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my love who shelters in his words sometimes falls silent for a sudden eternity breathes that silence into a bell of glass in which he calms storms he draws lee lines in what was it’s more like a firefirm crackling when he takes up words with ease in a single glance, caressing my body I read him day and night. What will it be like when he withdraws into the word old,

The man with the red hat And the polar bear, is he here too? The window giving on shade, Is that here too? And all the little helps, My initials in the sky, The hay of an arctic summer night? The bear Drops dead in sight of the window. Lovely tribes have just moved to the north. In the flickering evening the martins grow denser. Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat Cry “We are ripe, reap us!” —Ted Hughes I begin to think Actaeon never changed. The words that followed him, the poems That leapt upon him and left him for dead Were difficult exactly to the extent They were rational. It makes perfect sense For nakedness to give way to frenzy. And the poems, let’s be clear, were naked. Time was, questions were put, clear as water. The Goddess bathed, and time was the soft smile Of water catching the sunlight on her. And the sunlight, let’s be clear, was sheer murder. Into the same creature, no human word Leaps twice. Given to frenzy, nakedness Smiles upon the breaking of men and dogs. How easy to lose all patience with chaste things! Christ, I am hoping to hear from you Before the hunters and suicides make off with me. Christ, I am hoping to take your weapons To a tarn freezing in the death of me. I shall harry the moon there. I shall halloo. Bayed in the cross-tree is a lion too. In 1969 a red stag made A cobweb of moonlight in his antlers. For once in your life, pray without ceasing, Pray the stag safely by the lion’s tree. Actaeon never changed. Predator Is simply prey to nakedness and reason. The poems have been out hunting all the time. Then it is Friday. Frisk. You might as well. Seeing as the rapeweed, you might as well. The lion is no stranger. The belling Stag is as familiar as the moon, but a strange Suicide. Taken by legs, taken By sinews, kissing the cobwebs of moonlight, He prays the prayer I was not quick to say. Berries and hoardings, ermine horseplay short Of the new, short of poems no longer old As I knew them, leaving the small schools For the main campus rapeweed climbing, pale. It is Friday. Stars won’t cross. Actaeon Never imagined the frail, sheer speed Of meat. Christ, eat me. Nothing else makes sense. On the far Safe side of becoming, Metaphor Is all love, The pure being of each Nude above Perfect sense. I begin to hunt words. The tension The soft smile Of the Goddess eases A short while Reappears In a red stag’s terror. Metaphor Leaps and eats. It is not difficult. Love is meat. The dogs leap on Actaeon. He is human. I begin to think of Time as anything In the gift of humans or as sacrifice To the long uplift of lions in the blood. Now dogs tear deeply into the living flesh. Each moment is a visible agony, And still the godly human nature remains Unharmed. I never imagined the sheer frail Of fear so powerful. Legs and sinews turn Into flowers. Between her breasts, the Goddess Shelters one such, one blood violet alive. The porch of heaven is littered with color. As familiar as the moon, our humanness Crosses into heaven as the new poem. On the far side of becoming, a life’s work Begins another kind of work, but naked Of change. There are animals, water and trees. Nothing is recognizable in its old Skin, yet everything shimmers. I am afraid, Shrinking from the teeth of the cold water And from the howling trees. I perish at this point Down among dogs and upwards beside lion. The pieces of me are carried fast away By plot and rhyme. See Artemis bathing. The moonlight on her body is the mother Of God. It makes perfect sense. I am eaten And fed changeless into her breast, blood Violet alive. I remain your friend.

Gliding o'er all, through all, Through Nature, Time, and Space, As a ship on the waters advancing, The voyage of the soul—not life alone, Death, many deaths I'll sing.

A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

More than ample a deadfall of one meter eighty to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet and crash the operating system, tripping an automated shutdown in the casing and halting all external workings of the moist robot I inhabit at the moment: I am out cold and when my eyes roll in again I sit on the edge of the bed and tell you just how taken I am with the place I’d been, had been compelled to leave, airlifted mid-gesture, mid-sentence, risen of a sudden like a bubble or its glisten or a victim snatched and bundled out, helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day, and all particulars of life there fled except the sense that stays with me for hours and hours that I was valuable and needed there.

