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swans The arc of the driveway is what’s left, where someone built a house and tended a lake to walk beside, discussing politics and how a tree moves in the wind. Its music is a jetty drifting away from the boathouse whose rolled-shut metal door tricks visitors into thinking it holds a life raft. The house drifts beyond its purpose, is demolished for a car park and picnics and returns in a special room, small, sturdy, becoming anonymous as its windows empty, enormous insects swanning around — they own the place — occasionally stunning themselves on the glass. secretarial The country, sometimes, still appears to ask to just be taken down, even by a tourist, on no one’s side, a tourist lost at home, blue book open, ticking off each task. But when old Colin, in pajamas, explained how I could evade the barbed and electric wire that fenced off fields and the bull let loose to scare the stranger off (I’d stopped to ask for directions), I was ready to wade through cowshit and knee-high grass to see if the poet, long abroad, was written in the ruin’s native life. Colin stopped me then, leaning on the open door of the Renault— noting first the English registration I’d parked outside his roadside bungalow, and said his father hated that his mother called him Colin, but he’s the one who stuck it out. No one, it seems he had to tell me this, no one belonging to them ever had to go over to England, a sally he follows up with a question about where I live, before naming the man on whose land the castle rested: we do nothing, he says, but damage what we inherited, bulldozing the medieval church and causing the collapse of the foxhole the settler and his family used, legend has it, to make, under a smoldering fire, their escape. This new heir has his eye on the castle, no doubt. It will soon be more literature than history. We are not all the same, he said. I recall, at the edge of the clearing, the grant’s nice clause saying the poet had a right to possess new areas discovered by his survey ... To belong, a moment’s authority is nothing.

The day glared, breathless: an eye socket. Clouds barely shifted, and the opal sky was sheared into dry-dazzling millions. Yet fall in, the sky, it did not. The mail did not go undelivered, dogs were walked; lovers fell savagely out of and in love, and all between. Seven concussed days, his draft longhand swaying like supple pillars of gray flame, erasures; in the long nights his desk lamp revealed the window streaked with chalk sweated off the fen, which was England. Once Ribera’s Jacob, now Jerome, Ugg-booted at the piano, “The Irishe Dumpe” from the Fitzwilliam Virginal hindered by the little lion kneading his lap. Later, the papers howling of guignol ambush would milk his delighting spleen as the rectory self-veiled in evensong and dusk. Somewhere over an inexpressive sea of rain-sleek tiles, the contemptible perfection of gardens, perhaps up from the weird moonlike muteness of the Black Country’s broken kilns and felt absences, it came winging. He died without dread or pain. A sour storm rides the Levant, rinsing the domeless yellow streets. On the steep road to Worms Ash the coverts take the tincture of foxgloves, where the shade of Housman, deadly-formal kink still running through him, fidgets among the cinder-like moths. Hill makes his way to Pisgah.

The night approaches. Dusk drafts on buildings their future ruins. Dusk deepens windows and apertures. It hollows stones with shadows like with water. It foretells the near death of a hundred clouds to the shining host. A thin layer of dust, the seer leaves his footprints on the roofs as he walks home from the future not his own, swallowing his voice — in its rays, fat blood flows down the golden armor. Wet blue entrails. Large heads have rolled down the shoulders. Speech has grown silent in deep mouths. ................................................. The signs of a life without past will emerge like lies through the lines of an old page, emptiness will turn into loss, foreign sand into Ithaca. Ithaca is the time when there’s nowhere to go. If it’s night, it means the night is the end of the voyage. A sackcloth hiding the shoulders of the stranger is truer than speeches about past and future he won’t make. Nobody will. On the streets rain readies hollows for the funeral, already overgrown with grass. In a long puddle he sees: a pauper, a random victim of the skies hangs with his head down. In height, he is a cloud, the size of a lost faith in returning home. ....................... So should I, a pauper sitting by a stranger’s door, declare:I’m Odysseus, and I’m back. Should I say: I’m recognized. After the mourning songs tears are still rolling down my face. I have been summoned to clothe the past in the shining ice.

