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Insanity is not a want of reason. It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu. Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us: spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more; let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets— it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.

(February, 1841) Melinda, I've been preparing to write. That peculiar girl named Molly, who has a bit of liberty in the house, has said she'll find some paper. I have practiced mixing charred wood with water and have managed to shave a twig so one end nearly resembles a nib, but tonight Lila got caught up under the good Doctor's whip for such a little offense. I am frightened. Doctor Jackson brought in a new troop of slaves today. A boy of thirteen among them had the welted cheek that speaks of a driver's dissatisfaction. Lila put a poultice on to ease the swelling, but Jackson wants the boy to understand his place and thinks a scar will help. Lila's back and neck and arms have thirty new wounds to replace the one she thought to heal. Melinda, how is Jacob? Ever yours, (February, 1841) Do you ever start at night believing I might be dead? I leave my body sometimes, Melinda. Is that all dying is? Remember how I'd scold you when the stew was thin, believing I needed a thick stock to forge muscle for all the work I had ahead? Your stew would make me big again, Melinda. Sometimes we have to trap, skin and roast possum, rabbit, snake and squirrel. Except for that, I have swallowed naught but salt pork and coarse meal in all my days away from you. But I work just fine. Ever your beloved husband, (March, 1841) What a herd of slaves Jackson brought in last month. No sooner had their strength returned after the long march to the farm from Lynchburg but they began to plot another run. We didn't know they'd planned to leave until they were already gone a day. All manner of neighborhood men came around to tip Jackson's whiskey and help him on the hunt, though all they brought back for their trouble were two bodies. One dead, one fighting off living. That boy I told you about, Ben with the slashed cheek? At the stony fork of the river Doc Jackson found his body, cut up, twisted as if it had fought long under water, a dead hand pointing in the direction his netted sister and the "damned lost lot of niggers" had run. I guess he was too obstinate even for the water to hold down easily. Jackson used Ben like a scarecrow, his shirt hooked on a pole, his body meant to warn us from the road. Lila's still not certain that the girl will live. Until tomorrow, I am ever your Joe. (December, 1843) William is the name Smythe matched to my description when he shipped me from his Wilmington slave pen to the Richmond consigner Jackson bought me from. So I am William, though it took more than one whipping for me to remember it. There is a woman keeps the kitchen here prefers we call her Auntie. She's been called so many names she "most forgets" which one means her. I trust Jacob is getting on in school just fine. I was, at his age, learning to carry myself with the pride of a Freeman. It's been many years since I've been able to answer to any person calling me that name. And Jacob? Can he remember his father? Please hug him for me, Melinda. I am ever your husband, (November, 1845) How many live on our alley in Philadelphia? There, this room might accommodate a bed and two chairs, but here we are three men, two women, some potions, and a girl. We sleep in turns. Marlo often walks the woods at night, his eye out on the traps for all of us.   'Dolphus steals sleep in the smithing shop and steals everything else before dawn. Just last week, we bore the tread of a muzzled goat and two hens he brought in from a neighbor's farm. Our field sweat adds stench to the store of bones, feathers, brews, and herbs Lila claims can cure the women on this place. Sadie, who Lila never tried to stop herself from bearing, sleeps with her body wedged behind the door. Molly swings it in her side each night when she turns up to sleep after Miss Amy's laudanum takes and again when she races the conch call to the house in the morning. Even Lena, who had a well-built cabin of her own when she lived on the place, pushed four babies off her tit to make room for the Doctor and for Miss Amy's boy. I wonder, Melinda, are your wages enough, since I went away, to satisfy the rent? Yours in tribulation, (December, 1847) The Doctor's had his eye on Molly since he caught her listening while the tutor drilled his son on Greek. She says the boy translates slowly. On a war now, his spoiled tongue has spent two days flogging some warrior's impenetrable shield. Molly showed me yesterday what a heart looks like. Traced it in the dirt that is my bed, my stool, my desk, my cabin floor. I miss you, Melinda. I miss feeling the little skip your heart took sometimes, though I know the pinch that came along with the stutter pained you.   Molly is a smart girl, though brutal in her zeal. She's quicker than a butcher to find cause to wield a knife. I am certain the Doctor will lapse in his vigilance soon enough. Then I will chance to capture on the page one of these letters. May God be good and grant so large a prayer. Yours, (January, 1848) We are like to lose another hand unless 'Dolphus can recover from the flogging he took over a missing pair of cufflinks. The girl who was brought home with Ben's body was quickly well enough to work, and she had less skin on her bones than Doctor Jackson left on 'Dolphus. Perhaps there is some little hope for Lila's husband. Molly is afraid to sneak me any of the Doctor's paper. Molly, who can be as bad as 'Dolphus about purloining pretty, useful things. I doubted she was earnest in her fear, but now I see what she, born here, must have always known. A man whose livelihood depends on stealing the toil of other people's bodies must keep a keen eye on his own most dear and precious things.

