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Lash everything irredeemable to the ficus with muscle. Use the flexor digitorum brevis from the arch of my right foot. This is how what’s grounded gets hitched to the rooted, everything cramped into place and contemplative. Tight striations might as well be bindings to Bodhi as body. Why not dump this tired mind at the foot of a tree, aerial roots less caustic than an unanswered calling — or perhaps this is it, to sit, to ponder, to ask: what violated cunt, what unhappy gasp, what sad spat, and toppling building left us blooming untoward? Who puts flowers on the inside of a fig except the injured or the bereft? The ones who hankered hard and failed to do anything but live lush and fallible? What regret is: bark or bitch. The world succumbs to beauty even now, in the throes. The sky is dark and hidden behind branches, cephalic veins clotted with grief. Hush now, finally. All the face can do is flush, sympathetic nervous system, visible horror of wounded and wounding. All inflorescence remains safe inside that place the mind opens up pear-shaped and vast: the body of every lover is unattached to hurt or hope, falls in its own field of daffodils, to curl fetal with singular prowess or glut.

The curtains part: it is a summer’s day. There a cow on a grassy slope watches as a bull charges an old aeroplane in a meadow. The bull is punching holes with its horns in the aeroplane’s fabric... Suddenly the aeroplane’s engine ignites; the meadow is dark blue smoke... The aeroplane shifts round and faces the charging bull. As the bull comes in the propeller takes off the end of its muzzle. The bloody nostrils, a ring through them, are flung to the grass with a shattered blossom of teeth. The bull, blood oozing from the stump of its face, backs off, and charges again. This time the propeller catches the bull behind its lower jaw and flings the head into a tree. The headless bull backs off once more, and then charges down again. The propeller beating at the headless bull, cutting the body away in a great halo of blood, until only the back legs are standing. These run widely away through the meadow in figure eights and zigzags, until at last they find the aeroplane again. And as they come running down the propeller whacks them apart. The legs, one with the tail still attached to it, the other somehow retaining both rectum and testicles, scamper off in opposite directions. The aeroplane turns away; the engine stops. The shadows are suddenly seen in lengthened form. The watching cow begins to low ...

Bick Benedict, that is, Rock Hudson in the Time-clock of the movie, stands up and moves, Deliberate, toward encounter. He has come out Of the anxious blur of the backdrop, like Coming out of the unreal into the world of What's true, down to earth and distinct; has Stepped up to Sarge, the younger of the two, And would sure appreciate it if he: "Were a Little more polite to these people." Sarge, Who has something to defend, balks; asks (In a long-shot) if: "that there papoose down There, his name Benedict too?," by which he Means one-year old Jordy in the background Booth hidden in the bosom of mother love of Juana, who listens, trying not to listen. Rock Hudson, his hair already the color of slate, Who could not foresee this challenge, arms Akimbo (turning around), contemplates the stable And straight line of years gone by, says: "Yeah, Come to think of it, it is." And so acknowledges, In his heart, his grandson, half-Anglo, half- Brown. Sarge repents from words, but no Part of his real self succumbs: "All right— Forget I asked you. Now you just go back Over there and sit down and we ain't gonna Have no trouble. But this bunch here is Gonna eat somewhere's else." Never shall I Forget, never how quickly his hand threw my Breathing off—how quickly he plopped the Hat heavily askew once more on the old Man's head, seized two fistsful of shirt and Coat and lifted his slight body like nothing, A no-thing, who could have been any of us, Weightless nobodies bronzed by real-time far Off somewhere, not here, but in another Country, yet here, where Rock Hudson's face Deepens; where in one motion, swift as a Miracle, he catches Sarge off guard, grabs His arm somehow, tumbles him back against The counter and draws fire from Sarge to Begin the fight up and down the wide screen Of memory, ablaze in Warner-color light.

A poem I keep forgetting to write Is about the stars, How I see them in their order Even without the chair and bear and the sisters, In their astronomic presence of great space, And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving, Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure. Having not mathematics, my head Bursts with anguish of not understanding. The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments Of a tortured victim, far from me In his galaxy of minds bent upon him, In the oblivion of his headline status Crumpled and exploding as incomparable As a star, yet present in its light. I forget to write.

He snapped his lighter shut, placed it beside the metronome on his nightstand. We’d just made love and I was sitting naked on the edge of his bed, watching the stars appear. He told me my skin was chatoyant in the window light, like wet fiddleback maple. I asked him what chatoyant meant. He grinned and explained growth distortion, how it could pattern the wood fibers into flames of alternating tones. I told him that was nice and he said he could take me to the workshop for a look around. Show me what he was talking about. I rolled my eyes. It sounded so boring. But then he bit into my thigh and said he wanted to fashion me into a beautiful cello. He drove with both hands on the wheel and told me he thought of everyone as instruments. He said his father was filled with knots like a burl and only good for music boxes but his mother was quilted beneath her surface, like rippled river water. Then he just stared ahead at the road and kept quiet the rest of the way. When we got inside he felt along the wall and flipped a switch so I could see the three white torsos, each with a headstock and fretboard attached to the sternum. They were displayed on hangers like guitars. I covered my mouth with a shaking hand, backed away and ran out to the parking lot. He stood at the door and watched me squeal away in his pickup. The sky clouded over as I drove to the police station, all the millions of stars like birds’ eyes. Like the darkness was sawn off the trunk of a black walnut tree, then sliced into a veneer.

