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Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

We were at the Edison Hotel on West 47th Street for the annual muffin beauty contest — I can’t tell you how pumped up we were. Times Square was having another psychotic judder. The bellhop was all thumbs up: Sir, have a nice day and get one gratis. All those avenues of doors and the Hispanic chambermaid who couldn’t speak English. Spider-Man was doing all that Spider-Man shit just to get a bird’s eye view. Donna Summer was almost dead and we were barely into spring. I want to dance to “Love to Love You Baby,” I want to groan. I’ve never seen so many high-quality muffins. If  I wasn’t a religious man, and maybe I wasn’t I would have said the muffins were walking on water: I’ve never felt so half-and-half. Have you read the Bible? The bellhop said: You ain’t seen muffin yet. They were drifting in from Queens, Brooklyn, Harlem, The Bronx, Manhattan muffins too and that weird cute coke-faced muffin who’d taken the subway from Coney Island. If only I were a betting man, but hey I am a betting man, it’s Coney Island every time. Lou Reed isn’t getting any younger. Zappa said, Girl you thought he was a man but he was a muffin, he hung around till you found he didn’t know nuthin’. In the lobby Nina Simone was singing, I Loves You Muffin and in the restroom they piped in “Mack the Knife”: Hey Suky Tawdry, Jenny Diver, Polly Peachum and old Miss Lulu Brown.Muffin The Romance was the biggest show in town. We were hurtling back to the 1970s and sometimes the 1970s are almost as good as the 1930s. I want my muffins to be ahistorical: shit just to say ahistorical makes me joyful. I saw Leonard Cohen crooning with a couple of octogenarian muffins and I’m telling you now the lobby was pleasantly disturbing. You may find yourself   behind the wheel of a large automobile. You may find yourself  in another part of  the world. You may find yourself  at the gargantuan muffin beauty contest and you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here? Times Square was having another psychotic judder. Love is in the air, it’s in the whisper of the trees. This is not America, this is the cover version: sun, sex, sin, divine intervention, death and destruction, welcome to The Sodom and Gomorrah Show. All those white muffins trying to be black muffins! Give us our daily muffin, save us from temptation. Jimmy Buffett was singing, Why don’t we get drunk and screw? In Times Square the most beautiful muffins in the world were hanging on a thousand screens. Where are my singing Tibetan balls? Am I dead?

The present tense is the body’s past tense here; hence the ghost sludge of hands on the now gray strip of towel hanging limp from the jammed dispenser; hence the mirror squinting through grime at grime, and the worn- to-a-sliver of soiled soap on the soiled sink. The streaked bowl, the sticky toilet seat, air claustral with stink— all residues and traces of the ancestral spirit of body free of spirit—hence, behind the station, at the back end of the store, hidden away and dimly lit this cramped and solitary carnival inversion—Paul becoming Saul becoming scents anonymous and animal; hence, over the insides of the lockless stall the cave-like scribblings and glyphs declaring unto all who come to it in time: “heaven is here at hand and dark, and hell is odorless; hell is bright and clean.”

a line of faces borders the strangler’s work heavy european women mist blows over dusty tropical plants lit from beneath the leaves by a spotlight mist in my mind a riffled deck of cards or eccentrics was i a waterton animal my head is not my own poetry is neither swan nor owl but worker, miner digging each generation deeper through the shit of its eaters to the root – then up to the giant tomato someone else’s song is always behind us as we wake from a dream trying to remember step onto a thumbtack two worlds – we write the skin the surface tension that holds you in what we write is ever the past curtain pulled back a portrait behind it is a room suddenly lit looking out through the eyes at a t.v. programme of a monk sealed into a coffin we close their eyes and ours and still here the tune moves on

I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother's body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water. This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I'd say, What? And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I'd say, What? And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

This is the house of the very rich. You can tell because it’s taken all The colors and left only the spaces Between colors where the absence Of rage and hunger survives. If you could Get close you could touch the embers Of red, the tiny beaks of yellow,

