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For I will consider my Star Sol. For I am the servant of this Living God and daily serve her. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East I worship in my way. For this is done by fixing espresso and watching the pinkening light on The Shard. For then she waves her warmth across the scene and lifts the hearts of those who took a Night Bus at 4 a.m. to clean HQs. For she tickles the orbitals of foxes in their stride and hies them home. For having risen and settled into her groove she begins to consider herself. For this she performs in eleven degrees. For first she does the Planck to strengthen core stability. For secondly she runs a malware scan for comets closing in. For thirdly she completes the paperwork for eclipses total, annular, and partial. For fourthly: flares. For fifthly she sorts her sunspots into pairs. For sixthly she gives neutrinos Priority Boarding. For seventhly she referees the arm-wrestling match between the upstart fusion and gravity. For eighthly she weaves flux ropes and thinks up skipping games. For ninthly she degausses her plasma screens. For tenthly she is profligate with her photons. For eleventhly: star jumps. For having considered herself she will consider her neighbors. For she runs a cloth around the ecliptic to make it gleam. For she oils the wheels of any planets gliding there. For she sends invites out to wallflowers in the Oort cloud. For she issues shadows for children to dodge as they make their way to school. For she shakes out her blankets for devotees of helioseismology. For when she takes her prey she plays with it to give it a chance. For one planet in nine escapes by her dallying. For in her morning orisons she loves the Earth and the Earth loves her. For she is of the tribe of Tyger! Tyger! For she hands out coloring books to chameleons in the morning. For when it is time to rise she blushes to be seen at so intimate an hour. For when it is time to set she is crimson ashamed to run out on us. For though she neither rises nor sets she thinks it best that we believe so, so that we can take our rest and fuel our waking with anticipation. For she lifts oceans over mountains without thinking. For she tries to solve the puzzle of the weather, placing this here and that there and attempts to even out the air. For she is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For she’s a stickler for solstices. For she booms like a woofer for those that can hear. For she cares not what lives as long as all live. For she takes her time. For she lenses the light from distant stars to swerve it into our sockets. For sometimes in the winter haze she’s as pale as a lemon drop and lets us watch her bathe unpunished. For she never calls in sick. For her colors are open source. For every raindrop’s an excuse for Mardi Gras. For she will work on her drafts for a million years and release them typo-free. For she will lash out and then regret the hurt. For she promises radio hams jam tomorrow. For your power grid is a cobweb she walks into when she steps off her porch. For she kept mum through the Maunder Minimum. For her behavior is definitely “on the spectrum.” For she keeps dark about dark matter but she definitely knows something. For she plays Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Furnaced. For she offers board and lodging to Turner’s angel in the Sun. For she made a great figure in Egypt for her signal services. For she can fuse the wounded parts of a broken heart and release the lost mass as hope. For she spins plates to create auroras. For she leaves clues all over the place: some cryptic, some quick, some general knowledge-based. For she is hands-off. For she tends to micromanage. For she lays down squares of light for your pets to sleep in. For she turns a blind eye to all the creeping, swooping killers of the night but leaves a Moon-faced night-light on. For her sunquakes flatten no buildings, gridlock no cities, disgorge no refugees. For she is not too proud to dry your smalls. For she gives us heliopause and time to rethink disastrous decisions. For Ray-Bans. For she polarizes opinion. For her secrets are waiting to free us. For she appreciates Stonehenge and visits every day. For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan. For she will kill you with the loving of you. For she can shine.

