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In Virgynë the sweltrie sun gan sheene, And hotte upon the mees did caste his raie; The apple rodded from its palie greene, And the mole peare did bende the leafy spraie; The peede chelandri sunge the livelong daie; ’Twas nowe the pride, the manhode of the yeare, And eke the grounde was dighte in its moste defte aumere. The sun was glemeing in the midde of daie, Deadde still the aire, and eke the welken blue, When from the sea arist in drear arraie A hepe of cloudes of sable sullen hue, The which full fast unto the woodlande drewe, Hiltring attenes the sunnis fetive face, And the blacke tempeste swolne and gatherd up apace. Beneathe an holme, faste by a pathwaie side, Which dide unto Seyncte Godwine’s covent lede, A hapless pilgrim moneynge did abide. Pore in his newe, ungentle in his weede, Longe bretful of the miseries of neede, Where from the hail-stone coulde the almer flie? He had no housen theere, ne anie covent nie. Look in his glommed face, his sprighte there scanne; Howe woe-be-gone, how withered, forwynd, deade! Haste to thie church-glebe-house, asshrewed manne! Haste to thie kiste, thie onlie dortoure bedde. Cale, as the claie whiche will gre on thie hedde, Is Charitie and Love aminge highe elves; Knightis and Barons live for pleasure and themselves. The gatherd storme is rype; the bigge drops falle; The forswat meadowes smethe, and drenche the raine; The comyng ghastness do the cattle pall, And the full flockes are drivynge ore the plaine; Dashde from the cloudes the waters flott againe; The welkin opes; the yellow levynne flies; And the hot fierie smothe in the wide lowings dies. Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge sound Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs, Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d, Still on the gallard eare of terroure hanges; The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges; Again the levynne and the thunder poures, And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers. Spurreynge his palfrie oere the watrie plaine, The Abbote of Seyncte Godwynes convente came; His chapournette was drented with the reine, And his pencte gyrdle met with mickle shame; He aynewarde tolde his bederoll at the same; The storme encreasen, and he drew aside, With the mist almes craver neere to the holme to bide. His cope was all of Lyncolne clothe so fyne, With a gold button fasten’d neere his chynne; His autremete was edged with golden twynne, And his shoone pyke a loverds mighte have binne; Full well it shewn he thoughten coste no sinne: The trammels of the palfrye pleasde his sighte, For the horse-millanare his head with roses dighte. “An almes, sir prieste!” the droppynge pilgrim saide, “O! let me waite within your covente dore, Till the sunne sheneth hie above our heade, And the loude tempeste of the aire is oer; Helpless and ould am I alas! and poor; No house, ne friend, ne moneie in my pouche; All yatte I call my owne is this my silver crouche.” “Varlet,” replyd the Abbatte, “cease your dinne; This is no season almes and prayers to give; Mie porter never lets a faitour in; None touch mie rynge who not in honour live.” And now the sonne with the blacke cloudes did stryve, And shettynge on the grounde his glairie raie, The Abbatte spurrde his steede, and eftsoones roadde awaie. Once moe the skie was blacke, the thunder rolde; Faste reyneynge oer the plaine a prieste was seen; Ne dighte full proude, ne buttoned up in golde; His cope and jape were graie, and eke were clene; A Limitoure he was of order seene; And from the pathwaie side then turned hee, Where the pore almer laie binethe the holmen tree. “An almes, sir priest!” the droppynge pilgrim sayde, “For sweete Seyncte Marie and your order sake.” The Limitoure then loosen’d his pouche threade, And did thereoute a groate of silver take; The mister pilgrim dyd for halline shake. “Here take this silver, it maie eathe thie care; We are Goddes stewards all, nete of oure owne we bare. “But ah! unhailie pilgrim, lerne of me, Scathe anie give a rentrolle to their Lorde. Here take my semecope, thou arte bare I see; Tis thyne; the Seynctes will give me mie rewarde.” He left the pilgrim, and his waie aborde. Virgynne and hallie Seyncte, who sitte yn gloure, Or give the mittee will, or give the gode man power.