1. A crow gliding over a ravine was The sign his eyes were waiting for. They thought they were ready to cross. The tumbleweed listening to a cricket And seeing a line of ants snaking in Was the figure of his younger sister, Huddled by him, asking for a campfire. They made it as far as a roadside store And held their hands over the electric coils. When asked if they were going to buy anything, Their tongues broke off into halves And fell to the floor like Popsicles. 2. My father says I was born to translate What he could only nod to for years. He also says that God made a mistake By blurring out his eyes first because He can hear her asking for a blanket. She saw a church adorned with hipbones, Sun-bleached, and beautiful as curved jewelry. She dreamt of its wide doors, and after dipping Her finger in His palm, she felt His warmth. My father says that cactus needles fly And burn like the memory of lost ones, Then he tells me I was born to study The sand trails and notice when footsteps Drag and turn to knee and handprints. Those are ones I need to follow, he says.

for Peter Orr When all the rooms of the house fill with smoke, it’s not enough to say an angel is sleeping on the chimney. 1. a night in the barn The deer carcass hangs from a rafter. Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps and dreams about a death that is coming: Inside him, there are small bones scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass. He will spend his life walking there, gathering the bones together. Pigeons rustle in the eaves. At his feet, the German shepherd snaps its jaws in its sleep. 2 A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. The father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming. 3 I crouch in the corner of my room, staring into the glass well of my hands; far down I see him drowning in air. Outside, leaves shaped like mouths make a black pool under a tree. Snails glide there, little death-swans. 4. smoke Something has covered the chimney and the whole house fills with smoke. I go outside and look up at the roof, but I can’t see anything. I go back inside. Everyone weeps, walking from room to room. Their eyes ache. This smoke turns people into shadows. Even after it is gone and the tears are gone, we will smell it in pillows when we lie down to sleep. 5 He lives in a house of black glass. Sometimes I visit him, and we talk. My father says he is dead, but what does that mean? Last night I found a child sleeping on a nest of bones. He had a red, leaf-shaped scar on his cheek. I lifted him up and carried him with me, though I didn’t know where I was going. 6. the journey Each night, I knelt on a marble slab and scrubbed at the blood. I scrubbed for years and still it was there. But tonight the bones in my feet begin to burn. I stand up and start walking, and the slab appears under my feet with each step, a white road only as long as your body. 7. the distance The winter I was eight, a horse slipped on the ice, breaking its leg. Father took a rifle, a can of gasoline. I stood by the road at dusk and watched the carcass burning in the far pasture. I was twelve when I killed him; I felt my own bones wrench from my body. Now I am twenty-seven and walk beside this river, looking for them. They have become a bridge that arches toward the other shore.

Anatomie des parties de la génération, Paris, 1773 What have they done to deserve this beauty? Did they, like Marsyas, invite some knife- wielding god with petty transgressions, the crime of a few tunes on Athena’s lost flute? Or were they simply too poor for deep graves, locked gates, and good husbands to watch over the mounds of new soil tossed toward them and their hunted unborn? Whoever they were, they’re still with us, posing demurely in suits of blood and muscle, the bruised shadows of what skin they do have, purpling like crushed petunias as they spread their legs and raise their meaty arms to show dissected breasts, unfinished infants, sundry viscera on the ground about their feet as if this were Thanksgiving and they cornucopias stuffed with squash and fruit. And who delivered their sentences? Surely not the muses who, at least, let them keep rococo faces. In 1773 the womb and the brain were the last outposts of the body to be mapped. D’Agoty bought the rights to Le Blon’s technique of printing mezzotints and gave these ladies homes in scientific texts, but anatomists believed D’Agoty’s prints too gorgeous to be accurate. Perhaps that’s why they open other wounds so easily in us. All so like the single rabbit I downed at twenty with a borrowed rifle, and then was obligated to see skinned, first scoring the length of the spine, then peeling the fur in one steaming piece, while the perverse uncle who clearly desired to touch me, instead held up a dripping pelt in one hand, and in the other, a flayed carcass still wrapped in its bundle of muscle like a gift.

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare Of electric lights and a strange arranged Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council. I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters On stage suddenly wanting to say,I am. I was almost all eye: they weighed me down, Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face Which did not yet know struggle, burden; How the look of newborns unnerves. Then They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun Still too small to throw up into the sky. It was midnight when they injected me With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth Saying,these. Now it was contracted to a drop: And in the morning I knew both death and life. Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.