I. Separation Precedes Meeting The cat so close to the fire I smell scorched breath. Parents, silent, behind me, a feeling of trees that might fall. Or dogs. A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body. You follow the fog into more fog. Maybe the door ahead divides the facts from natural affection. How can I know. I meet too many in every mirror. 2. When I was little, was I I? My sister? A wolf chained, smothered in green virtues? Slower time of memory. Once I’ve got something I lie down on it with my whole body. Goethe quotations, warm sand, a smell of hay, long afternoons. But it would take a road would turn, with space, in on itself, would turn occasion into offer. 3. For days I hold a tiny landscape between thumb and index: sand, heather, shimmer of blue between pines. No smell: matchbook. Sand as schematic as Falling into memory, down, with my blood, to the accretions in the arteries, to be read with the whole body, in the chambers of the heart. The light: of the match, struck, at last. 4. Concentration: a frown of the whole body. I can’t remember. Too many pasts recede in all directions. Slow movement into Distant boots. Black beetles at night. A smell of sweat. The restaurant, yes. You’ve no idea how much my father used to eat. Place thick with smoke. Cards. Beer foaming over on the table. And always some guy said I ought to get married, put a pillow behind my eyes and, with a knowing sigh, spat in my lap. 5. The present. As difficult as the past, once a place curves into Hips swinging elsewhere. Castles in sand. Or Spain. Space of another language. Sleep is a body of water. You follow your lips into its softness. Far down the head finds its level 6. Tropisms Inward, always. Night curls the clover leaf around its sleep. Tightly. The bodies of the just roll, all night, through subterranean caves which turn in on themselves. Long tunnel of forgetting. Need of blur. The air, large, curves its whole body. Big hammering waves flatten my muscles. Inward, the distances: male and female fields, rigorously equal. 7. The drunk fell toward me in the street. I hope he wasn’t disappointed. Skinned his sleep. November. And a smell of snow. Quite normal, says the landlord, the master of rubbish, smaller and smaller in my curved mirror. I have un- controllable good luck: my sleep always turns dense and visible. There are many witches in Germany. Their songs descend in steady half-tones through you. 8. You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die following endless rows of sheep into your even breath. Precarious, like Mozart, a living kind of air, keeps the dream spinning around itself, its missing core. Image after image of pleasure of the whole body deepens my sleep: fins. 9. Introducing Decimals A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings. The grass pales by degrees, twigs quaver glassily, ice flowers the window. Intimate equations more complicated than the coordinates of past and Germany. The cat can’t lift its paw, its leg longer and longer with effort. A crying fit is cancelled. An aria jelled in the larynx. Nothing moves in the cotton coma: only Descartes pinches himself an every fraction must be solved.

It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole. Still the world would wag on the same, Still the seasons go and come: Blossoms bloom as in days of old, Cherries ripen and wild bees hum. None would miss me in all the world, How much less would care or weep: I should be nothing, while all the rest Would wake and weary and fall asleep.

Perfectly round. Perfectly black. No. . . not entirely black. He has that bluish-white at the edge of his eyes And his beautiful lips Open upon a smile of expensive pearls. *       *       * Round and dusky-headed, Round bellied Black baby, fearlessly Offer your unpristine hand to the daylight, Say hello, fearlessly, to your life.

The body, bearing something ordinary as light                           Opens as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns & bears the child — out. When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of it all, the push & head not moving, not an inch until, when he flew from me, it was the night who came flying through me with all its hair, the immense terror of his face & noise. I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be split me down, with the axe, to two. How true, the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here. The fight, first, to open, then to breathe, & then to close. Each of us entering the world & entering the world like this. Soft. Unlikely.      Then — the idiosyncratic minds & verbs. Beloveds, making your ways to & away from us, always, across the centuries, inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this 
iteration of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear, Body of laughing — & even last a second. This fact should make us fall all to our knees with awe, the beauty of it against these odds, the stacks & stacks of near misses & slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next. Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see. & so to tenderness I add my action.

Tete sits me down and tells me the story of our ankestors. She says it with a hard K.I squelch my sass, and listen. Our ankestors were hunters, of the zebra totem. There were two brothers and a very beautiful sister, as sweet as a sugar bean. So they called her VaNyemba. They came all the way from Mozambique to this place, tracking wild game. When the chief saw VaNyemba’s beauty, he granted her brothers leave to hunt on his land. They set out to hunt early, leaving VaNyemba to tend the fire. She was very beautiful.              The chief surprised her. She screamed, but her brothers were far, far. He was a heavy man, and as he thrust himself inside her he found her penis. Our VaNyemba hanged her busted bare body. When the chief saw it, he was afraid. He stripped off his regalia and fled, leaving the land to her brothers. That is the land they buried her in. And that is how we came to live in Chihota, the land of sweet potatoes. I am sitting next to Tete, wondering if I will ever eat a sweet potato again.