Wherever we go, needs feed and I find it harder and harder to believe benevolence is the thing Thousands of Yazidi girls missing and plastic fills the ocean’s mouth and the cursive of yr name still occupies the canopy of my throat Fuel, the under- pinning What fires your gd engine Rigor, mortis Cold as unmoving or unmoved The opposite of music Warm in the cold universe Molten, forming A rock becoming magma becoming lava becoming land Land, the trauma of lava Lava the lamp of the ancestors and later a cheeky find in the Junk shop and rising in our living room Livin groom Just bc nothing cares doesn’t mean it lacks meaning What’s the point of curiosity but a train rolling past the spot where the Donner Party feasted n then go on a four hour Wikipedia downward spiral I’m the closest thing to a mime parade I whisper, home late tiptoeing down the creaky hallway tryin not to wake my roommates Nice chicken parm, sluts, I say to my fingers at lunch Dissociation is evacuating from the inside I just know we’ll have a good time

ix There I was, all spread out for the taking, bloomed wings waiting for winter sleet. It was a long season of drinking whole creeks and nothing else. We churned desert into desert. What I’m saying is, neither the desert rat nor damselfly can bear the nosebleeds: shoal- laced face bearing down just in time to overwinter. There I was, all spread out for the taking. In truth, nobody wants water this thin. One swallow, and we’re off to dig for more within a hollow womb. This morning we sip water, discussing the trauma in our blood: saltwater — there it rests, in droplets, on my breast skin, “Oh,” I say. “My tears,” rubbing them deep within. xi At church I sat salvaged: I said to send me away wearing nothing but satin and lace. We both felt secondhand. It was knee- length, and it wore me cheap. I couldn’t embrace the old woman who once wore it, couldn’t see my wrists even. And my neck, it was braced up all in lace. The woman next to me says, “How beautiful.” I say, “This beautiful,” then split a hair down the middle. I lied, “I made it myself,” then stood up to fade through painstaking humiliation. As a child, a girl, I saw through myself to age 45. It was then when I first noticed the aching of my hands, how they were soon to set themselves away — they came and went, as if they were lace for the breaking. xiii I was reciting Alfred, Lord Tennyson on my back, in a canoe, floating the holiest way I knew — so close to ghost, and went pale for a moment before finding myself wandering among high pines. I didn’t expect to emerge in white already with my heart in his hand, just as normal as a shell rests on my chest. Didn’t expect to hand it over so early on, at the boundary of our properties in a dream: in the grasses where he ended and I began.I’m feeling very still now that we’ve crossed over into the pale, where we are soon to thread, soon to embellish, then loop back into each other: braided the way we were taught to approach each other — the same way.

Auld Coila now may fidge fu' fain, She's gotten poets o' her ain— Chiels wha their chanters winna hain, But tune their lays, Till echoes a' resound again Her weel-sung praise. Nae poet thought her worth his while To set her name in measur'd style: She lay like some unken'd-of isle Beside New Holland, Or whare wild-meeting oceans boil Besouth Magellan. Ramsay and famous Fergusson Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon; Yarrow and Tweed to mony a tune Owre Scotland rings; While Irvin, Lugar, Ayr an' Doon Naebody sings. Th' Ilissus, Tiber, Thames, an' Seine Glide sweet in mony a tunefu' line; But, Willie, set your fit to mine And cock your crest, We'll gar our streams and burnies shine Up wi' the best! We'll sing auld Coila's plains an' fells, Her moors red-brown wi' heather bells, Her banks an' braes, her dens an' dells, Where glorious Wallace Aft bure the gree, as story tells, Frae Southron billies. At Wallace' name what Scottish blood But boils up in a spring-tide flood! Oft have our fearless fathers strode By Wallace' side, Still pressing onward red-wat-shod, Or glorious dy'd. O sweet are Coila's haughs an' woods,. When lintwhites chant amang the buds, And jinkin hares in amorous whids Their loves enjoy, While thro' the braes the cushat croods Wi' wailfu' cry! Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, When winds rave thro' the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, Dark'ning the day! O Nature! a' thy shews an' forms To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! Whether the summer kindly warms Wi' life an' light, Or winter howls in gusty storms The lang, dark night! The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel he learn'd to wander Adoun some trottin burn's meander, And no think lang; O sweet to stray and pensive ponder A heart-felt sang! The warly race may drudge and drive, Hog-shouther, jundie, stretch an' strive: Let me fair nature's face descrive, And I wi' pleasure Shall let the busy, grumbling hive Bum owre their treasure.