first and most important dream our missing friends forward burn their reflections into empty chairs we are less bound by time than the clockmaker fears this morning all I want is to follow where the stone angels point birdsong lashing me to tears heterosexuals need to see our suffering the violent deaths of our friends and lovers to know glitter on a queer is not to dazzle but to unsettle the foundation of this murderous culture defiant weeds smashing up through cement you think Oscar Wilde was funny well Darling I think he was busy distracting straight people so they would not kill him if you knew how many times I have been told you’re not like my gay best friend who tells me jokes and makes me laugh no I sure as fuck am not I have no room in my life to audition for your pansy mascot you people can’t kill me and think you can kill me again I met a tree in Amsterdam and stood barefoot beside it for twenty minutes then left completely restored yet another poem not written by a poet sometimes we need one muscle to relax so the others follow my friend Mandy calls after a long shift at the strip club to say while standing in line for death I am fanning my hot pussy with your new book will you sign it next week my fearless faggot sister

1 A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed- fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south- bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal regularity their dying has given rise to the custom of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath. The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time, about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human throat, while the adverb here refers to my person and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular level extending more of less undaunted all the way down to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves. 2 Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched, trudges through the froth. I take its photograph from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche has proven spirited enough to produce such a range of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to, and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand- new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera, and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale, then might it not also prove possible for the psyche by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress its thumbprint on some other system, a production in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway, dragging your long chains behind you most morosely if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak. 3 After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes. Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky wide open without any question, steam and dioxides of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use of imagination more productive or time less painful it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy. Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples, or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it. 4 (Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce. On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar, cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh. Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history (Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary (Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel. This passion for the material realm after death however refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy (Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats. That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless. 5 Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs, snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . . There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which to see means having wanted already to forget, unless stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp, the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why the constant hum around or inside me has to choose among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica? And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself? 6 Asked again what I miss the most about my former life, I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities, I eliminate certain objects and events from the running right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes. Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth, approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week. Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose, emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production, shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look directly into the camera, and even though it will make me come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn. 7 After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography will come to show: field after field of untouched white. After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare, too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather over time might deaden one all over again, unless being changed with death means not only changing past change but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change. That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it. In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph. The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods. When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay. I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour, even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world. 8 The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek. Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping. Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide, and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda. The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand. Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about. And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous: broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw. His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit. Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.

When she rises in the morning I linger to watch her; She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window And the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow Golden shadow glows as She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts Sway like full-blown yellow Gloire de Dijon roses. She drips herself with water, and her shoulders Glisten as silver, they crumple up Like wet and falling roses, and I listen For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals. In the window full of sunlight Concentrates her golden shadow Fold on fold, until it glows as Mellow as the glory roses.

Upon a bank, easeless with knobs of gold, Beneath a canopy of noonday smoke, I saw a measureless Beast, morose and bold, With eyes like one from filthy dreams awoke, Who stares upon the daylight in despair For very terror of the nothing there. This beast in one flat hand clutched vulture-wise A glittering image of itself in jet, And with the other groped about its eyes To drive away the dreams that pestered it; And never ceased its coils to toss and beat The mire encumbering its feeble feet. Sharp was its hunger, though continually It seemed a cud of stones to ruminate, And often like a dog let glittering lie This meatless fare, its foolish gaze to sate; Once more convulsively to stoop its jaw, Or seize the morsel with an envious paw. Indeed, it seemed a hidden enemy Must lurk within the clouds above that bank, It strained so wildly its pale, stubborn eye, To pierce its own foul vapours dim and dank; Till, wearied out, it raved in wrath and foam, Daring that Nought Invisible to come. Ay, and it seemed some strange delight to find In this unmeaning din, till, suddenly, As if it heard a rumour on the wind, Or far away its freer children cry, Lifting its face made-quiet, there it stayed, Till died the echo its own rage had made. That place alone was barren where it lay; Flowers bloomed beyond, utterly sweet and fair; And even its own dull heart might think to stay In livelong thirst of a clear river there, Flowing from unseen hills to unheard seas, Through a still vale of yew and almond trees. And then I spied in the lush green below Its tortured belly, One, like silver, pale, With fingers closed upon a rope of straw, That bound the Beast, squat neck to hoary tail; Lonely in all that verdure faint and deep, He watched the monster as a shepherd sheep. I marvelled at the power, strength, and rage Of this poor creature in such slavery bound; Fettered with worms of fear; forlorn with age; Its blue wing-stumps stretched helpless on the ground; While twilight faded into darkness deep, And he who watched it piped its pangs asleep.