What represses unhomes in the sound Who has made me what is made me Is a voice just muscles and shape and Breath to phrase a song boats assemble At the mouth of the harbor mouth in Earth you who wrote an ode to silence Never wrote of what is silenced I did Seek all resounding caves let the voice Be lit all the lanterns in the new world we Need the language of stone from string To string quiver in the opening the garden So beautiful Lucifer dark sun of morning No Eden but innocence no expulsion But after • No more will I listen to other than A single note moaned not known I do not here think again what place Presents itself own moan well eye Here body as a battery of the one Moment when it is time to open Your mouth to plug in I will allow what I invented to find its color make A shape which neither water nor Sky do how do you now in this Contained shape go through Your life not like a constellation Not guessed at intuited or divined No name so how do you discern a shape for What is often called g-d • Vantablack was made for missiles Or planes for defense purposes so dark No eye could see it some voices are Like that no one could hear them it Is not good to be lost to be lost is More than metaphor for spiritual Condition I sit at the terrace overlooking The green sea perhaps it is failure That ought to be sought the voice That fails falls silent Sheila’s or The body’s the blue failed me the sun Fails every evening I we you have all Failed too everyone who strove all these Long years for peace failed • August 7 Predawn blue and blue the sound Of the sea further away and less violent lights On the water fishing boats closer than I Imagined no one is awake some animals Maybe what I do without knowing in a Harrowing world what I do without knowing As I listen to the gurgle of water against The promontory I feel like I am listening To a body how slow and opening a piece Of tune where one does not know how It will unfold no chord or cadence to tell You in sound what the path will be how It will happen until it happens I do not want To be alone what does it mean anyway when Someone says “Muslim” • Can she still feel music in her body can she Vocalize even without technology of the Mouth tongue palate glottis vocal chords What is a voice Anish Kapoor granted Exclusive right to work with blackest Black she now communicates through notes And gesture Vantablack made for Military purposes like sound also used For torture all sounds to wake you vibrate Your brain what emerges as an echo from Music as torture children on the beach Playing god is sound or art or science Shit and sex the body’s echo what mess Is left in the big or the little death • Sheila’s voice always in the background Always disappearing into the music Of what surrounds it the way one loses Oneself in sex or death or the moment Of shitting I got lost in Salman’s Music he said it was a surrender of Ego when he left me behind but really It was a surrender of my will words too Have god inside but for the prize of The body they do not compete can Not hold the storm of time cannot Hold the line do I touch the ocean Inside will my family come to My funeral • That night we swam the full moon Civilized us federated us gave us Our nationality we who were lost I have now lost what little heritage I did have returned to the rude Rough world long vowels of Morning evening birds scream No soft blanket falling to cover But a throttling a suffocation Of dusk no silence when the self Stills the absence of noise is itself Torture I cannot sleep tongued loose Drones move through a riff by A singer without papers • August 9 Eleanna takes me out on The water Miller exploding the form Of the novel itself I see now how Nin Wanted to move away from his vociferous Singing of the world as material to try To construct a music of the way The mind works still fed by light on the Water a mute noise of engines under Water as the boat passes the light House and heads out for open sea Remembering in Palestine crawling Down the hill trying to catch a wifi Signal from the settlement untapped Improvisation of space • At the stone terrace the gardener lingers Clipping hedges while I work breeze Between us soon I will return I read The article about a poet who was killed In the street his poems untranslated All the artists and writers killed the open Space of the sea yesterday Eleanna and I Went too far out went almost all the way To Marseille we saw the pink-gray sky Of wildfire I accepted the waves I found In the chapters of the Quran to sing my Way through turbulence draw a way Through the waves savage wildfire all The villages evacuated • We woke to the smell of burning air A little cool smell of charred refuse Colors muted last night the moon Came clear nearly blue eyes too Painfully large rough on the eyes and Impatient but I wanted to look so Badly for the meteors the sea Crashing against the rocks smoke From the fire obscured the sky In the morning we rowed across The harbor and realized fear of heights And fear of depth is the same just one You see and one you don’t

from the waist–so that, turned the bulb that's oneself (thorax) –only–then–doesn't have any existence–turned (wherever one turns) as conception–at waist of magnolia buds that exist in the day really sewing the black silk irises–not when one turned at waist sewing them, they have no shape literally except being that– from one's hand (being, in the air) the irises only had existence in the black, before dawn, in fact a man doesn't want me to become quiet again–go into ocean not weighed of before fighting–ever formation of that of narrowed to no form in one–of black volup- tuous lip–outside–voluptuous lips that (aren't) on black dawn, or before it when it's black. There was no intention–being done–with their existing. not weighed before fighting which is the black, weighed, air– not the lips which have no weight–isn't following if one's not contending...so the inner isn't contending either...?

