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The giant takes us down. A man with no arms. Unbreakable. What made today is concordant, transforms the brief decisive phase we call fear. I look to that whited-over part and see a face. Then I look to the black and see the same face. There were tunnels…chambers beneath some of the sidewalks…page after page of places… The last thing you think of. Won’t be my fluffy blonde hair. We have his ear. He was the first boy I knew. The liberation. Which I remember from sand. The pail shape. The whole world’s washed out. These words: take refuge. What I mean by dream in this case is his last dream. And you see no land, you’re that far away. Someone coughs in my first life. Someone must have noticed how like you he is… First you can’t be heard Then you can’t hear Then you can’t dial Then you can’t turn it off You pose a question, I repeat it. And as always with speech, one is blind. As a reflector, as of cloth or thick flecked glass, as slats— You asked though about the self. There were fireflies, and the corn cut to the nubs. The windows shook, we saw a flash of light… then the tiniest feckles of rain after we waited all day.

The giant water bug can lug His eggs upon his back. He gives them extra care up there And guards them from attack. The mother glues them to the dad, And on his way they stay. But does he ever get a card Or gift on Father's Day?

... who can bear the idea of Eternal Recurrence? I Even as you went over, Nietzsche, in your last letter, as ever, you tried to reach him: “Dear Herr Professor, When it comes to it I too would very much prefer a professorial chair in Basel to being God; but I did not dare to go so far in my private egoism as to refrain for its sake from the creation of the world.” The past before him, the hateful present stifling no end of futures with noisy smoke, what could the Dear Herr Professor, magnificently sober Jacob Burckhardt, do or do for you; how thrust pitiful hands into what proclaimed itself a sacred solitude? Maybe too at times, syringa blowing through his classroom (gape- mouthed angels Paracelsus pressed into his lectures in this very room, throwing all Basel into an uproar and a hatred that finally drove him out, familiars also like a rout of mornings bickering to swell the retinue of Dr. Faustus after breakfast), trumpeting through the profundity of his pauses, maybe he could let that host, with nothing to lose in being, be themselves, especially as there sprang among them heroes out of Raphael with everything to gain. Even now Astorre the horseman, in the twinkle of that scholar eye, spurs quarrying the dark, falcon-plumed, plunges, a warrior of Heaven, to the rescue of a youth, fallen with copious wounds, by this aid exalted. II Alas, for all Astorre’s audacious charging down the margin of the page, the Professor’s age, parading with its Sunday family-walks and the thundrous drummers of Basel in trim, upholstered parks, benumbed him. What was there for him to do who saw his begetters, fighting men, furious, mighty in their pride, tumbled to such petty end? That beauty being slain on the high places in the midst of its noblest battle, should he, exclaiming, dare to tell it, publish it in the streets so prim and polished, to see the daughters of the philistines rejoice? He let you go, best emparadised, or so you said, in the sparkling shadow of a sword, retiring into frozen heights, a terrible loneliness, enhanced by sun. III At the end, rocks breaking their doors for you, out poured the shaggy men, hordes of flame and drunkenness. Solitude, dressed in winds and falcons, rang, a honeycomb of voices hailing: dancer David; Agamemnon, amethyst with proud and deadly twisting; Dr. Faustus; Borgia and Astorre, those human hours, sowing splendors with their wily wrists. The peaks, much moved, conscious of the love that guides by the same capricious path as stars the agony, the maggot’s tooth, hurtling to your beloved town, stormed its arcades past the drowsiest beds. God was dead, long live the gods. In that third-floor room, still going about in your academic jacket and down at heel, all the heavens rejoicing, laughing, lifting up your legs, into the middle of the rout you leaped, a satyr’s dance, as always, the conclusion of the tragic truth . . . IV You in what we are, alas, and by your effort that had to fail have reached us. And we go, perhaps as the Dear Herr Professor did, saddened that we cannot give ourselves, the Greeks at last, Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin too, surpassed by the resolution—not time could tame it, not the mob’s indifference—of your fury.

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk        floor        lamp        flowers tatami, my underwear then dares to paw across Mother’s face, so smilingdelirious. Twenty years in a twelve square metre room with the thuds of tennis balls the only music tells me that suffering is necessary and more powerful than healing and I wish to cover all territory for once—hospital beds, chinaware, bed linen, your bland skin with the pattern and fear of all my dots— by the old wharf on Naoshima I make my yellow wartime pumpkins. I know my home is not a country anymore, just a festering colony of the mind: these shuddering trees that come and talk to me each night, the whispers of the white nurses and the star-dances of my Japanese kaleidoscope. Come haunt me still. Do what you may. I won’t return. I’m not afraid.

