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No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year Nor collateral white skin No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend New York trophy parts among the limbs of decent people Being an enraged artist is like entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears I might as well be an activist Called my girlfriend and described All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions I feared for my poetry You have to make art every once in a while While in the company of sell-outs Accountant books in deified bulk Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier Or in your last lobby as a wanderer The prison foot-races the museum My instrument ends I mean, what is a calendar to the slave? Also, what is a crystal prism? “He bought this bullet, bought its flight, then bought two more”

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood jewels & miracles, I, Maximus a metal hot from boiling water, tell you what is a lance, who obeys the figures of the present dance 1 the thing you’re after may lie around the bend of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird! And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight (of the bird o kylix, o Antony of Padua sweep low, o bless the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart, And the flake-racks of my city! 2 love is form, and cannot be without important substance (the weight say, 58 carats each one of us, perforce our goldsmith’s scale feather to feather added (and what is mineral, what is curling hair, the string you carry in your nervous beak, these make bulk, these, in the end, are the sum (o my lady of good voyage in whose arm, whose left arm rests no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner! a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for forwarding 3 the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must be played by, said he, coldly, the ear! By ear, he sd. But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned? when even our bird, my roofs, cannot be heard when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? when, on the hill, over the water where she who used to sing, when the water glowed, black, gold, the tide outward, at evening when bells came like boats over the oil-slicks, milkweed hulls And a man slumped, attentionless, against pink shingles o sea city) 4 one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born born of yourself, born of hay and cotton struts, of street-pickings, wharves, weeds you carry in, my bird of a bone of a fish of a straw, or will of a color, of a bell of yourself, torn 5 love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejorocracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon offend a black-gold loin? how shall you strike, o swordsman, the blue-red black when, last night, your aim was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick And not the cribbage game? (o Gloucester-man, weave your birds and fingers new, your roof-tops, clean shit upon racks sunned on American braid with others like you, such extricable surface as faun and oral, satyr lesbos vase o kill kill kill kill kill those who advertise you out) 6 in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form that which you make, what holds, which is the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect, the mast, the mast, the tender mast! The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say under the hand, as I see it, over the waters from this place where I am, where I hear, can still hear from where I carry you a feather as though, sharp, I picked up in the afternoon delivered you a jewel, it flashing more than a wing, than any old romantic thing, than memory, than place, than anything other than that which you carry than that which is, call it a nest, around the head of, call it the next second than that which you can do!

I saw I dreamt Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope Not closed on their breathing But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow Suspended From the mood of a tree not American they were African Ugandan Nigerian Without a license a right to touch The sin their touching incites And I heard their names called out Revision Or Die and You Must Repent And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots Called up from the mob Of their mothers their fathers With Christ in the blood who had Christ in the blood Who sung out “Abide with Me” This was my eyes’ closed-eyed vision This is what a darkness makes And how did I move from that distance to intimacy So close I could see The four soles of their feet so close I was kneeled Could lick Those feet as if I was because I became The fire who abided I saw that I dreamt Their black skin made blacker by my feeding I thought Christ Why did I think Their black skin tipped blacker by this American Feeding but just one shot up A cry African it was American O Lord abide with me It was human lusty flat You had to be in the hollow of it to taste it You had to see how in such lack Invention takes hold They say some dreams come in the moment Of waking Stitched because daylight likes a story That some dreams are extensions Of an itch Thief-walking the coral of the brain I say But I did feel that one blue mouth blow out As I felt The mood of that tree As I saw the other turn away apart stay with silence I stayed with southern silence

