight and history stops talking for a moment and sighs while the melancholy of Albinoni passes from heart to heart and each lifts a little, the way passing a baby around a room can be sacramental, and the memories of simple pleasures become more beautiful, the memory of your joy on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car a clown take off his nose at the end of the day, the memory of how your mother laid roses, sweetheart roses, on the cold grate of the fireplace, and the sudden rain one afternoon in fall after you’d hiked far into the dells and you huddled deep in your overcoat in the wet, waiting out the storm with a sheep that had come up to lean against your side like a rock.

I am four in this photograph, standing on a wide strip of Mississippi beach, my hands on the flowered hips of a bright bikini. My toes dig in, curl around wet sand. The sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet glinting like switchblades. I am alone except for my grandmother, other side of the camera, telling me how to pose. It is 1970, two years after they opened the rest of this beach to us, forty years since the photograph where she stood on a narrow plot of sand marked colored, smiling, her hands on the flowered hips of a cotton meal-sack dress.

—for Paul Metcalf A linear projection: a route. It crosses The ocean in many ships. Arriving in the new Land, it cuts through and down forests and it Keeps moving. Terrain: Rock, weaponry. Dark trees, mastery. Grass, to yield. Earth, Reproachful. Fox, bear, coon, wildcat Prowl gloomily, it kills them, it skins them, Its language alters, no account varmint, its Teeth set, nothing defeats its obsession, it becomes A snake in the reedy river. Spits and prays, Keeps moving. Behind it, a steel track. Cold, Permanent. Not permanent. It will decay. This Does not matter, it does not actually care, Murdering the buffalo, driving the laggard regiments, The caring was a necessary myth, an eagle like A speck in heaven dives. The line believes That the entire wrinkled mountain range is the Eagle’s nest, and everything tumbles in place. It buries its balls at Wounded Knee, it rushes Gold, it gambles. It buys plastics. Another Ocean stops it. Soon, soon, up by its roots, Severed, irrecoverably torn, that does not matter, It decides, perpendicular from here: escape. A prior circle: a mouth. It is nowhere, Everywhere, swollen, warm. Expanding and contracting It absorbs and projects children, jungles, Black shoes, pennies, blood. It speaks Too many dark, suffering languages. Reaching a hand Toward its throat, you disappear entirely. No Wonder you fear this bleeding pulse, no wonder.

Where the correlative of reason was conviction and where the correlative of power was obedience, the correlative of authority was trust Your job—she gives another to the child hip-high—is to heat the money in your hands to the optimum warmth for purchase. Cagey, the diversion in the same coin as his want. It buys her time, enough that once they round the corner, she might break into a sprint, as one might with a pet who can keep up. But the prophet makes eyes in his open fists of the nickels’ glint, and we see he forbears our guess her hector gets lost in the flash when as if by swale we all give way to expel a customer from the clench of us without her. For what beneath the moths who have all night to live do we brace ourselves as we approach? We lean to find again the boy’s outguess of us. Demand is double at the walk-up window, where punishment for paltry want is to tell it again into plexiglass the color of slobber, so others in the bleach of halogen light may deal their disparagement forward. For what if not dishonor are we braced, rehearsing what to ask? Repetition is a machine, a machine for converting request into appeal; and commerce, then, the window’s byproduct or balm, depending. Red hot cashews, yellow bag. Only because we visit by day do we know at night what to call at the walk-up window where two aisles of open merchandise end at the sacral plates of clerks before us who, if on pulleys they were carts instead or vending claws, would be by now concussed and dented by lever malevolence outright. The prophet stands eye level with the vending plunge, a here and now mechanism he would need to invent to operate, and stands between it and his mother. Yellow bag. Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal;...                                                           because there is not enough recognition, they make art

I The leaves of blue came drifting down. In the corner Madeleine Reierbacher was reading Lorna Doone. The bay’s water helped to implement the structuring of the garden hose. The envelope fell. Was it pink or was it red? Consult Lorna Doone. There, voyager, you will find your answer. The savant grapeade stands Remember Madeleine Reierbacher. Madeleine Reierbacher says, “If you are happy, there is no one to keep you from being happy; Don’t let them!” Madeleine Reierbacher went into the racing car. The racing car was orange and red. Madeleine Reierbacher drove to Beale Street. There Maddy doffed her garments to get into some more comfortable clothes. Jazz was already playing in Beale Street when Madeleine Reierbacher arrived there. Madeleine Reierbacher picked up the yellow horn and began to play. No one had ever heard anything comparable to the playing of Madeleine Reierbacher. What a jazz musician! The pianist missed his beats because he was so excited. The drummer stared out the window in ecstasy at the yellow wooden trees. The orchestra played “September in the Rain,” “Mugging,” and “I’m Full of Love.” Madeleine Reierbacher rolled up her sleeves; she picked up her horn; she played “Blues in the Rain.” It was the best jazz anyone had ever heard. It was mentioned in the newspapers. St. Louis! Madeleine Reierbacher became a celebrity. She played with Pesky Summerton and Muggsy Pierce. Madeleine cut numerous disks. Her best waxings are “Alpha Beta and Gamma” And “Wing Song.” One day Madeleine was riding on a donkey When she came to a yellow light; the yellow light did not change. Madeleine kept hoping it would change to green or red. She said, “As long as you have confidence, You need be afraid of nothing.” Madeleine saw the red smokestacks, she looked at the thin trees, And she regarded the railroad tracks. The yellow light was unchanging. Madeleine’s donkey dropped dead From his mortal load. Madeleine Reierbacher, when she fell to earth, Picked up a blade of grass and began to play. “The Blues!” cried the workmen of the vicinity, And they ran and came in great numbers to where Madeleine Reierbacher was. They saw her standing in that simple field beside the railroad track Playing, and they saw that light changing to green and red, and they saw that donkey stand up And rise into the sky; and Madeleine Reierbacher was like a clot of blue In the midst of the blue of all that sky, and the young farmers screamed In excitement, and the workmen dropped their heavy boards and stones in their excitement, And they cried, “O Madeleine Reierbacher, play us the ‘Lead Flint Blues’ once again!” O railroad stations, pennants, evenings, and lumberyards! When will you ever bring us such a beautiful soloist again? An argent strain shows on the reddish face of the sun. Madeleine Reierbacher stands up and screams, “I am getting wet! You are all egotists!” Her brain floats up into the lyric atmosphere of the sky. We must figure out a way to keep our best musicians with us. The finest we have always melt in the light blue sky! In the middle of a concert, sometimes, they disappear, like anvils. (The music comes down to us with sweet white hands on our shoulders.) We stare up in surprise; and we hear Madeleine’s best-known tune once again, “If you ain’t afraid of life, life can’t be afraid for you.” Madeleine! Come back and sing to us! 2 Dick looked up from his blackboard. Had he really written a history of the jazz age? He stared at his television set; the technicolor jazz program was coming on. The program that day was devoted to pictures of Madeleine Reierbacher Playing her saxophone in the golden age of jazz. Dick looked at his blackboard. It was a mass of green and orange lines. Here and there a red chalk line interlaced with the others. He stared attentively at the program. It was a clear and blue white day. Amos said, “The calibration is finished. Now there need be no more jazz.” In his mountain home old Lucas Dog laughed when he heard what Amos had said. He smilingly picked up his yellow horn to play, but all that came out of it was steam.