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There is big excitement in C block today. On the window sill, in a plastic ice cream cup a little plant is growing. This is all the men want to talk about: how an apple seed germinated in a crack of damp concrete; how they tore open tea bags to collect the leaves, leached them in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed made of Lipton. How this finger of spring dug one delicate root down into the dark fannings and now two small sleeves of green are pushing out from the emerging tip. The men are tipsy with this miracle. Each morning, one by one, they go to the window and check the progress of the struggling plant. All through the day they return to stand over the seedling and whisper.

What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The luster of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? —Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength— Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this, and more; but not Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be! ’Tis not to have our life Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow, A golden day’s decline. ’Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are no more. It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion—none. It is—last stage of all— When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

Grown about by fragrant bushes, Sunken in a winding valley, Where the clear winds blow And the shadows come and go, And the cattle stand and low And the sheep bells and the linnets Sing and tinkle musically. Between the past and the future, Those two black infinities Between which our brief life Flashes a moment and goes out.

The jay’s up early, and attacks the lawn with something of that fervor and despair of one whose keys are not where they always are, checking the same spots over and again till something new or overlooked appears— an armored pillbug, or a husk of grain. He flits with it home, where his mate beds down, her stern tail feathers jutting from the nest like a spoon handle from a breakfast bowl. The quickest lover’s peck, and he’s paroled again to stalk the sodgrass, cockheaded, obsessed. He must get something from his selfless work— joy, or reprieve, or a satisfying sense of obligation dutifully dispensed. Unless, of course, he’s just a bird, with beaks— too many beaks—to fill, in no way possessed of traits or demons humans might devise, his dark not filled with could-have-beens and whys.

No, sweetheart, I said courtly love. I was thinking of John Donne's "Yet this enjoys before it woo," but my big hands were dreaming Pinetop's boogie-woogie piano taking the ubiquitous night apart. Not Courtney. I know "inflated tear" means worlds approaching pain & colliding, or a heavenly body calling to darkness, & that shame has never been my truest garment, because I was born afraid of needles. But I've been shoved up against frayed ropes too, & I had to learn to bob & weave, to duck & hook, till I could jab my way out of a foregone conclusion, till blues reddened a room. All I know is, sometimes a man wants only a hug when something two-steps him toward a little makeshift stage. Somehow, between hellhounds & a guitar solo made of gutstring & wood, I outlived a stormy night with snow on my eyelids.

I play on Grove Street, live on Grove Avenue. Find me in the streets dressed in greens like groves. On the avenue, I’m a blue jeans type of guy. In the streets, never leave home w/out my 9mm. On the avenue, always carry my pen & wine key, in case some fool blows his cork. My UZI sings songs in the streets—rat-a-tat-tat. Birds chirp-chirp-chirp in trees on the avenue. Rolling down the street w/my lady—what she wanna do? “Let’s do a drive-by.” Rushing down the avenue w/my baby: “I’m hungry. Let’s do drive-thru.” I’ll punch punks purple & blue in the streets, bleed ’em w/bullets. On the avenue, I’ll leave punching to punks dressed in blues, reds, et cetera & mind my own.

We knew something was wrong when next to the TV, a large tomatillo plant was growing out the carpet. Everything there spoke, Table, Lamps    ... In the living room, Coffee Table’s eyes glued to the TV: flags, drums, hands on the chest on the screen, but it couldn’t have been Independence. It was the fifth of the fifth month, something about a battle won, a battle lost. Our host, Dining Table, handed each of us a green sphere.Eat, s’il vous plaît. Don’t think about it, she told us; then sent Chair and Coffee Table to sleep. Watch the bedbugs. You can’t unlock the windows, Fan in the hallway said. For two weeks Table left tomatillos outside our door. The green marbles punched through our stomachs, so deep, our ears grew roots. It was as if no heat. Bed wished she was bigger. Closet dreaded his clothes. Wall didn’t let us sleep; kept saying, ¡Look! Look over there, cabrones. You’ll never make it there. If you’re gonna ask for the best route, the best price. ¿Where are your suspenders? ¿Dress shoes? You’re not really serious about getting to San Francisco. ¿Are you? Pinche dirty pigeons.

