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~ [our] nightmare : no birdsong— the jungle was riven emptied of [i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold feathers—everywhere : brown tree snakes avian silence— the snakes entered without words when [we] saw them it was too late— they were at [our] doors sliding along the passages of [i sihek] empire—then the zookeepers came— called it species survival plan—captured [i sihek] and transferred the last twenty-nine micronesian kingfishers to zoos for captive breeding [1988]—they repeated [i sihek] and repeated : "if it weren't for us your birds                    [i sihek] would be gone forever" what does not change / last wild seen—

[ for my dad ] The fallen Latte is the sign.It is from within the row of Latte that we feel our strength. It is the severed capstone that gives us Their message

Am I the only one watching my neighbour’s frolicksome goat, Ginger, tied to a pecan tree? All morning it has been examining an empty bushel basket and has lifted one leg delicately like a circus horse as if to roll it, but whether to do that or to butt it with its small horns, that is the question. Not of great moment, no signing of the Charter, but like air music, quickest of the elements. Towards which I leaped! In form its own grace, appearing, as it passed in retrospect, classical. The real goat stayed, imperturbable, the body solid as a four-square loom and delivered me from abstraction. His coloring, greyish-soft shades, their dark and light passing into each other as in an antique rubbing. I now found myself sitting so near, my shade, as in the Inferno, sensed his, but he gave no sign of my presence, even when I stroked him and my heart leaped at the gentle fleece, too fine for a hard life. He continued nibbling on a dry bush. I would not have believed unconcern could bolster the man in me and be so enduring. Sic transit, not caring whether it is recognized, The Divine (from another age). He was poking into the underbush now and reached across my head for the small spiny twigs. At that the phase changed and a sensuous trembling hung in the air, as when a bee is about to descend on blossoming clover, and I felt myself being pulled as by a line from the invisible other side to enter goathood, deeper than sight.

The threewomen who all walked In the same dress And it had falling ferns on it Skipped parallel To the progress Of Giovanni Franchi Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked Flickeringly as he flacked them His wrists explained things Infectiously by way of his adolescence His adolescence was all there was of him Whatever was left was rather awkward His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees Descended to the fallacious nobility Of his first pair of trousers They were tubular      flapped friezily The color of coppered mustard What matter Were they not the first No others could ever be the first again The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen Began fading as she thought of it Tea table problems for insane asylyms Are démodé Démodé Allow us to rely on our instincts The threewomen was composed of three instincts Each sniffing divergently directed draughts The first instinct    first again    (may Renascent gods save us from the enigmatic Penetralia of Firstness) Was to be faithful to a man       first The second       to be loyal to herself first She would have to find which self first The third which might as well have been first Was to find out how many toes the Philosopher Giovanni Bapini had       first Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born You imagine what he looked like Looked as nearly as he could as the Philosopher looked His articulations were excellent Still    where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous Giovanni Franchi was merely pale He scuttled winsomely To its distribution from a puffer For the declaration of War His acolytian sincerity The sensitive down among his freckles Fell in with the patriotic souls of flags Red white and green flags      fillipping piazzas When the “National Idea” arrived on the Milan Express Continually cutting off an angle from Paschkowski’s Through plate-glass swingings To look as busy bodily As the philosopher’s brain was As Giovanni Bapini importuned mobs From monumental gums To the sparky detritus From the hurried cigarette Of his disciple Whose papa and mama kept a trattoria Audaciously squatting right opposite the Pitti Palace The Pitti Palace however stolid      could hardly help noticing Being an aristocrat it went on looking As plainly piled up as ever The Pitti Palace has never been known to mention the trattoria Or mention Giovanni Franchi Sitting in it At a book It could not see from that distance Giovanni watching the munchers supporting his parents With an eye On assuring himself Of their sufficient impression By erudition He was so young That explains so much No book ever explained what to be young is But they look so much more important for that Giovanni was in continuous ecstacy Induced by the imposing look of them When Giovanni Bapini spoke of them He could not tell How completely more precious Would be such knowledge As how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had Now the threewomen For pity’s sake Let us think of her as she    to save time Seeing the minor Giovanni Sitting at the major Giovanni’s feet Made sure he must be counting his toes All to the contrary    he was picking the philosopher’s brains Happy in the security that when he had done He would still be youthful enough to sort out his own He listened at the elder’s lips That taught him of earthquakes and Of women— His manners were abominable He would kill a woman Quite inconspicuously it is true And neglect to attend her funeral I mean the older man And what he told Giovanni Franchi About these pernicious persons Was so extremely good for him It entirely spoilt his first love-affair To such an extent          it never came off We have read of Trattoria    meaning eating house. Piazzas    or squares The Pitti Palace    enormous And Paschkowski’s      for beer All are in Firenze Firenze is Florence Some think it is a woman with flowers in her hair But NO       it is a city with stones on the streets Giovanni Bapini often said Everybody in Firenze knows me And everybody did Excepting—That is      she didn’t She never knew what he was Or how he was himself Yet she uniquely was the one To speculate      upon the number of his toes The days growing longer Fulfilling her of curiousity She made a moth’s net Of metaphor and miracles And on the incandescent breath of civilizations She chased by moon-and-morn light Philosopher’s toes As virginal      as had he never worn them Clear of ‘white marks means money’ All quicks and cores They fluttered to her fantasy Fell into her lap While she gathered her ferny flounces about them They inappropriately passed But Giovanni Franchi was there He almost winked it at her That he was there His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets The Philosopher had flung to him And as she tripped by him She guessed      these all All    but the number of those toes She made diurnal pilgrimage To the trattoria To eat Trout    that might have been trained for circuses If minarets    grew in miniature whirlpools And mayonnaise       that helped her to forget That what is underneath       need never matter She put all minor riddles out of her Such as What was the under-cover of Franchi’s book Telling to the plaid pattern of the tablecloth Too shy to interrogate She sent ambassadors To the disciple They returned Oh rats Quite manifest    that Giovanni Franchi Some semieffigy Damned by scholiums Knew no more      how many toes— Than      Giovanni Bapini knew himself

A mouth is a sideways woman, her curves and dips, the way she opens, how her hollow center can sing. Mother, your mouth is a fallen cello, your husband's hands— a casket. Full of me.