These are the lines on which a committee is formed. Almost as soon as work was begun in the tunnel men began to die among dry drills. No masks. Most of them were not from this valley. The freights brought many every day from States all up and down the Atlantic seaboard and as far inland as Kentucky, Ohio. After the work the camps were closed or burned. The ambulance was going day and night, White’s undertaking business thriving and his mother’s cornfield put to a new use. “Many of the shareholders at this meeting “were nervous about the division of the profits; “How much has the Company spent on lawsuits? “The man said $150,000. Special counsel: “I am familiar with the case. Not   :   one    :    cent. “ ‘Terms of the contract. Master liable.’ “No reply. Great corporation disowning men who made. . . .” After the lawsuits had been instituted. . . . The Committee is a true reflection of the will of the people. Every man is ill. The women are not affected, This is not a contagious disease. A medical commission, Dr. Hughes, Dr. Hayhurst examined the chest of Raymond Johnson, and Dr. Harless, a former company doctor. But he saw too many die, he has written his letter to Washington. The Committee meets regularly, wherever it can. Here are Mrs. Jones, three lost sons, husband sick, Mrs. Leek, cook for the bus cafeteria, the men: George Robinson, leader and voice, four other Negroes (three drills, one camp-boy) Blankenship, the thin friendly man, Peyton the engineer, Juanita absent, the one outsider member. Here in the noise, loud belts of the shoe-repair shop, meeting around the stove beneath the one bulb hanging. They come late in the day. Many come with them who pack the hall, wait in the thorough dark. This is a defense committee. Unfinished business: Two rounds of lawsuits, 200 cases Now as to the crooked lawyers If the men had worn masks, their use would have involved time every hour to wash the sponge at mouth. Tunnel, 3⅛ miles long. Much larger than the Holland Tunnel or Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tubes. Total cost, say, $16,000,000. This is the procedure of such a committee: To consider the bill before the Senate. To discuss relief. Active members may be cut off relief, 16-mile walk to Fayetteville for cheque— west virginia relief administration, #22991 to joe henigan, gauley bridge, one and 50/100, winona national bank. paid from state funds.

“Burnished,” when applied to limbs, refers you to furniture, or wood at least, a hint the skin has been burned beyond the human, & then beyond. Necessary for the removal of skin from a burnished limb is an implement sharper rather than duller, wieldy & willing to dig without displacement. The scrape of flint on a burnished limb —if you say “arm” you must mean it— resembles, no doubt, a chisel (of iron?) that furls what’s before it, away. The point of whatever has been lost between the stasis of the burnished limb & its movement away from the rest of what you have identified as skin, the skin of a burnished limb, is to bring to bear the thought of bone & how it relates or, better, responds to its covering uncurling from it flake by flake & amassing, forceless, on the floor, the floor you will describe as cement or concrete, at least rug- and wood-less, the wood being the skin of the burnished limb, until the skin is just another piece of your household furniture.

Love peruse me, seeke, and finde How each corner of my minde Is a twine Woven to shine. Not a Webb ill made, foule fram’d, Bastard not by Father nam’d, Such in me Cannot bee. Deare behold me, you shall see Faith the Hive, and love the Bee, Which doe bring. Gaine and sting. Pray desect me, sinewes, vaines, Hold, and loves life in those gaines; Lying bare To despaire, When you thus anotamise All my body, my heart prise; Being true Just to you. Close the Truncke, embalme the Chest, Where your power still shall rest, Joy entombe, Loves just doome.

All he undertook goes under, under the undergrowth he rose from fly-boy, lovely in his day. All his clothes — spruce suit & tie — are underclothes against ungrounded gray. All his studies understudy an unstudied play. Under the under of what I remember we are both twenty and except with each other underemployed.