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For T.S. Whose hands touched, first, the head of the penis, the shaft? And was it soft or shale?  More rock than clay. And who pinched first into their place the small cups at the base of the ass? Who was it got down there, on whose knees, and blew— and was that passion or panic, the machine that drove those exhalations? —and how could we rate the power of that breath—breeze or gale or a whisper like the song the little boy sings to the beetle, whose small legs moved in tune like his legs, the legs on that first body, must have moved, if they did move, when the dust settled. In my mind everything’s become enormous. But was it ever small like that, the first body? Did it ever sit close to the ants and their piles of dirt from which that body had come? You were a small boy once, I suppose. You were dirty from the start. You showed me how to use a cock ring, and why. How, without ever paying for a room, to spend two weeks in any city. How two men could fuck and continue to face each other directly —took my body and showed me, my back on a table, my knees by my head. Stretched me into seeing you were more than a dog. You must be dead by now, though I don’t know whose hands prepared you. Whose fingers fingered, for the final time, all that dark and kinky hair? If the first body was made of dirt, in order to plumb the hollow of that first throat, whose thumb first lodged inside the hinge of that first mouth to force it open? To make the tongue, so it could work, who shoved inside that mouth the shit of a hundred thousand worms?

October and the rain is warm the light moving across the water’s surface is there and not there like a voice you remember say your mother’s youthful as once she was on a day like this embracing the sunshine breaking through or watching it trace between her fingertips so real you can almost believe again in the silence between you, her breath on your cheek while you lay ill in bed and in only a moment a bell is ringing or your father is singing in the kitchen about strangers and without even an echo or the echo of an echo all of this is gone and we’re walking again to the Hellfire Club or the Sugar Loaf, it’s Sunday there’s not much traffic, and on the hills as you run twigs, and small black pellets are vanishing beneath your feet

People expected that the evil would finally drain away. —Aleksander Wat, My Century Faded and baked here to a tawny grit, spills of blood and seed from humanity called from it for its crimes against mute earth gully in footpaths, dribble down to the sea, payment now and forever drawn from birth through flesh’s sunny darkness. Light yeasts in it. And if I find the slope to crumbled temples of that light’s god dragging at me through heat, shallow degrees of slant up to remnant stone, then something more than burnt air, or the repeat of weight known as time, pulls heavily in this zone, something the bone brings, terrible through simple. Phoibos, slayer at distances with shock, sower of plague and arrower of healing, tension of bright-dark beyond spanning, love will not quite cast out evil while revealing your fissionables. The raven was your dove. Heavy isotopes hum with crickets in rock. Neither woman nor man, my driver laughed when his lights torched writhings down the far shoulder, cross-dresser in the night beyond Naples, huge, sinuous, crooning as we shot past. Life seems older in its variant forms, drawn by the centrifuge to the rim and swinging, swayed in time’s dream uncalfed. For the vast thrower, shafter of quivering force, sex was filigree in whoever served. Pythoness, yes, wombed keeper of those coils in the wet cellar where tongue darted and swerved. But her own throat when it swelled with voice knew toils past a man’s strength, torqued bulging from the source. And that young man fitted with bone and thong and membrane from his withers by his father the maze molder, when he climbed into flame itself in the high nucleus, dripped as slather down the sky’s maw. Union there, with an aim at the center, crisped on a central soundless gong, sizzling from his overreach extended back on itself and down, the soundless hurry of the sea far below minutely riven, trembling in place, diamonds in blue slurry nowhere disturbed yet flecking everywhere, driven— all this boy’s cry endlessly thin, suspended. The sybil when at last her throat disgorged its burdens rumbled like a pawing bull, or the bull-fiend on Krete, and shrilly warbled. Birds ride the bull’s hump in stone graphs, that full barbarity at poise piercing now the garbled clang of Ikaros, over us tensile and forged. This is the crumbling whistle of shells and frags in their close arc. Philosophy gets precise when it turns practical. This in our background whir. Archimedes, old Fermi in your eyes, naked, ecstatic with theorems that assure conclusion, your city falls, your hacked flesh sags. There was a sprig which, if you bore it in hand on landing here, your pilot drowned and your herald crushed in the surf, would bend and seem to listen— there was a branch that trailed her voice through imperiled corridors to throats of the dead, and glistened, then brought you back to your breath near shining sand. And there was pelt from the solar scavenger, its blond mane tossing with your workings, turning catastrophe to triumph, lion crud strewn now on waves, coat of the charger burning obsidian cobalt platinum and mud in craters of the shaker and avenger. Eroded skull of this squat promontory, nubbled shrine over cave by surf hypnotized before deeps enameled with fire’s mosaic, you are the structure lucid though pulverized behind the logics, and the omens prosaic in their spelling out, and the blaze of story. Give me your light! I am the darkened thing seeking it. Give me your fire and your cry! But hood me from sulfurs she inhaled when she twisted over the fissure, give me your hand from the sky we have fallen into. Give, yes, what you insisted she utter, rasped uncoilings of your spring! And then release me to the animal shy of speech yet steady in ecstasies, your cousin the outsider’s gaze through life, the drink of it down, and finally mind as frieze eternally in metamorphic strife released, sea stone and cloud infinitely small. And there the migrant and his wanderers may find the new land, and their future wars may roll, exhausted in hissing foam, to sink over the fish spines, and the blunderers of fulfillment stare at samsaric wink of ocean, stare and find sleep that dissolves the curse.