A Girl, Her soul a deep-wave pearl Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries; A face flowered for heart’s ease, A brow’s grace soft as seas Seen through faint forest-trees: A mouth, the lips apart, Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze From her tempestuous heart. Such: and our souls so knit, I leave a page half-writ — The work begun Will be to heaven’s conception done, If she come to it.

I'm talking with Mike over coffee. His wife recently left him. He's lonely. We're both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps plying the trade. We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can read a set of blueprints. But when it comes to women . . . I'm thinking about my mother, who is 91 and very frail. I'm thinking about my wife, my daughters, my granddaughter, my sister, old girlfriends, my ex-wife, and the girl from Panama in the reading room of the New Orleans public library forty-five years ago who slipped a note to me across the table, asking: "Are you a philosophy?" Rain splatters against the storefront of the coffee shop. Mike and I are silent for a long time before going back to work.

“ . . . But my mind, gone out in tenderness, Shrinks from its object . . .” —Randall Jarrell I want to find my way back to her, to help her, to grab her hand, pull her up from the wooden floor of the stacks where she’s reading accounts of the hatchet murders of Lizzie Borden’s harsh parents as if she could learn something about life if she knew all the cuts and slashes; her essay on Wordsworth or Keats only a knot in her belly, a faint pressure at her temples. She’s pale, it’s five years before the first migraine, but the dreamy flush has already drained from her face. I want to lead her out of the library, to sit with her on a bench under a still living elm tree,be one who understands, but even today I don’t understand, I want to shake her and want to assure her, to hold her—but love’s not safe for her, although she craves what she knows of it, love’s a snare, a closed door, a dank cell. Maybe she should just leave the campus, take a train to Fall River, inspect Lizzie’s room, the rigid corsets and buttoned shoes, the horsehair sofas, the kitchen’s rank stew. Hell. Bleak loyal judgmental journals of a next-door neighbor—not a friend, Lizzie had no friend. If only she could follow one trajectory of thought, a plan, invent a journey out of this place, a vocation— but without me to guide her, where would she go? And what did I ever offer, what stiffening of spine? What goal? Rather, stiffening of soul, her soul cocooned in the library’s trivia. Soul circling its lessons. What can I say before she walks like a ghost in white lace carrying her bouquet of stephanotis, her father beaming innocently at her side, a boy waiting, trembling, to shape her? He’s innocent, too, we are all innocent, even Lizzie Borden who surely did take the axe. It was so hot that summer morning. The hard-hearted stepmother, heavy hand of the father. There was another daughter they favored, and Lizzie, stewing at home, heavy smell of mutton in the pores of history. But this girl, her story’s still a mystery—I tell myself she’s a quick study, a survivor. There’s still time. Soon she’ll close the bloody book, slink past the lit carrels, through the library’s heavy door to the world. Is it too late to try to touch her, kneel beside her on the dusty floor where we’re avoiding her assignment?

Good enough name for me, my father said the day I was born. Don't see why she can't have it, too. But the women said no. My mother first. Then each aunt, pulling my pink blanket back patting the crop of thick curls tugging at my new toes touching my cheeks. We won't have a girl named Jack, my mother said. And my father's sisters whispered, A boy named Jack was bad enough. But only so my mother could hear. Name a girl Jack, my father said, and she can't help but grow up strong. Raise her right, my father said, and she'll make that name her own. Name a girl Jack and people will look at her twice, my father said. For no good reason but to ask if her parents were crazy, my mother said. And back and forth it went until I was Jackie and my father left the hospital mad. My mother said to my aunts, Hand me that pen, wrote Jacqueline where it asked for a name. Jacqueline, just in case someone thought to drop the ie. Jacqueline,  just in case I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer and further away from Jack.

The bodies seemed so much like sleeping children that working with them felt “almost more like a kidnapping than archaeological work,” Dr. Miremont said. — New York Times , September 11, 2007 Thunder loves you, mumbles charms to warm you—folded cold body. Lightning’s pity picks you, licks a kiss, but what’s left to wick? Even direct hits miss— no amount of flash and hiss fires you. Inviolate virgin, inflammable channel to Gods long gone or gone underground, ghost-gray flecks left in the rock altar, your shelter for five centuries where you huddled, red-painted hair and wreathed with feathers. Weave threads of your shawl— not a shroud since you were live when left for dead—weave cover please, I beg your handlers. Pull stitches so that wound closes over your smoldered remains. They say you clutch your mother’s hair, strands in a bag sent up the mountain, an introduction to the Gods of Science, who read threaded DNA to determine who you were related to when human. Not the crushed boy near you, no brother he nor sister the girl, bound away to sacred silence, cased in plastic cased in glass. Visitors point and justify the past: See what they did—child sacrifice. Fattened ’em up, drugged ’em— Spanish violence, Christian influence, border fences, all deserved because of her wad of coca leaves and elaborate braids. Lightning’s mark spares you display. Singed cheek and blasted chest, blackened flesh looks less asleep, flashed back the fact you’re dead, a charred mummy, so far gone even Lightning’s longing couldn’t wake you. Thunder won’t forget you, hums a generator’s song in cooler vents to your coiled form in cold storage— song of your six years plus five centuries come to this: doom, doom, doom. Lightning still sighs:release, release, release.