act 1 , scene 1 : do you know what it means for our survival? Fog spun into silk on the knee of the comptroller, propelled toward the crest of Ontario, the old, faded star, steambreath onto the windshield. To orient in the finest sense of cackles, mute chrysanthemums, funneling inordinate nakedness, absorbed, absorbed, immediately absorbed. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, we stay limber, each line choreographed from a tremendous mouthful of swamp, skunk cabbage brining at the jowls, acquiesced to pestilence, and exaggerated diffidence. Do you know what it is to clamp your shell an extra foot into the silt riverbank, kissing the soles of passersby, silky grains churning the earth over? Makeshift ceremonial dances, fine textiles culled from thrift store bins display brightly-colored throats who feed stacks of cash killed on recycled names. There is a golden tapestry on the berry-stained bottom of Wealth Woman’s basket of abalone. Beneath it are the exhausted faces of her babies grown old in the length of the inhale, and a facsimile remains from all the cycles spilled over, since nature cannot acid wash, since frizz canvassing the ozone always carries over. Geometry for days, countless days, spin-cycled through a craftsman’s circumpolar hands. There’s always another grotto or chamber where things dwell, they say. Wandering skitterers we are, the Northern Lights vacuum pried-open skulls. We cover ourselves with hides and entrails, overripe elderberries, looking to steal a moment of letup from the glare. The limbs of the Old Ones shunt aside bare toes, stripped solid and indifferent as a bear’s den or an ant’s apartment. Don’t be so much in charge, the frogs say, of coalescing wolverine trails huddled in 60-million-year pellet tracks when the wetlands dried out. The way soaked, green corpuscles rasp each other’s mouths and hands braiding the woof of God’s mind, that’s how it is, says the giant rat’s captive wife. Even if you can only faintly hear the eighth narrative told in the corner of the babbling wooden-slat house, that is enough leftover hooligan grease for the gods with killer whale ganglia. Knuckles rasp proscenium floorboards, splattering herring peck at scops owl’s waist, spruce branch lowered, scrapes conglomerate bedrock. Mother-in-law’s atonic hands lunge for stewed milt. One can conclude it’s a virus to plant burdensome layers of topographic crust on self-renewing limbs, like there was more to it than rustling fingers at the end of the line. All components must be in order, or it’s an ulcer here, a bladder infection there, a baked-out parking lot, fizzing in trampled-over, chastened hairlines. Hold, hold, hold, hold in your palms the Steller’s jay that beats its wings on glaciers lying high and straight over rivers slicing into cool nettles. Sea lions suck up a quick breath, dive and waft on the outskirts of ballerinas who gyrate in like-mind to classics bubbling up from Sedna’s citadels. I’m here to show you what you can do with this sandbar dialect, says the humpback whale and the goatsbeard moss, and the ore of iron oxide in the shoreline cliff. You must trust, she says, your swimming blood, joints lumbering in shadows, the dolphin clicking out to you, far above ground. And we should feed just as much as eat, says the heart your body formed around.