Tournaments lasted days and changed you, but today the living and dead are speaking through microphone of “I Voted” button, erogenous zone, a place in the mind’s wrestle, pause that votes and bets. Other voters return to homes, run dishwasher, read to kids, get high and craft. Still others walk the golf course turning gold with sprinkler. Returns are noted. No one hangs who had not already planned to hang. At some point I’ve thrown almost everything, and broken within, activated like a glow stick. It is a sustained throwing; an act with its stink of trash — power out — each evening, the stairs and the light switch, and a pause at the open door. Unenunciated stair-structures are closing off the switch from voice to silence. This morning, a snail bore its huge garden shell, the color of owl, into the afternoon. How to choose what to bring! I set the excess down by the door, for nobody who is there, or seems that way. Near the fire. Where the weather vane points is where I’ll carry my father, slung fleece and steady footfall into the valley of the painting above the couch, brushstrokes crazed and smoked, enveloping the riders, us, trot-dazed in a conjectured landscape paralyzed by the wind’s chisel. The clouds are a sheet the volcano staples above parking lots to hills where owners shit and talk on the last phones. As long as the sheet holds I will be darling. Or it is the mildewed sail battened down where I hide from fathers. Light rain makes rooftops new. Boughs fracture like lines an iced-over pond zags ahead of a boot and in there we get glimpses of inquiry, otherness to learn more about. Silence becomes the subject the speaker set out to be, landscape’s counterpart, and reflection my resemblance. A hand goes up to stop the process, and, when the process doesn’t stop, suppresses until the next moment approaches, and passes, the bid dizzy with regeneration. Let’s fold this balloon into animals, vehicles, a weapon, the air inside song, or last breath, or first. I’m a dog when I ape my words. Who would dent or differ? The teeth of the pig are, it whispers, red and brown and recede now that they have been mentioned. When I look close: not us. What is inexpressed? This departure hurries by and is like the lion who simultaneously guards the books and elsewhere tests the river with a paw, stone in the first and lean flesh in the other world where the sun is blessing its glide back into thornbushes and I am stone, guarding stone. There is no predator I would like to be torn in half by, from the logging road a cut like a jeweler’s work down to the shore where the sea stars disappeared leaving nukes and love metered and syllabary and also the rocks they used to cling to exposed at low tide, green clocks. At dawn a fishing boat’s uncertain past the rock offshore, chord on chord. Warped sexual knuckle in flushed purple and hundreds of shades of orange, herpetic and stone to touch, cut, they grow back, vitrified, easy to draw. Round was the dish of mints in the conference room where we signed over my mother’s liver, some mints were soft and pastel, some hard with white covering. Mint grows back in the creek. The liver grows back too, largest organ in the body. No, not skin, mother, skin is on the body — we addressed this with the host at trivia night no, not the one I go to each Sunday with friends, the constant one I sleep inside of every blink. Time’s the thing that’s not the mind or the baby, which wants a nipple. Time’s a baby in a sling, all the babies in the park on blankets, beginning, a minor electricity, water and dust a kind of suet in a hanging cage and is larger than whatever the universe turns out to be (a strawberry pip) all tough winter, which has been shown to prosper. Seen from the past the line is the present when the astronauts came back, bid us bury our gravity and grow the lines that are the story of loneliness, waste, either enough or not enough. I walk past the potted plants in the side alley, marigold, sunfollower, a good plate, give a little water, adjust the moments. Constellation of last images before sleep: a walk around the drained reservoir, arrival at the island; having a theater all to yourself and they show the movie anyway. Formless or forming interior scrumble: the fluttering of her eyelid is like what floats up the chimney. Something inside is being stepped-down to the noises from when I was here last. This time of year you can see to the bottom of the lake.

All this was written on the next day’s list. On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots, pale but effective, and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events, built-up its tiniest cathedral ... (Or is it the sum of what takes place?) If I lean down, to whisper, to them, down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path, hoping to be on the air, hoping to please the children— (and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if I stir the wintered ground-leaves up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun, into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though mostly crisp, fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by— just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought, no, a burning-bush’s worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves, oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one, the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one, the hurried mind hovering over its rankings, the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the zero of the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart, formulating its alleyways of discovery, fussing about the integrity of the whole, the heart trying to make time and place seem small, sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event on the list then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss, an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged obligation, checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes the unfinishable’s gold hem aside, revealing what might have been, peeling away what should ... There are flowerpots at their feet. There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe. It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air, down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth. Oh listen to these words I’m spitting out for you. My distance from you makes them louder. Are we all waiting for the phone to ring? Who should it be? What fountain is expected to thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees, what parapets petalling-forth the invisible into the world of things, turning the list into its spatial form at last, into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony.... Oh look at you. What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list won’t cover?   You down there, in the theater of operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical— (are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)— (what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)— oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused —as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some original fleet, the captains gone but some of us who saw the plan drawn out still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men, who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings, while the solitary ones, heads in their hands, so still, the idea barely forming at the base of that stillness, the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot itself out of the manyness—the plan—before it’s thought, before it’s a done deal or the name-you’re-known-by— the men of x, the outcomes of y—before— the mind still gripped hard by the hands that would hold the skull even stiller if they could, that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let to filter through— the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree, without the distractions of wonder— oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea, which taking-form begins to twist, coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit, now finally about to rise, about to go into the other room—and yet not having done so yet, not yet—the intake—before the credo, before the plan— right at the homesickness—before this list you hold in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.

Men of the Twenty-first Up by the Chalk Pit Wood, Weak with our wounds and our thirst, Wanting our sleep and our food, After a day and a night. God, shall we ever forget? Beaten and broke in the fight, But sticking it, sticking it yet, Trying to hold the line, Fainting and spent and done; Always the thud and the whine, Always the yell of the Hun. Northumberland, Lancaster, York, Durham and Somerset, Fighting alone, worn to the bone, But sticking it, sticking it yet. Never a message of hope, Never a word of cheer! Fronting Hill 70’s shell-swept slope, With the dull, dead plain in our rear; Always the shriek of the shell, Always the roar of the burst, Always the tortures of Hell, As waiting and wincing we cursed Our luck, the guns, and the Boche. When our Corporal shouted “Stand to!” And I heard some one cry, “Clear the front for the Guards!”— And the Guards came through. Our throats they were parched and hot, But Lord, if you’d heard the cheer, Irish and Welsh and Scot, Coldstream and Grenadier— Two Brigades, if you please, Dressing as straight as a hem. We, we were down on our knees, Praying for us and for them, Praying with tear-wet cheek, Praying with outstretched hand. Lord! I could speak for a week, But how could you understand? How could your cheeks be wet? Such feelin’s don’t come to you; But how can me or my mates forget When the Guards came through? “Five yards left extend!” It passed from rank to rank, And line after line, with never a bend, And a touch of the London swank. A trifle of swank and dash, Cool as a home parade, Twinkle, glitter and flash, Flinching never a shade, With the shrapnel right in their face, Doing their Hyde Park stunt, Swinging along at an easy pace, Arms at the trail, eyes front. Man! it was great to see! Man! it was fine to do! It’s a cot, and hospital ward for me, But I’ll tell them in Blighty wherever I be, How the Guards came through.