Nothing will hurt you that much despite how you feel the stress on your back shapes your insight this splendid November rain Toussaint. I find you by your marks, he says an imprint But when I summon you, I talk to—I say— my memory of your face. It’s kind of crazy to others. They’re not very interesting he says. When I first came to this country, and now I know the language I say, but I had in a dream spoken it many years previously. That is, not the language of the dead the language of France. I took one year of French in 1964 and then nothing but once, in 1977 I spoke French in a dream all night: I was in the future I moved here in 1992. Country of the more logical than I? though the people of my quartier know and like me, even as I a foreigner remain strange You do everything alone a woman said to me. There are ways to care without interfering but the French speak of anguish frequently they are conscious of emotional extremity a terrible gift. It’s all a gift, he says . . . some haven’t been opened. I’m not sure he said that it’s nearly my sixty-seventh birthday today though it’s the day of the dead hello we love you they say.

Who is that creature and who does he want? Me, I trust. I do not attempt to call out his name for fear he will tread on me. What do you believe, he asks. That we all want to be alone, I reply, except when we do not; that the world was open to my sorrow and ate most of it; that today is a gift and I am ready to receive you.

around 530 is a beautiful peaceful time you can just hear the dog lapping David lifts his smoke to his lips forever dangling chain in the middle of everything bout the top shelf or so. The party at which I sd that’s my col- lected works and every one stared my home was so small is it I’m not particularly into the task of humility at the moment but I’m not against it it’s like that deflated beach ball on a tiny chair I think of as joking with the larger one on a painting floating in air my home is large love made it large once not to get all John Wieners & believe me love made it small once this place only had sex unlike the house I love a house I fear a house a house never gets laid frankly who doesn’t like a hotel room I live in a hotel room a personal one. A young person very much like me was brutal no personal photographs please   it was anyone’s home perfect for a party now I’m going fast. How the description of a drug enters a room & changes the room thus with going fast say thus if you want to go slow. To drink the wrong thing for a moment for you to lick my thigh & your honey face I met a dog named Izzie once, I met a dog named Alan the calm person writing her calm poems now & then she shows her sacred heart she opens her chest & a monkey god is taking a shit swinging on his thing. You didn’t know I had so much inside me buckets of malice bibles of peace I don’t want to go all library on you now like my mother the mother of god or my brother named Jack who sat in a deck of cards getting hard when she squeezes in getting cozy I know less what I want to say. I can open an entire room comes out each moment that’s what I mean not things widen & flow there’s no purpose to this.

The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.

When I got the box home from the gun shop, I let it sit on my kitchen table in its wax wrapping for hours before I opened it. Safe from the elements. Protected from rust and more esoteric forms of corrosion. My father gave me a rosewood chess set when I turned twelve. I’d never felt so loved through and through, almost literally, as if 
I were transparent — and it probably wasn’t love, just a lucky, last-minute guess at the toy store, which is probably what most love is, anyway. I took the set into my room, shut the door, determined to master every fork and zugzwang, that strange position where you’d be safe if only you didn’t have to make a move. Now I’d given myself a perfect gift. I imagined the gun at rest in a velvet sack next to its dainty box of   bullets. I wouldn’t need many. And no sequined wrapping paper could have been more beautiful than the brown waxed sheet the clerk had unrolled and cut along the steel edge in one long, smooth stroke. When I finally slit through the layers to open it, the paper was as delicate and rich as sheets of pastry in baklava, with a mass of dark chocolate in the center. I’d never touched a gun. I loved how perfectly its handle fit my hand: centuries of engineering and design coming together in the “unit,” and I knew it would work. Unlike toys, religious rituals, erotic techniques, and works of art, I could depend on it. The only other device I own that fulfills its function so well is my reading glasses, and I used a soft gray cloth just like the one I clean them with to wipe the oil from my fingertips as I dropped the bullets one by one into the somber chambers. I just need to know it’s there, like the extra purse I keep hidden in the closet with a money clip and a neatly folded change of clothes. I don’t need a class in safety or marksmanship. If I ever use it, it will be at close range. It may be the only way to get rid of the stranger inside. It may be the only way to get inside someone I love when every other route has been systematically barred.