It mounts at sea, a concave wall Down-ribbed with shine, And pushes forward, building tall Its steep incline. Then from their hiding rise to sight Black shapes on boards Bearing before the fringe of white It mottles towards. Their pale feet curl, they poise their weight With a learn’d skill. It is the wave they imitate Keeps them so still. The marbling bodies have become Half wave, half men, Grafted it seems by feet of foam Some seconds, then, Late as they can, they slice the face In timed procession: Balance is triumph in this place, Triumph possession. The mindless heave of which they rode A fluid shelf Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed, Loses itself. Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals Loosen and tingle; And by the board the bare foot feels The suck of shingle. They paddle in the shallows still; Two splash each other; Then all swim out to wait until The right waves gather.

In green water I saw your eye and in it I saw that Arabian palace filled with birds and broken glass. I copy an address into my right hand and fill myself with memories of psalms. A green fish emerges from seaweed as seaweed from a wave that rises like the wailing wall. My sun-baked body at the edge, wind in my lungs, its whistle, my torn world, my grief, my soggy passport, my shell with no pearl, you lift them, delicate cloud, into a liquid world. Last night I dreamed of my father's flabby body and of my blue resolve to run away, to find a way, I dreamed of your eye and for an instant I found the vertex of the road, the imaginary line that falls across the earth: that meridian where the sun on a tiger's back meets the shade at its belly. Waking up, we are swallowed by wakefulness. The house swallows us in its terrible thirst. The routine of taking our children to school swallows us and so does the if only I could. There was something to that dream. You know it. A direction. A way. A forest as green as you and your roots. Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious memory, give me the blue gaze from your dark eye, give me the devotion of your sleeping birds. Sometimes the way is a fire through which the circus tiger leaps, a perfect circle returning to me with its stripes intact and with the endless continuity of this ineluctably feral world.

So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded. — Ezekiel 24:18 She is approaching him, God, he sees her in his eye-edge, a tiny gold speck getting bigger, scintillating. Her beauty lashes him with its sword — but she has heard all this before. She approaches him, the one who killed her, and she reeks of life. He waits for her to dissolve in him, but her grit encircles his teeth. He waits for her to become what he has made her, an angel, passionate and cold as the dawn, quietly encased in power, churning out neutral love and fastened to eternity, backwards and forwards all the days. But the world is tangled in her hair. She is getting closer and her gold beauty is greening, her face is turning furious, fury-like, her death opens around him and he feels a human fear. He cannot match her, she has the reins of creation in her slim white paws, he feels the world creeping away from him. He makes to shove her from heaven, let her slip and slumber through the world. But he cannot grip her. She gleams through him like heaven through a needle. the stroll God takes Ezekiel for many walks. He talks about all the things he will do to the people, this and this and this, and then they will know who I am. One day they chance upon a valley of bones splintering and whitening in the sun. Shall these bones live? These bones? Oh Lord. God flings sinew on the bones, liver, spleen, gristle. The bodies rise. Rise without breath, wet clay glistens in the sun. He gives breath, as if an afterthought. Ezekiel tries to see in their eyes, one at a time. The men not moving but lunging forward like warriors, eyes ice cold mud seen through mist, waiting for their souls to snap back in. They are bruised with an ache made not by the world. Their forgotten stories rift their faces, their deaths now a hole they can walk through. Home a space that closed after them, rinsed of the mourning that ran its course. They glimmer in new reality, still speechless, as if they were really the miracle ... But already God has taken Ezekiel by the elbow.

Cold wind comes out of the white hills and rubs itself against the walls of the condominium with an esophogeal vowel sound, and a loneliness creeps into the conversation by the hot tub. We don’t deserve pleasure just as we don’t deserve pain, but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist keep rising from the surface of the water to wrap themselves around a sculpted clavicle or wrist. It’s not just that we are on the eighth story of the world looking out through glass and steel with a clarity of vision in which imported coffee and a knowledge of French painting are combined, but that we are atop a pyramid of all the facts that make this possible: the furnace that heats the water, the truck that hauled the fuel, the artery of highway blasted through the mountains, the heart attack of the previous owner, the history of Western medicine that failed to save him, the successful development of tourism, the snow white lotions that counteract the chemistry of chlorine upon skin—our skin. Down inside history’s body, the slaves are still singing in the dark; the roads continue to be built; the wind blows and the building grips itself in anticipation of the next strong gust. So an enormous act of forgetting is required simply to kiss someone or to open your mouth for the fork of high-calorie paté someone is raising to your lips, which, considering the price, it would be a sin not to enjoy.

A black sun rises in the West of me & will never set. God of my fathers, sleep like the one sleeping next to me; inert & tenderly coiled. I am so grateful to yóu, that breathes as the dead breathe in their shallow land — barely, below the range of my hearing. That draws in the thin streams of black air & shifts & puts a white arm around me. I want to know, Né, what it is like in the kingdom of the dead where you are. Is the one I fear there with her train of silver hair? Have you seen John, the temples of his glasses duct-taped to the hinge? I know it is not still there; I know everything is in furious motion beneath the black sun & the sky white as chalk — the torrent of silver hair whipped about her face that woke in the moonlight on the last morning, lucid & fluent, & turned toward my father & said, “I love you,” walking backward on the white road into the white sky toward the white city, black sun clearing the horizon & a wind lifting in the torn leaves like the wind in the wood above Lady’s Walk where I trespassed in spring, singing, Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, the bluebells hissing like cats & the canopy a violent array, violently outside me in flickering Islamic greens / Spanish grays, the topside / bellyside of milled leaves, the harebells biting their bitter tongues, & raising its head in panic, a juvenile fallow deer stippled with thick white spots. Then someone shouted, “Oy, stay there, you fúck,” Oyé, Whale, & my launces in his side, & I went down the hill with the sweetgrass pulling at me & the spit in my mouth. Né, I cannot sleep. Ever since I lost my little children. I look for their shapes on the ceiling, in the dark, & they are not there. Né, never, no, no, never, never, never, never. There is nothing, Né. Neither the night nor the white city like Conholt in its great estate. Not the hart, nor the furious wood. O, John, John. I came downstairs still drunk to find you asleep with your head on the hoover, & the hoover still running; half-shaved, the tape on your glasses, your mouth open & the tattered Crombie. Then years later when Oli called & you were, O John.Y am alpha and oo, the firste and the laste, bigynnyng and ende. O, John, John. No white city as a wijf ourned to hir hosebonde, no voice in the wind, in the (clouds) crying Lo! Y make alle thingis newe. I make all things new. Como una novia adornada para su esposo. Como tu cuerpo en la noche, Né; like this body that pregnancies have raged over & I have loved with my mouth moost feithful and trewe. i And let him that is athirst come. ii And let him that heareth say, Come. iii And let the dawn thunder up in the street while you are sleeping with the first cars sauntering by & the dustmen & women whistling. Lord, I will stand before yóu when yóu wish in death’s little house & yóu will eat my pronoun. • In that other life that will be ours where there is neither marriage nor children, I may kneel beside you, Mouse, & not know you — our eyes like a golem’s, empty of their own will, but full of hís, the dead Lord at the center of hís dead city. In the days when my glory is stripped from me, & yours from you, & all are made equal — no aesthetic splendor, no charm, no subversive, faithless glances to- ward those I have loved & have loved me; no property, no desire, no variation, no sparrowhawk thrusting through birches in the snow toward the wood, for hé never stepped in a wood, nor saw a harebell easing its frail metaled head, its light pinks & papery blues, through the first tranche of snow in November, nor the gray cere of the plunderer beneath her blue helmet, her single attention, wings volute in air, head w/ beak narrowly ajar in concentration & hunger breaking the line of the fence at the old house in Broadway; in the snow; in the snow that has flattened everything, the bells ringing out, the clouds heaped above the Blackdowns dragging themselves from the earth, headlights on the ridge in the wind groping toward them, the hills featureless, snuffed, white, black, dull, shining w/ no light. No drinking in the afternoon, no dope, no flaring temper. No bed to sleep it off, Mouse, while you draw catkins & piggies & pussybears with gorgeous happy frowns in the cold. No sleep, no flesh to rest in, for there is only day in the white irradiate city where the lamb lights hís terrible mercy in to worldis of worldis, forever & ever & hís government will never fail, for no glory is allowed but hís glory, no bone gouvernance but hís bone gouvernance, no prison camp but hís prison camp, hís plantations, hís will & techne, hís punishment beatings, hís censorship, hís textual criticism, hís forgiveness, hís rehabilitation, O ferdful men, & vnbileueful & cursid & manquelleris. Mouse, on that day, will you turn toward me & will I see in the insubstantial glass of your eyes the memory of these days; myself, father, authority, half chocolate & half steel, still carrying you at six up the hill & down the hill, still playing the Ticklepuss & Crocopotamus, the horn of plenty, salver, lessener of cries, bringer of swallows & dragonflies, the Emperor & Downy Emerald hovering over still waters in the valei of teeris, wolves in the mist in the hills above Antequera where the rocks bared themselves like teeth & you were asleep on my chest with fine alabaster eyelids & eyelashes plashed with droplets of dew? Where I said, “Shhhhhh, close your eyes & imagine that you’re a water reed, Mouse,” & I blew on you & that was the wind & then my hand was a snail wandering over your eyelids & the nape of your neck & last of all it rained & that was my fingers going pitter-pat upon the pinnacles of your head. The days fade through our slow parting; your mother grows ambivalent. Little accident, in the stillness of the earth there is no life; the harebell reaches its root into death & the waters flow down until the rock is dry. I wanted more than I was given, & found in betrayal a churning courage. Torchlight in the garden where we make our choice. The will that flickers. My loss. Our bliss. Mouse, on the last day, remember this. • Lying with you, Né, in the sun, in the (clouds) half-listening to the Senegalese preacher two mornings after the riots when they ran Mame Mbaye down to the gutter & wishing you would go buy your mutes & play again, here, in silence, — for them & for me & yourself & the polis— Bach’s Suiten für Violoncello No. 1. To watch in dumb show the formal motions that reify language & music — the flesh; your shoulder & forearm & wrist & lightly-draped fingers one continuous dependent assemblage flowing south to the river at Arganzuela & the chuckling magpies. There is an authority in you, when you play, that is different from the authority of the whap|whap of rotor blades overhead; control that is liberation, a concentration that is neither at one point nor diffuse, like the globes of light hovering over the lampposts in your myopia last night; wandering across the river, the madrileños also entonados swaying like palm fronds in the wind; then the dark, & our one body with its artifacts of pregnancy & loss. An authority that is different from the authority of the Lord in hís dead city, hís kingdom that has no contiguity with ours, no conformitá, the streets empty of opposition & neither wind nor rain; nor thunder, nor tears. Now a thin sun is dwelling in the wind. I wd like to reach out to you in its cold light & pull the shape of your body into mine; put my tongue against your eyes so I can taste what it is you see through them; the restaurant opening, the crisp cloths. Even the polis with their holsters & war clubs looking on carefully & asexually like angels come to lie with the daughters of men. A kestrel on a lamppost strips the bascinet from a cricket with slow, considerate motions: lovely rare flame. Have they buried Mame Mbaye? They are erasing a name from the wall & the quarter is pacified. Clouds rise above Guadarrama, Somosierra, above the meseta like kites. The picoletos shift from foot to foot in long black boots. Bells bleat — lambs; Alsatians on leashes. The bougainvillea — glad to bring us at last the first trace of its colors — flaunts a breathless restraint. •