1 Because he, because she, in so far as she (in so far as he) exists is on the way to battle. Not what is your name, but what the battle? 2 “Each one of us has come here and changed” — is the battle. Born a loved one, borne a loved one. 3 My father fought in this war, thus I can speak of it. My mother fought in this, thus I can speak. My friends, my lovers have fought, have worn (like the tree) their several directions at once. And I, in so far as I can say “I” have fought to be related to these — we strive and strain but also try to ripen the entity of the Other. 4 We kiss on lips, where the tenses attach. We enter the conundrum of another’s becoming. We look for someone who can raise us up again to feet, or near to standing. We tend in our terrors to forget (we do not store them) felicities. I try each day to stay near beings, mornings when I am most mild. And may I nothing harm, in case it is them.

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i came close to his WET dog’s eye & a FAT tear shared animal PAIN sloshed & seeped in between us — “darling I’m sorry you were born a dog & people notice it” , 2 COME ON IN, WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU like a clue we found PEOPLE in the KITCHEN in the SUICIDE VEST with the KALASHNIKOV such beautiful, desperate weapons their faces had to be covered so we didn’t fall in love piteously with the self-same wretchedness we see in mirrors a worryingly familiar scene we’ve lived in will live in the carnage going on behind closed doors being told, regurgitatingly, “you only get one shot!” but is it true you only get one shot when you get a loaded magazine & plenty more where that came from in the MUNITIONS DEPOT which I picture in Arizona, right beside a render farm and to the left THE CLOUD that backs up and up and up up to where are there edges, Bobby? INTELLIGENCE tells us to test the power of names by naming things, for one thing to name is to guarantee the end like a starting pistol BANG you name it         it’s ! smithereens 4 I am so indifferent to the limits of feelings I can’t tell the difference every time someone lifts my flap the unwashed salad the unheated leftovers the sanitary products are standard but bear no relation to what I expected to feel overlaid with various forms of filth don’t you sometimes feel like getting wrapped in a dog towel and buried in the hardening ground under the Canadian maple? Do dogs need to approach death and back away from it like I did when the vet injected deep pentobarbital & his bowels ejected across the floor tiles I was there to inhale his fur and weep for my benefit I am not independent of my feelings this way of talking about feelings has fooled each one of us I’d rather be given CBT by a border collie when there are fewer words around my arms around his only adored and stinking neck dead up my nostrils throw me in there with him everything is in the cold awful and I’m not OK and without good reason still here and feelings 6 JUST A GENTLE REMINDER A LOT OF WORK goes into making sex alluring sex is just this and that but it seemed, for a moment, that a new climax had been won when even the sky fingered me with a slobbery insistence when we were retching with so much desire we created a whole new atmosphere grabbing at sex things / using the sick bag to be actually sick in now the shower curtain is transparent it’s a way of saying, “I want you too to have this experience so that we are more alike like a sign that life struck once in a slippy-bits marathon that began when our eyes were magnets yanked to each other’s fully-charged crotches at a picnic when it was essential to make every enhancement to our ‘connection’ by getting seriously indecent beside the Bluetooth wireless speaker system until even the trees had to dash inside to pour ice in their underpants” while I choked up playing the scene, as we lived it, united by our pursuit of arrhythmia or satisfying itches to that catchy bridge section in Chopin (I couldn’t wait to come with Chopin through his melancholic meadow (not that I approve of background music (I prefer to foreground the piano by massaging it loud and all over until the top layer comes off in my hand and the pedal squeaks for humanity (I like to FEEL a piano as an instrument of interruption and consciousness (though I also like to take light swims, to get away from what I FEEL (today I felt jelly beans resemble kidneys)))))) which throbs like everyone grieving 7 HERE, HAVE A NEW PUPPY said the Russians to the French to soften the dog-loss but mostly the dog’s image the image is the greater likeness except we never seem to run out of images sometimes something in an image runs through me and that is very common as is reading about something that’s happening to someone outside