I the people to the things that are were & come to be. We were once what we know when we make love    When we go away from each other because we have been created at 10th & A, in winter & of trees & of the history of houses we hope we are notes of the musical scale of heaven—I the people so repetitious, & my vision of to hold the neighbors loose- ly here in light of gel, my gel, my vision come out of my eyes to hold you sur- round you in gold & you don’t know it ever. Everyone we the people having our vision of gold & silver & silken liquid light flowed from our eyes & caressing all around all the walls. I am a late Pre- in this dawn of We the people to the things that are & were & come to be Once what we knew was only and numbers became It is numbers & gold & at 10th & A you don’t have to know it ever. Opening words that show Opening words that show that we were once the first to recognize the immortality of numbered bodies. And we are the masters of hearing & saying at the double edge of body & breath We the lovers & the eyes All over, inside her when the wedding is over, & the Park “lies cold & lifeless” I the people, whatever is said by the first one along, Angel-Agate. I wear your colors I hear what we say & what we say . . . (and I the people am still parted in two & would cry)

I looked brightness in the eye. The iron, the tang of metal & rust. I held a penny on my tongue. The taste shocked me, its brown-gold sweet. I roamed the field angry & burned asking bitter questions of a gun. Dance is a body’s refusal to die. But, oh, your gone hair. The flame & orange flare. Our forms, our least known selves — barrel, sugar, & stench. Your pleas, looped in writing, the stutter of a body’s broken grammar.

o Farrah pharaoh: the feather up and off your shoulder— an absence of pressure. but the weight of the guitar and the bass, the synth and kit— the all that was all you ever wanted to do.  the disco video grain like a leopard skin or baby powder tossed at an afro. someone blowing in your face gently— maybe the 80s you were coursing. you keep changing parts— this one that, mother and sister, too. was it you wanted as easy as making something not you speak you you spoke it —you say—maybe first: if you love you get loved. the spangle in the air shine before the light shine it. the tips of your hair coming back with they own air.

I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house with all the pomp available. With celebratory music and all my beloveds watching. With Baraka and DiPrima and Roque Dalton behind me I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house wearing my favorite clothes probably a hoodie or perhaps my Belgian suit. Belgium is a failed state in the heart of Europe which is something to aspire to. I like Belgium and one day I might like to read poems at the palace of the nation but for now I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems and sing karaoke and I will probably tell a few nervous jokes. It will be like all the other readings. We will be there together. I want to read poems at the white house and then like any house reading we will all clean up together. We will clean up the mess we have made together. All that rubble and all those ashes. These are my conditions.

I was thinking: God has abandoned me, So, what of it—he is a priceless ray of light, Or a thin needle in the haystack of man. And cruel. I have turned away from him—torment me no more. But which of us is more cruel? More to be feared? The one who has no body, of course. He has made us endless, vast— So that our grief will know no bounds. Providence, 2001

You could hike over it, the you without a problem, its mountain viewed from the closet coats are found in, your constant Yes/No a hee-haw, a mule alert that’s pasture-perfect, a coronary at the last corner. Nobody’s framing you for the chintz- covered wall to cover the leak. Besides, you like leaks, you’re inside the view as if hibernating or crazy, you try not to erupt. Hypothesize the rest, the languor and freshet, the crags, the serrated parade. So — heights? What about the hairy stream, the pushed-up bushes saying Pet me? You got a problem with that? Cascade is what you call it a voice off the hanger, the blouse cast in a corner or animate.

Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car; your office door closes behind you and at that moment you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall from the hall’s point of view. If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms of the buildings where you worked for seven years— if the halls don’t know you, and they don’t— some new woman or two new men come clattering down these halls in the month after your departure, indeed just two days after you left forever they come clattering with ideas about the relation between mind and body or will and fate filled with hormones of being the chosen workers here and they feel as if the halls and rooms begin to recognize them, accept them, as if there is a belonging in the world— but these new workers are wrong, the halls don’t know who is working under the unobtrusive fluorescent panels: this is appalling and for a minute you are appalled though your being so now is not an event in the life of your new rented house or even your new condominium . . . So if they don’t, if they don’t know you, the halls, the walls, the fixtures, then what? Then there is for you no home in that rock, no home in the mere rock of where you work, where you briskly walk, not even in the bed where your body sleeps alone or not— so if there is to be a place for you, for you it must not be located in plaster and tile and space, it will have to be in that other house, the one whose door you felt opening just last night when you dialed from memory and your friend picked up the phone.