The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior! His brow was sad; his eye beneath, Flashed like a falchion from its sheath, And like a silver clarion rung The accents of that unknown tongue, Excelsior! In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright; Above, the spectral glaciers shone, And from his lips escaped a groan, Excelsior! "Try not the Pass!" the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead, The roaring torrent is deep and wide!" And loud that clarion voice replied, Excelsior! "Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest Thy weary head upon this breast! " A tear stood in his bright blue eye, But still he answered, with a sigh, Excelsior! "Beware the pine-tree's withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!" This was the peasant's last Good-night, A voice replied, far up the height, Excelsior! At break of day, as heavenward The pious monks of Saint Bernard Uttered the oft-repeated prayer, A voice cried through the startled air, Excelsior! A traveller, by the faithful hound, Half-buried in the snow was found, Still grasping in his hand of ice That banner with the strange device, Excelsior! There in the twilight cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky, serene and far, A voice fell like a falling star, Excelsior!

They pay us time and a half and don’t dare catch us drinking: we don’t insist, don’t pass a bottle, but each sips a private pint, all sitting in the narrow room with our backs to the center, each facing his work—router, stain tray, buffing wheel, drill press— and with that sweet taste echoing in our bones, we watch our hands make what they always made —rosewood handles—but now we smile in delighted surprise and Marchesi brings envelopes that record a full day’s work though it’s still noon, processions still fill the streets, choirs, loudspeakers bellowing Hallelujah: and we change into our finest clothes in the locker room, admiring each other’s hat brims, passing bottles freely until all are empty, and at last we separate in the brilliant street, each in the direction of a different tolling bell.

It was relatively painless except for being all she could see: a world made of dinner, very pleasant; a lunch at something called a table in the dining room; an endless night; a half-day; another lunch, this on Tuesday. Yesterday. Today. Pieces propped up with supports. The therapist tapped his cigar. He no longer accepted her general opposition to myth, marriage, Olympic Games, and the course of decades. He said it was as if she were engaged in an eternal war, either watching a movie or acting in one, depending on the situation and time of day. She sat in silence, the sky above a half-baked blue, a blank- face dying of awkwardness. The simple explanation boiled down to the too-easy explanation. He was smart and charming then; and later, much less so. Behind his head, pictures were crammed together with the top layer hung so high she had to crane her neck to see the details. He said to please pretend she was listening.

