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Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper, but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come:thwash, the next day another, an example of everything that gets done in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case, the strange October weather warming them. There were the conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.

I consider the woman’s choice in liberating a red dress with pale-green sandals. My penury depresses me into a staring contest with a melting ice cube. A friend excited my husband with an invitation to pilot a boat with powerful thrusters. My gift of chocolate in pink cellophane failed to make the blonde smile. Consequently, I remind the party-goers that Trans World Airlines painted a new night with nebulae. I could be happy in Alphabet City, buildings crumbling around my notepad. I could be happy sipping iced tea while admiring the seamless face of a pool. I could be happy gurgling back at an infant dribbling green saliva down his chin. I could be happy downing Absolut gimlets (ice-cold, no ice) in a neighborhood bar with pool players providing the music, or a hotel whose walls are laminated with mahogany and where tuxedos prevail. I could be happy with your hand on my waist as you try to identify the scent hollowing my throat. An entire landscape in Antarctica disappears, evaporates until salt becomes the only debris. There are keys to everything, even handcuffs. You could have been happy, too.

All our stones like as much sun as possible. Along their joints run both solar access and decline In equal splendor, like a mica chipping At every beat, being sun responsible. How much sun then do you think is due them? Or should say, how much sun do you think they are apt to have? It has misted at their roots for some days now, The gray glamour addressing itself to them. I should think possible that it go on misting likewise A good way into next year, or time as they have it, A regular cool season every day for our stones. Not a streak that low of any sun or longed surprise.

Distrust this season breeds in me whole blue worlds, am second to leafy nouns, pinned back darkening lip of the night, untrustworthy sidewalk glazed and sleeping there, peachy trees, a line drawn from one brow of a star down and planted, each pillow little shimmer, little wilt startled from out the arranging field moonlit pale behind no foxes, in me finding the fragrant new crisis, not dead still where I love you in feast and pledge, worlds rolling first on crookedly and on.

Tell em to take my bare walls down my cement abutments their parties thereof and clause of claws Leave me the land Scratch out: the land May prose and property both die out and leave me peace

Her life was dwarfed, and wed to blight, Her very days were shades of night, Her every dream was born entombed, Her soul, a bud,—that never bloomed.

This is a poem on my other’s body, I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one who saved her braid of blue-black hair in a drawer when I was little. Meaning one I could lean against — against not in resistance. Fuzzy dress of wuzzy one. Red lipstick one. Kitchen one. Her one to me, bad-ger bad-ger — or so I heard. The one body I write on like Daddy’s blank studio wall with my colored pencils. About seeing her skin as she bathed in the afternoon — was I five? It was summer. Then today’s winter where again I call that bath to mind. I cannot leave her body alone. Which is how I found Mother in the bath escaping the heat of a 1950s house, Father on a ladder with blowtorch to scrape the paint off the outside. • badger badger • The sun in the suburbs simmered the tar roof over our rooms in the town where only wasps lived inside paper cells beneath eaves and roots. And they hurt very much, the wasps. • Now I am sixty. Sweet as dried papaya. My hair, a bit tarnished, my inmost, null. Memory is failing away as if an image shattered to shards then recollected for a kaleidoscope: I click the pieces into sharp arrangements — grouse, crow, craven — no, now, my own daughter turns sovereign

Meat-eater, salt-licker, piped spring dribble-sucker, an exiled Bolshevik’s villa at Viareggio. The beach sheep shit crumby money, munificent marks, lire, dollars, Dolorous Daintyfoot, Proudass, Chinadoll, a three-way clut- ter, the piazza pizzeria. Mrs. Smith- Jones, rich, gonged aground a pissoir. At three the imprisoned poisoner’s tea tells her rice-cake fortune, it is it. Who to who? You yew alley ewes knew goatsuckers in Swedish horse-hide hid the boathouse key, locked the oarlock, sung Sam’s nutsy song, Sin Fleet, at night. Night, ketchup cup, pepper-pot, bid bound Belinda break her bracelets: the dirty photographs apostrophize mon- soons. Swimming snakes shake the lake.

To bomb them, we mustn’t have heard their music or known their waterless night watch, we mustn’t have seen how already the desert was under constant death bells ringing over sleeping cribs and dry wells. We couldn’t have wanted this eavesdropping of names we’ve never pronounced praying themselves towards death. I try to believe in us— we must not have heard their music.

The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: White is their color, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? Must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? Must dullness turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me,Thou art still my God. Good men ye be, to leave me my best room, Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodgèd there: I pass not, I, what of the rest become, So Thou art still my God be out of fear. He will be pleasèd with that ditty: And if I please him, I write fine and witty. Farewell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors. But will ye leave me thus? When ye before Of stews and brothels only knew the doors, Then did I wash you with my tears, and more, Brought you to church well dressed and clad: My God must have my best, ev’n all I had. Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, Honey of roses, wither wilt thou fly? Hath some fond lover ’ticed thee to thy bane? And wilt thou leave the church and love a sty? Fie, thou wilt soil thy broidered coat, And hurt thyself, and him that sings the note. Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung, With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame: Let folly speak in her own native tongue. True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame But borrowed thence to light us thither. Beauty and beauteous words should go together. Yet if you go, I pass not; take your way: For Thou art still my God is all that ye Perhaps with more embellishment can say. Go, birds of spring: let winter have his fee; Let a bleak paleness chalk the door, So all within be livelier than before.