of me until I know someone outside of me without any knowledge it is a test for my knowledge to hang around until morning practically all mornings are news to me practically all knowledge is news to me practically all news is images going very fast around the world so we have to guzzle them like wrapped food — hot and on the run — in one end and squitted out the other [pics or it didn’t happen] until I’m fat with implications and containing not a sausage 9 I love a good weepy dog-meme as much as the next crybaby and nauseate irregularly when the gifs load automatically his hairy body into my hairy body unfairly the dog becomes the shape of 2:13 p.m. in me on a Tuesday if we accept the world as totally fucked there’s a lot worse coming than dog hairs in macaroni cheese dog hairs on pillows dog hairs in rented flats in bathtubs in my hair in my dog’s hair in your short & curlies between my teeth in coagulant soap bars some people are revolted by dogs and dogs are not up for revolting I am revolted when dogs are lacking what if he did lick my cheeks by which I mean “buttocks” which were coated in whipped shea butter and heavily comestible it’s obvious he’s related to a father he never knew because we found all his needs and perverted them into a kind of inter-species loyalty or the usual master-slave hierarchy before laying down the crisp breakfast bowl of the rest of his days which gave us carte blanche to rush in anytime and smother him with kisses without getting socked in the eye (unlike when I tried the same on Johnny (who spat my tongue out (& no one blamed him))) when maybe all he wants is just to go on being less and less subtle and alive the way life becomes very well known after its termination 12 If rigor mortis sets in it means there’s somebody who needs it. It means that somebody is drained and not awake and deems any speckles of life unusable and he is dead and dead all dead in the humus of trashed bodies shoved down there dressed in made-up relationships. What’s your favorite part? Mine’s every part with a maggot in it. Maggots mean that life’s still leaking. It’s like magic when his dead voice is nauseating and I can’t see him so he might as well be invisible. It’s like magic when he isn’t and doesn’t have anything to say and I can’t bear to listen anyway so I just recognize my fingers / all the injuries they’ve inflicted while my skin drops off. What’s worse than a maggot in the EAT ME GLOVE-BOX DATES? Does the 5-second rule apply to something that drops dead? Is it true he might come back and crack open a piñata blue alcopops, bombay mix, karaoke, and a pint of nostalgia which is like thinking in another language, I mean, how it feels, not what it means. Half a maggot, the memory of mange marching across his fur describes a lot of other feelings the feeling that someone else is taking up the whole room the feeling that no one could help me now or ever whether I was on several edges my hot core and noggin facing this hammering world of brainlessness and sweetbreads was always a favorite word. I don’t know what it tastes like but I know it’s terrible. a:ldskjfa:lkdgjsa meaning I’m so overcharged that all I can do is literally slam my hands / head / breasts against the keyboard. Wherever there are corpses there are maggots. If we dig him up will he be wearing a jacket? LOOK OUT for the milkier, gentler solaces which for all we know                   for all we know could be the wind or Chopin’s noise (still hammering the background) — who’s seen it? Only its aftermath is visible what’s not visible is the aftermath of my screaming 20 you can catch me on the FLOOR / DOG / SYRINGE periphery of the dying and dead scene FACE (FEMALE) maybe my whole life carting sensations to the center mopping shit up with towels SKULL / COFFIN (there are feelings for these things) while public petting CAR / PLANE / ROCKET bodies leak it’s no surprise what I give away ONE DROPLET you can have when the vet twirls off to deal with some bloody business in a kitchen KNIFE / GUN the hug-a-corpse scene gets deep in the hold of what I am PARTY POPPER / WASTEBIN is what I’ve not yet been 30 Who concocts the smell of dogs which smells like an extreme close-up of the world oozing in at the edges. Full as an ice cube is full of liquid. I mistook it for solidity. The world is too full of smells. Though it’s impossible to see the top of it they crawl between my legs in the shimmering fuzz on top of the plant stickers of evenings tongues held out pocket-friendly air fresheners strikes on our nostrils. They come at me streaming. Why the dog? Why not the dog? Was it only a dream of soil heating held and stimulated for his unique aroma. It’s not a way in but it places you somewhere that smells strong and looks strong leaving behind us. Hi.