You. You at the door a crumpled thing when I open surprised.Sing, you hiss.Prosecute, sentence, waving your thin not-arms like dollar bills, your bewildering moldy skin — one or two of you are you, are you a god now, bony, wing-beaten down, smaller than ever, not dead as you should be but not alive either as you indicate mumbling almost falling in on your clawed feet —I still have desire— you float — at my small door — me inside — me inside life. Are you newborn now, I ask. Are you remnant. Why.Why are there moneylenders you say swatting me away when I ask can I help, growing more crumbled, but more than just cloth — all feather, burlap, beak, fingergrip, all edge and cling. A thing not formed or not divided yet. Pre-conception. Just at the threshold. Almost falling in your uneven crouching. Your chest a pulsation. A languishment that will not die. What is die. Now there is not blood on the earth anymore. We disappear. We pixilate. Races or places, is it. Which? Remember what it was to carry your load? Your you. That weight. Wondrous it was. At intervals light-struck. Silence and then the cutting of water, sleeping audible, thrown about by breath, keeping a sharp lookout — here’s where free choice vanished, here rights, here the real meaning of the word — (you choose) — consequence, capital, commodity, con- sumption. Community? Come here says time. Just try to find it, the here. Such a good game to keep you occupied for now. The rest of the now. It’s going to be a long time. Why are you here.What are they lending you. How can it be loaned. What is a loan. The changers. Who gets to keep it. No one gets to keep it. No one. None of it. What is it. The money changers. What can you change it into. What else do you want the things to become. But it won’t stay still as currency either. It will be changed again. Shape-shifting and all the other tiny adjustments. Currency manipulation — feel it — all those other hands on it, each with its own need, having held it — grasped, changed, folded, tucked, handed — oh look it becomes virtual — the fingerprint is lifted off, its little stain — no one’s need is on it any- more. It’s clean. It has never been, and never again will be, touched. The looping ledger of the fingerprint’s wish. I signed my name to this.Did you. In the hush. At the center. Among the closed shutters at the height of the day I signed. I clenched the pen and then my dream. It flowed. No one is ever at home. I don’t know why. Had been told to live by any means possible. Did. Beyond, the sea. You could feel this period coming to an end. All of it. A bomb went off, legs went off, means went off, blew off, like gossamer — nothing stalled — you couldn’t get it to stall — seemed painted-on but it was not, was sleeping, reality finally was sleeping — so deeply — you couldn’t wake it up again, you couldn’t wake yourself again — it rained — time sputtered now and then like a regurgitation of space. It’s a jail, light says, but it looks like just being lost, full of the things we needed to learn, us ready to step up and offer our lungs, intake and out,change me we say. We want to be identified, written-in, collected. Worth me up. Give me my true value ... But still I have to bring this to you in these words, cracked glaze all over it, little holes over it, belief drilled through, self, that boutique, gone under, such dark windows, history arrested ... History arrested. How is that possible. It flowed. It flowed without us, us on it if we could catch a ride sometimes. How do you live in this end. I look at you. You have been through. Your war is done. I try to squint it in. Do you really want to begin again. Is that why you’re here. I feel I could count your fingers, each hair left on you, each thread of skin, each crease. Four or five times you cast a glance on us. But then it’s done. Your passing by us now a buzzing of flies. You stand at the window and the song begins. We don’t know what to do with it, the moon, that monster, the fame and the thirst, the night out there a shirt rolled up to reveal what dusk had hid — a murky heart, a love that would never be replaced. But they are still there on the steps — the money changers. The steps of evening rise. They want you to exchange. That is the sacrament. Why does he keep throwing them out. Day after day. Forever. Listen to me, you say, you are going off into thought, it is not a real road. Take yourself off the road. He is and is not but he is. And you are always in the holy place. Because just being in it makes it holy. Uphold it. Linger. Be eternal for this instant. Lodge in. I cannot say in what. Have spent a lifetime saying in. In flow, in promise, rich, in haste experiment crowd season in bias gnawing at hope invisible in time standing in it confounded tongue in my mouth about to curl up, speak, promise, taste promise, laugh at the ignorance, cherish ignorance — don’t leave — this is where I’ve arrived — don’t slip away, the reverse of the watching and waiting is finally here, wasn’t mine, wasn’t me speaking either. Not anymore. This is that dream. The darling of failure. No identification. All impending and then the now strikes. It is unbreakable. It is. You must believe me. I want to be here and also there where you receive this but I can’t. That’s the whole story. I will never know what is there to know. You will not be changed. You must believe.

Given the existence of plagues of eels and bloodsuckers in Lake Léman, cursed by the Bishop of Lausanne and the learned doctors of Heidelberg, the homicidal bees condemned at the Council of Worms, the petition of the inhabitants of Beaune for a decree of excommunication against certain noxious insects called hurebers, a kind of locust or harvest fly — given, further, the trial of the weevils of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne lasting over eight months, with due attention to the protocol of cases brought against caterpillars, to the custom of writing letters of advice to rats, the writs of ejectment served on them, and the rhyming rats of Ireland; and, further, Egbert, Archbishop of Trier, having previously 
anathematized the swallows which disturbed the devotions of the faithful and sacrilegiously defiled his head and vestments with their droppings, and exulted in scandalous unchastity during his sermons; in spite of the 
vermifugal efficacy of St. Magnus’s crosier and accompanying papal execratories, all sorts of animals, a cock burned at the stake for the unnatural crime of laying an egg, an ox decapitated for its demerits, all manner of sweet and stenchy beasts, are observed to persist in their heretical obduracy, irrational and imperfect creatures, though notified, admonished and commanded to depart from the habitations of man, notices to this effect being posted on trees that all guilty parties may read; and whereas it has been urged that brute beasts that they are, the field mouse, locust, mole, ass, mule, mare, goat, snail, slug, weevil, turtledove, pig, cow and bull, are lacking immortal souls (that they might be damned), they lack not indwelling spirits, otherwise demons and imps of Satan, of which they are the visible form, so that it is the demon and not the beast that suffers in the beaten dog and squeals in the butchered pig; a vile and lowly specimen of which genus art thou, the accused, standing trotters against the dock before me now, that did willfully last Tuesday fortnight throw the swineherd’s son to the ground, mangling his ears and cheeks, for which crime having first been dressed in a velveteen waistcoat as is our custom and the executioner 
furnished with a fresh pair of gloves, you will be conveyed to the town square and there without benefit of clergy be hanged by the neck until dead and your body thereafter displayed for the improvement of your fellow filth-dwelling sinners. Do you have anything to say for yourself?