Mr. President! The monsoon season is approaching. This raises the question: What steps are planned to ensure the timely gathering of the harvest and to prevent farms from being inundated along the floodplains of the Amazon river? Mr. President! I just wanted to express how grateful I am. Never have I been so proud of my country. Under your presidency everything’s finally been made right. Allow me just to say a simple, heartfelt thank you. Mr. President! I have received my veteran’s pension. I am returning it to you, and thank you for your concern. Where were you, where was your human feeling, when my fingernails were being torn out? Mr. President! How long will our schools keep taking bribes for passing gym class? Mr. President! I’ve received a message that I must deliver to you. I’ve been ordered to do it. “Government of  Earth! We, the representatives of the Delta Orion star system, inform you that if you do not renounce atomic weaponry and psychic intervention, we will annihilate you.” Mr. President! I wish to express my concern. It seems to me that there isn’t enough freedom of speech in our country. I await your response. Mr. President! We are two belle ragazze and we want to have your children! And if that isn’t possible, we want our future men to be just like you and no one else! Ciao! xoxoxo. Mr. President! Mikey’s cursing again! Mr. President! How do you patch KDE2 under FreeBSD? Mr. President! Yesterday I had a dream. There was nobody around. The entire planet Earth was empty. Tell me, can that be done? Or where can I go to dream that again and so it would never end? Translated from the Russian