They found you under twenty feet of loose ash — one vowel solo in an archipelago of strung-out vowels and doting volcanoes — Isole Eolie— O hoop of exhilaration, O sigh of relief softening your votive mouth if not blowing off steam at the crater rim, crystalizing sulfur, poring over tomes, the trade winds and furies that fan through your realm, O citizen-king, O sonorous persona weaned on fumes and that old itinerant intonation — air your woes all over again.

This that is washed with weed and pebblestone Curved once a dolphin’s length before the prow, And I who read the land to which we bore In its grave eyes, question my idol now, What cold and marvelous fancy it may keep, Since the salt terror swept us from our course, Or if a wisdom later than the storm, For old green ocean’s tinctured it so deep; And with some reason to me on this strand The waves, the ceremonial waves have come, And stooped their barbaric heads, and all flung out Their glittering arms before them, and are gone, Leaving the murderous tribute lodged in sand.

[SAROUK] We buy what we cannot control, the rugs, rhythm-makers, containing refrains of the oldest story: a man takes a journey. I have no stories inside me, he says, so travels on, to rest beneath a carpet of blue constellations, star patterns at the edges of disordered border walls. At the center, a meditative medallion makes a moving immortal-flowered ground: to live there is to give oneself over to greenness, redness, occasional blues, holding those spirits of woollen dyes rising from the knots within to breathe against the woven, multi-colored air. [BIDJAR] Now there is a coat of many colors hung around the wanderer's shoulders where he climbs out from that pit, down which he flung himself, or was thrown into. Reaching to soothe his wounds, he finds the dusts of centuries residing there beneath his feet, the hopeful travelers passing, wearing thin, fighting about how best to articulate the names of gods for whom they yearn—accursed by wars' helmet curves, shields, chained stitches of unmediated reds and yellowed husks of blood—broken lines marking a garden in whose precincts his journey began. [KAZAK] Three sunbursts spin, enigmatic energies through golden latchhooks, surrounding cloudbanks; three eagles, darting within their shifting images: they return him to streets of lit porches in summer dark, a boy stuttering over random syllables, a blindfolded man pleading for his life— whose fate is in the hands of some men whose fate is in the hands of other men, whose fate . . . until the whole pattern emerges, and the language becomes clear. On the floor lies his mother, moaning, until he comes out, guilty, before her— amid the mud of his own frozen blood. [SHIRVAN] To live inside such squares as the weaver of this green, becoming golden, labor; to pull back old skins and try to emerge, victorious, from that old prison after so many years, is to find a path back to harmonious designs, surely centered on the search—yet still speaking of a life with knotted figures seen as suffering variations on themes that can be inferred from small vibrations of weft and warp, the ‘snakes' within the threads worn down to the shapes of ribbons, even rhythms writhing in a loom of days: those humming ancient instruments whose music seems [SHIRAZ] raw as colors governed by the earth, pink as brick, or deserts scraped from rock, rough clay slowly grinding, then drifting down the slopes of the central plateaus to fresh respites from thinner regions of dessication fixed at the fringes below. These lands lie under the ache of desire, which calls feet out to play upon sand, to fill each new hollow, and dance about, tongues turning on the knots of umber, ochre, woven into those undulating waves others might summon in flowery manners to escape from bitter orange, still held by recalcitrant fingers, to the purple [KERMAN] empowering all those who try to hold on— as all things will hold to themselves an idea of themselves—to an aspiration towards good fortune, unwavering even unto death. Yet here are dusky passages, canopies of clearness, an everlasting understanding of the earth as cancerous points of coloration, acid starbursts, or dangerous blots—all blurring the way to move past sight: perspectives lost and found again, symmetrical, surrounded by the momentos one saves from travel, old friends, like hues that may betoken, in hopefulness, some changes of heart. [SENNEH] This creates a powerful language about how to levitate a plane—for even as the occasional murmurs of new machines are heard in the land, as old cyclic gardens arrange themselves in the whorls and tendrils throughout tilled fields, snakes hold up this world in variations of light blue skies above temptation. Even when an illiterate weaver mistakes an old date for the design, then dyes and binds strange numbers into a ground, the change of the serif, for instance, in a calligraphy of days marks the date of cartouches as mysterious, unknown. [KASHAN] Yet the signals from the borders suggest a different tale: lozenges are bottles strewn along mauve and terra cotta roads, shaped like a woman found lying along the side of those same roads—the figure of flesh, going nowhere but endlessly back on itself—as a web of years frames a dying kind of certitude, innocence. The birds in these cages signify singing, as the tapestries of perfected threads suggest reticence, chosen intermediaries to the indeterminancy of all creation: and we can buy it yet, articulate or not, with each new freeing of our hearts.

Praying answers prayer: in the deep spells of inquiry and hope, a self enabled to rise again to the compromises and the shattering caring forms

You have a beautiful mouth, Luigi, the man-boy says. The rubber raft has floated far from shore. The choice is this: medusa sea, a boil of   jellied lashes, or face the kiss.