It is no use to beg anymore. He has begged them many times to let me speak to the head of the army hospital, but he’s told nobody will listen to him, a bad-egg, who only deserves a bullet. “We’ve been ordered to get your skin,” the squad-leader says, “to repair the extensive burns of Liu Yi who risked his own life saving horses from the burning stable. Now, let’s go.” They take him to the hill behind the hospital. It’s dinner time and the loudspeaker is playing music. Nobody will hear the shot in the woods. They stop at a ruined temple whose stones, bricks and rafters have been ripped off by the villagers. In the distance a light is shining like a glow-worm. He doesn’t know whether it’s a star or a lamp. It doesn’t matter now. He takes it as the pole-star. His only worry is: I’m not nineteen yet and my parents will never know how their son disappeared. “Now you may say something if you want.” They pull out the towel from his mouth and wait. Suddenly he starts yelling, “I curse all of you, the whole hospital! All your babies will have no ass-holes and die at birth! I curse Liu Yi and his family too! He and his folks will be struck by thunderbolts!” They raise their pistols and he raises his tied hands: “Long live the Chinese Communist Party! Long live—” One pistol fires. He wanted to shout “Chairman Mao,” but they wouldn’t let him get it out. The bullet hit his penis— which is the best way to save the skin.

Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven. Half the population are like the long grasshoppers That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day; The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth. The crane handler dies; the taxi driver dies, slumped over In his taxi. Meanwhile high in the air an executive Walks on cool floors, and suddenly falls. Dying, he dreams he is lost in a snowbound mountain On which he crashed, carried at night by great machines. As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying, A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus. Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles Or hares flying from a fire behind them, And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs. Their trains come through the air like a dark music, Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.

Scholar-on-waves, a water-gazer, Call me Ishmael. Re-enter my own life. Waves: they murmur, babble, waves Do not articulate what the ocean Turning in its bed thinks: What must be said. Sing above or sing Below The knot in the plank, the cursive Pine-grain Of my life in the bow and my life Bay-less in the bowels Of the bow I signed myself on as me to become more so myself— A study, one volume of 36 signatures, 576 pages (9 blank for notes), And became dispossessed of all but one mis- spoken leaf— Pro- and epilogue both.Sign your mark. I do Find the escape Clause titled in fine print, watermarked, on condition Of being or becoming: me Tar-dark, thumbless or thumbed, Ocean eats the nib of pen But a nub dipped in pitch Sing above or sing below The wave’s back Broken by another wave There is no air besides A nub dipped in pitch Can’t help But write, beneath the sea-hawk’s wing The sea-hawk’s cry,Sign your mark With a nail, a splinter, a harpoon In the hand can’t help But Sing above and sing below But write but What song strides surface tension Help but write Thirst chokes and salt slakes A contract for a name Of being or becoming Ink on the line, a name or a contract For a name, a thumbprint, or I Signed me on on my name alone: Now Profit Now Leak Now Bury Now Speak.

Raise up your back like an insect on the face of the nation He took Miss Mousie on his knee, O say little mouse will you marry me? Getting hair cut this morning illegally I can’t afford it Fourteen fifteen I depend on you and roiling unlap this morn The mind refrigerated all night Now to clarify the broth skim off the oil & swallow it is your oil I must have it shorter so it grows longer in unison A glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears