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When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will Love has been torn in two. DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera, good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil he classified darkness, females, and so forth. (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84) Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse. First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.

He seems to be in front helping me look out of my foreheaded self. Listen to me: prone night. I was its actual first child cutting a path with my sword through its vapors. Then I subdued night until the desert was clear and a disk shone above. I am the hero of the struggle between de- spair and illumination, which is not a shaky buoyancy but claritas. The name of life or that you see at all. Just look. If you kill yourself nothing will happen. No choices but pedestrian actions a lying story: you have done nothing. You can be a detail — a scurrier — garbage you leave, a fit of nerves, propagating that. The front of my looking out pulls beauty taking me taking you. The scab in the sky is gone. We have to go beyond our calculations and the small words. Why a golden fringe on shirt come quickly riding the best horses. And nux is what night the worthless was, as I sang, We don’t have to believe the petite poetries. Hooves are pulling us across the yellow sands: lost in a word, led in a word I got there. I can never turn back, you see and you can never turn back.

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter. The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded —I hadn't noticed — and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil. Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do. A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted ware- house down the block and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me, their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other. I know where they're going—to the "Legion": once, when I was putting something out, they stopped, both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn't ten o'clock—and we chatted for a bit. I don't know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder if they're lovers? They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening hap- hazardly along, contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters, tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat, his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down, to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb. In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show. Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're not, at least, thank god, laughing. Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting. Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun. He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down, set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him. No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber, the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair, then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be, and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he'd known, all along, that I was watching and I can't help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too, I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours. It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold, and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then real- ized made a figure eight, what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent, and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out. Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he'd blazed, but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away, up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight, with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signal- ing erratically against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky. In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white, its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relent- less, unadorned.

Like all children Mz N lived in archaic mythic zones and all the neighbors and kin played their parts to a T although they never were able to tell her the whole story. § The child Mz N sat on her bed and wondered: that tree outside her window shifted when her eye shifted. What to make of that? § Mz N and her siblings had a dog for some time. They went on vacation & when they came back no dog. They asked the parents: the dog? who replied: what dog? And some people wonder why others distrust the obvious. § One year Mz N began her great project of investigative touch. Like everything it came about through reading and happenstance. Mz N had a friend who said I do it and then I worry what if my roommate hears? What if? Mz N wondered went home and discovered a new octave. § Mz N sometimes thinks what N stands for: Nothing. One day she said nihilism in school & the teacher paused, chalk between her fingers like her longed-for cigarette. What's nīhilism another student said I thought it was neehilism. This was another example of Mz N bringing up topics that went Nowhere. § the blackest black is not so black it cannot take a blacker black so Mz N thinks the void would speak if void could speak or of color think Mz N is writing what she hopes will be a masterpiece:Mispronunciation: the definitive autobiography. She only includes the bloopers she remembers. She is very strict like that. What's vá-gi-na —hard g— she called to her parents age five when they'd plopped her on the sofa with a picture book to help her learn where babies. Some years later she told a story at dinner about being very angry with a persecuting teacher. I spoke she sd with great ve-hé-mence. Her father laughed a somewhat unkind laugh and asked her to repeat it. She did & once again he laughed. Mz N vehemently objects to the making fun of children who struggle every day to get their words and bodies aligned § one day after sex in a century of bad sex the other one asked Mz N did I leave you on the edge never having had an orgasm as far as she knew she sd quite definitively no how would she know such an edge are you sure the other persisted Mz N thought again she could say quite definitively oh yes here I am on the edge where you left me the edge of a certain abyss but this she knew was the answer to a question no one was asking § Mz N embarks one day upon a sonnet attracted by the knowledge that it's dead extinct like dinosaur dodo or bonnet long replaced by baseball caps on heads that centuries ago were piled with curls birds powder wires and such machinery 'twould blow the minds of tattooed boys and girls who cruise the streets of this new century Mz N concedes she's antiquarian old hat old news—"hoarder of ancient dirt" to quote the mouldy Scot John Pinkerton but from her dead-end path she won't divert the airplane made the train a living fossil relict herself she listens for its whistle § Wordsworth never took a plane but Mz N takes a plane with Wordsworth on her mind and other matters: love, fear, a wish to die. Wordsworth had a very sturdy mind and legs that took him far into the mountains, Scottish glens, German towns and yes across the Alps. Mz N has never seen the Alps nor Snowdon nor a mountain anywhere beyond the ancient Adirondacks Wordsworth too she thinks would like their worndown humps their pathless woods the rowboats by the shores of placid lakes ready for exploring. Young Wordsworth stole a rowboat rowed out on a lake one night and found himself appalled the mountain strode sublime after him and he trembled and his mind as Burke had said it would before sublimity near failed. There are passages in life in Wordsworth he called spots of time and Mz N has some spots she sometimes recollects. But now she's happy incredulous in love and in strange anguish wants to recollect nothing.If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy she murmurs with the engine nearly exploding with the fragility and perverse strength of all that lives and moves and has its being in the air on the ground in the sea. Having reached a floating state of grace, surprised by joy she wants to die life can only get worse the mountain receding below them as they climb

My mother spoke perfectly well, and I understood. Fabi andá faser los deber, and I’d do my chores. Fabi traseme meio litro de leite, I brought her half a liter of milk. Desí pra doña Cora que amañá le pago — I told Doña Cora she’d get paid tomorrow. Deya iso gurí— stop that, child — and I would stop. But my teacher didn’t understand. She’d send home letters in my notebook all in red, like her face, and signed at the bottom. But my mother didn’t understand. Le iso pra mim, ijo, and I’d read them to her. But my mother didn’t understand. Qué fiseste meu fío— what did you do, child — te dise a que portaras bien, and I did behave myself. The story repeated itself for months. My teacher wrote, but my mother didn’t understand. My teacher wrote, but my mother didn’t understand. Then one day my mother understood. She said,Meu fío, tu terás que deiyá la iscuela— so I quit that school. Translated from the Portuñol

xxiv What is far hence led to the den of making: Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem

i (feoh) Wealth is a comfort                    to every man yet every man must divide it mightily If   he wishes to have the measurer’s mercy ii (ur) The ox is steady-hearted and over-horned A fierce and famous beast                      it fights with horns Glorious moor-stepper                that is a noble creature v (rad) Riding is mild for warriors                    at their hearthsides and strong-bold                             for he mounted on the back of a mighty horse                          over a distance measured in miles vii (gyfu) A gift is the grace                           and praise of men and warmth and worthship                    to all exiles sustenance for him                       who is stripped of all else viii (wyn) Joy is won                            by whoever knows little of woe sourness or sorrow                        and who has for himself breath and bliss                              and fullness and a fortified place x (nyd) Need is bound in the breast         yet nonetheless becomes for the sons of men a help and healing both                 if   they heed in time xv (eolxh) Elk-sedge is found                          most often in a fen it waxes in water                             and wounds severely burns in the blood                          of each man’s body who with his hand                          takes hold of it xx (man) Man in mirth                  is dear to his kin yet must every one                         betray the other for that reason                the Lord dooms wretched flesh                                 be taken by the earth

Joel Lipman has worked for years with rubber stamps, creating poems on yellowing acidic pages torn out of old books. This technique produces a frisson between the apparently unrelated base text and Lipman's overtext. As evidenced by the meter and movement of the words on the page above, it is clear that Lipman is writing real poetry, but it is poetry enhanced by the distinctive appearance of the words.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

Don't let's hang about on the cobblestones. The equestrian statue—keep going—represents the king. Yes, the Dante translator. Now let's move on. Lovely theatre, first rate, but no point in dawdling because this paving is contaminated (a nuclear accident near the quarry) and here we are already like ghosts on this X-ray plate, like ghouls, radiological tourists, little glass vessels blown with a breeze of electrons.

Sweet shades why doe you seeke to give delight To mee who deeme delight in this vilde place Butt torment, sorrow, and mine owne disgrace To taste of joy, or your vaine pleasing sight; Show them your pleasures who saw never night Of greife, wher joyings fauning, smiling face Appeers as day, wher griefe found never space Yett for a sigh, a grone, or envies spite; Butt O on mee a world of woes doe ly, Or els on mee all harmes strive to rely, And to attend like servants bound to mee, Heat in desire, while frosts of care I prove, Wanting my love, yett surfett doe with love Burne, and yett freeze, better in hell to bee.