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I just didn’t get it— even with the teacher holding an orange (the earth) in one hand and a lemon (the moon) in the other, her favorite student (the sun) standing behind her with a flashlight. I just couldn’t grasp it— this whole citrus universe, these bumpy planets revolving so slowly no one could even see themselves moving. I used to think if I could only concentrate hard enough I could be the one person to feel what no one else could, sense a small tug from the ground, a sky shift, the earth changing gears. Even though I was only one mini-speck on a speck, even though I was merely a pinprick in one goosebump on the orange, I was sure then I was the most specially perceptive, perceptively sensitive. I was sure then my mother was the only mother to snap, “The world doesn’t revolve around you!” The earth was fragile and mostly water, just the way the orange was mostly water if you peeled it, just the way I was mostly water if you peeled me. Looking back on that third grade science demonstration, I can understand why some people gave up on fame or religion or cures— especially people who have an understanding of the excruciating crawl of the world, who have a well-developed sense of spatial reasoning and the tininess that it is to be one of us. But not me—even now I wouldn’t mind being god, the force who spins the planets the way I spin a globe, a basketball, a yoyo. I wouldn’t mind being that teacher who chooses the fruit, or that favorite kid who gives the moon its glow.

Popped from the womb, he began gathering property extorted from his wet nurses by threatening to turn blue in the face and die. Everyone gave in. His mother dressed him in guava-colored lace crinolines his father obligingly retired to the Côte d’Azur siblings were disposed of by the Beast of the Bassinet. Coextensive with the world, his hands become The Hands, his mouth The Mouth, his dingus The Dingus. Absolute power corrupts absolutely said Lord Acton. Absolute corruption set in: a foot revolted and proclaimed democracy and universal male suffrage the hairs of his armpit began drinking heavily and all over his body an asexual budding produced nodes of himself, his genetic encumberment replicated and replicated, an oblique hysteria. The absolute corruption of self is community. The absolute corruption of the mouth is to taste its tongue over and over, to be continually filled.

Was Helen stronger than Achilles even "as the arrows fell"? That could not be, but he recognised in her some power other than her legendary beauty. He could name Helena, but the other he could not name; she was a lure, a light, an intimate flame, a secret kept even from his slaves, the elect, the innermost hierarchy; only Helena could be named and she was a public scandal in any case, a cause of shame to Agamemnon and Menelaus; it was not that she was beautiful, true, she stood on the Walls, taut and indifferent as the arrows fell; it was not that she was beautiful, there were others, in spite of the legend, as gracious, as tall; it was not that she was beautiful, but he stared and stared across the charred wood and the smouldering flame, till his eyes cleared and the smoke drifted away.

Down in fame’s flood, down an alley, down wind of now, elegant in self-denial, an Iron Range wraith junking cue cards, an ideal, an idol before which the Zeitgeist kneeled. Dylan, named for a poet named from an old tale of the child who crawled to the sea, this land is yours: the black plain the needle ploughs from lip to label; be all, end all.

The t(rain) again this morning, sky always gray, grain cars f(lying) like blackbirds with fieldseed in their bellies. The eight o five carrying g(rain) sings like tribes when they migrated north in summer across the plains following tracks of herds. High water into trees. The lake full of rain. We say it is someone else pushing down on the lake to make it spill over its edge. While we wait the woman earth sings with the tribes, transforms herself into all things. After the train b(rush) burning, the delay of smoke in the car comes after we have passed like sound. Rain hangs fringe from earth woman’s dress. She holds the delay of truth until it comes from our mouths. Coyotes sleep on her lap, birds fly into the b(ranches) of her hair while farther down the road the black snake train wiggles behind her ear.

October five. Seven years older in dog years and then your November the day record snowfalls hit Randolph New Hampshire in forty-three and I am thinking of something intimate and impossible to waste: Brazil’s undiscovered caverns of amethyst     endless smooth oval stones along Washington’s moody Pacific chewing a continent. But I am wrong. We pass St. Michael’s the cemetery that asks the public to mow and weed it and perhaps draw larger conclusions about the already wasted and tidy up names frayed at the edges by the ions that bind     by age the chemical salt of time that jostles stones over at their bases to remind us or alter their sentiments. We read and read and each time nothing new has come up on their markers. At home we hear the fishermen bring up their nets smack water to scare them. By now the flounder’s secret pocket where its heart and everything separate from meat and bone is cleaned and empty as a silk purse not a nickel left down in the freezer. Nothing really shines but this: I have loved you eight presidents. Forty years. Five point seven in dog.

1. Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns, But that was quite some time ago. Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs, Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant. Moving through ivy in the park Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate; But that grave, shell-white unicorn is gone. The path is strewn with papers to the street. Numbers that once were various Regarded us, were thought significant, significant Enough to bring reporters to the scene. But now the bell strikes one, strikes one, Strikes one—monotonous and tired. Or clicks like a sad valise. 2. Note to Be Left on the Table This ghost of yours, padding about the upper halls, Given to fright-wigs Burbage might have worn, Moaning in doorways, jumping out at maids, Has not convinced me even yet. Can this be you? Your life was frightening enough, but this Poor pallid counterpart who fuddles in its role Is inexcusable. Go haunt the houses of the girls You once infected, or the men who bore Your company far oftener than I; annoy the others For a change. Is this, my house, the medieval hell You took to at the grave’s edge, years ago, After a dozen other hells had burned themselves away, Or are we purgatory here? If not, You make it one. I give you until noon. 3. Ruined travelers in sad trousseaux Roost on my doorstep, indolent and worn. Not one of them fulfills despised Rousseau’s Predictions. Perhaps they are waiting to be born. If so, the spot’s been badly chosen. This is a site for posthumous investigations, Pillows stuffed with nettles, charnal notions: Apoplectic executioners, bungled incisions. Indeed, our solitary midwife fondles the hemlock. We welcomed one poor hackneyed Christ, Sad bastard, croaking of pestilence. The basement Holds him now. He has not as yet arisen. The tickets are ready; the line forms on the right. Justice and virtue, you will find, have been amazingly preserved. 4. As water from a dwindling reservoir Uncovers mossy stones, new banks of silt, So every minute that I spend with you reveals New flaws, new features, new intangibles. We have been sitting here for hours— “I spent that summer in Madrid, The winter on the coast of France— The Millotsons were there, and Farnsworth. My work has perished with the rest Of Europe, gone, all gone. We will not see the end.” You said goodbye, and your perfume Lingered for hours. At first it seemed Like summer dying there, then rank and sharp. And yet I did not air the room. 5. Among Victorian beadwork and the smell of plush, The owls, stuffed and marvelously sinister, Glare from dark corners, waiting for the night. High up, the moose’s passive eyes explore Candles, unlit, within cut-glass. A door Is opened, and you enter with a look You might have saved for Pliny or the Pope. The furniture has shrunk now thirty years Have passed (with talent thinning out, and words Gone dead), and mouths of friends in photographs Display their hopeful and outmoded smiles. You counted on at least a sputter of nostalgia, However fretful. That was a mistake. Even the moose Regards you with a tired, uncomprehending stare. 6. Signboards commemorate their resting place. The graveless of another century Came and were conquered; now their bones Are dust where idiot highways run. Land in their eyes, unquiet ancestors (On fences yellow signs clang in the wind) Unstirred by suns drying the brown weeds Above them now in parched and caking land. But when they speak of you, they feel the need Of voices polished and revised by history, The martial note, words framed in capitals. It is good to be deaf in a deafening time With the sky gone colorless, while the dead Thunder breaks, a cracked dish, out of the mind. 7. The eye no longer single: where the bowl, Dead in the thickened darkness, swelled with light, Transformed the images and moved the artist’s hand, Becomes a framework for our mania. And haunts the stairway. Friends depart, Taking their last look from the roof, Saying goodnight and carrying their view Of grapes the model ate in Paris years ago. Blue in the morning, green some afternoons; The night, ambiguous, forgets the signature. The dust in attics settled and his stove Grew cold. About the model nothing much is known. It ends the wall and complements the view Of chimneys. And it hides a stain. 8. And when your beauty, washed away In impure streams with my desire, Is only topic for ill-mannered minds, Gifted and glassy with exact recall, Gossip and rancid footnotes, or remote despair, Let ruined weather perish in the streets And let the world’s black lying flag come down. Only in calendars that mark no Spring Can there be weather in the mind That moves to you again as you are now: Tired after love and silent in this house, Your back turned to me, quite alone, Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair, At a small window, green with rain.

Church of broken toasters and singed fuses, church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack, of the flooded garage and its split door, gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters, church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks, fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times, church where wings of dead flies drift like petals from cobwebs, ghosts sift through floorboards and the homeless sleep in compost, steeping like tea bags pungent from the leaves' damp weight. Church where I am summoned by the door's clatter of brass to the brown-toothed vagrant who spreads open her overcoat; to the chattering man who communes with pines and brooms the stairs; to the bent, old Japanese woman who forgets her keys, waits for me to twist the lock free so she can scrub floors with Murphy wood soap and a toothbrush, wobble atop a ladder and polish the two-ton bell. On this path I am my uncle setting cubes of cheese into jaws of traps, and my grandmother stirring peas into a pan of fried rice, and my grandfather padding the halls in slippers and gloves, the cold globes of his breath a string of prayer beads weaving me, a mixed-blood grandson, into them.

If, in an odd angle of the hutment, A puppy laps the water from a can Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man Is not as men have said: a wolf to man? The other murderers troop in yawning; Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one Lies counting missions, lies there sweating Till even his heart beats: One; One; One. O murderers!... Still, this is how it’s done: This is a war.... But since these play, before they die, Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man, I did as these have done, but did not die— I will content the people as I can And give up these to them: Behold the man! I have suffered, in a dream, because of him, Many things; for this last saviour, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can: I find no fault in this just man.

It is scribbled along the body Impossible even to say a word An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand Yet not, not marks inside a box For example, this is a mirror box Spinoza designed such a box and called it the Eighth Sky called it the Nevercadabra House as a joke Yet not, not so much a joke not Notes for Electronic Harp on a day free of sounds (but I meant to write “clouds”) At night these same boulevards fill with snow Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe, as you wrote, writing of death in the snow, Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan It is scribbled across each body Impossible even to name a word Look, you would say, how the sky falls at first gently, then not at all Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause, twin ships, twin nemeses preparing to metamorphose into an alphabet in stone St.-Benoit-sur-Loire to Max Jacob