Jennifer had a tendency to stop in the street and listen to the neighbors’ problems. She was consoling to them. Jennifer would look for people in trouble and offer help, even though her body was relatively weak, and she could not carry groceries for the old people, really. When the young mothers had issues they would come to Jennifer because they knew that Jennifer also had had issues as a young mother and would listen to them. Now Jennifer had middle mother issues. • Everything can be illuminated by water or most things. The two women in the black of mourning knelt by the river in exact tandem, and they spoke softly. The film, like life itself, had minimal plot and extraordinary beauty. The film, like life itself, was slow and maniacal. And when we walked the village afterwards in search of just the right martini I thought of the same steps I had taken years earlier in preparation for mourning, and I was not unhappy.

Smaller than pollen-grain, smaller than seed Of bitter berry red— Do not look for the small, The door has no size at all. Some of sorrow have made a well And deep have seen In daylight far stars glimmer pale In a nether heaven. April 1963

My mother had two faces and a frying pot where she cooked up her daughters into girls before she fixed our dinner. My mother had two faces and a broken pot where she hid out a perfect daughter who was not me I am the sun and moon and forever hungry for her eyes. I bear two women upon my back one dark and rich and hidden in the ivory hungers of the other mother pale as a witch yet steady and familiar brings me bread and terror in my sleep her breasts are huge exciting anchors in the midnight storm. All this has been before in my mother's bed time has no sense I have no brothers and my sisters are cruel. Mother I need mother I need mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain. I am the sun and moon and forever hungry the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one.

Freud could never be certain, he said, in view of   his wide and early reading, whether what seemed like a new creation might not be the work instead of   hidden channels of memory leading back to the notions of others absorbed, coming now anew into form he’d almost known within him was growing. He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia. So we own and owe what we know.

I One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty, the bay's cold grave rose up through her arms and into her life. Her tears froze into spectacles. The island raised itself by its grass and the herring-flag waved in the deep. II And the swarm of small pox caught up with him, settled down onto his face. He lies and stares at the ceiling. How it had rowed up through the silence. The now's eternally flowing stain, the now's eternally bleeding end-point.

II.   Dalldorf Asylum: House 4, Ward B The white coats still come.Fraulein Unbekaant, they call me. Miss Unknown. One asks, Do I hear         voices       Do I          see things. The doctors here are not very well informed. When they appear at the foot of my bed, alabaster and looming        I hide my face in the sheets coarsened and brailled as if boiled in the well of a thousand drowned birds. So much worse is this quiet than the river’s drift and silt. Here I have only the rasp and cough of the woman bunked nearest me drooled to choking. On the floor, a puddle of saliva thickens.

my house’s stairway is seized with vertigo. Matter having forsaken its laws, we land in hell, ascending to heaven. * Shadows move along ladders under the silence of ordinary things there is another silence: it belongs neither to the leaves nor to the dead with a crown of birds circling him a child is running in an abandoned house the stairway takes the measure of its own emptiness I myself am the stairway that Time has used in its funeral course wheels lift water in the gardens of Hama and come down not waiting for the river to put out the fire Here we are left with the river Seine and Paris’s poisons. I prefer gardens where linden trees get ready for a lunar voyage The stairway that separates my room from my memory whispers in my ear . . . I am not at the mercy of men since trees live in my fantasies men and trees long for fire and call for the rain I love rains which carry desires to oceans. Between one airplane and another space is disoriented stars sneak into holes and brides go naked to wells their innocence wanes under our eyes You and I are made from a worm-eaten wood The Word has sunk we are left with no cry   gesture or gaze silence to us is forbidden. We are threatened neither by life nor by death nor forced to admire the Spring I found earth-castles on the edge of the desert’s torrents I took their marble stairs but could not find my way either up or down then I understood that I was in a state of non-reason and non-madness and that the gardens of Andalusia were standing ready to die. * Two cities               Two tears Let insanity keep between its skirts legs within its black eyes the fright of my adolescence and the nocturnal walk on the hills: which hill? I mean the kingdom that a man carries in his gut when his love’s fulfilled. Two cities which are neither Beirut nor Damascus two tears: neither of alcohol nor of rain Yes there has been a truck and a blue-eyed woman from Russia —grey olive tree— I was a butterfly caught by a fire: neither the day’s not the night’s but the incandescence that radiates from the body like a receding sickness, Let tombs stay open! * The stairway which leads to my room borrows its metals from Babylon The Prophet’s Ascension had two movements we fell into whirlpools of mud and the wind followed his horse A tempest went after the sun’s steps The Prophet swam through waves of clouds a river of gold carried his vessel and away from the sun he reached Paradise a Paradise made of light. The stairway which leads to my room leads to an observatory I own two telescopes to observe stars and black holes and take mechanized stairs which advance with no advance my hair spins with sunflowers * Illegitimate is this linden tree which shakes by my door let us get ready for Hell! * Cursed be messengers tossing about water’s tranquility and building forest fences Oh that the wind go quicker than us! that we be smothered by light! This linden tree standing by my door weights heavy on my days I will finally marry it and we shall bring children condemned to terror this tree looks at me with insistence: It will be kept waiting until Time’s end.