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On paunchy green hills in some province of China, you are the one I speak to. Someone buys a perfume, recalling that the bones of his beloved are small. When he writes the note, when he wraps the little bottle, he takes that into account. So do I. The subtlest trace of mind against your shoulders is your true skin. And I press myself to you. I hear the steady rhythm of your typing, the key of a borrowed pulse. But what difference does it make, that it is given? For a while it is mine to use, then your turn, but the pulse originates in the Child of Heaven who has hearts to spare. Some day you'll sink yourself into a frozen lake where paper ships were torched with the names of the missing. Some dead, some vanished. The flames consume all but the wisp of smoke on which a single word rises and water licks at the rest. So we are freed from a weight. Perennially your hills are filled with birds. Green hills, the deep mosses around your temples. They, the birds, are your faithful ones. As I am, naturally. Faithful to a world unknown, a world for us alone, paper-thin, and too fragile to speak of.

—“mu” twentieth part— The way we lay we mimed a body of water. It was this or that way with the dead and we were them. No one worried which... Millet beer made our legs go weak, loosed our tongues. “The dead,” we said, “are drowning of thirst,” gruff summons we muttered out loud in our sleep... It was a journey we were on, drawn-out scrawl we made a road of, long huthered hajj we were on. Raw strip of cloth we now rode, wishful, letterless book the ride we thumbed... Harp-headed ghost whose head we plucked incessantly. Bartered star.       Tethered run... It was a ride we knew we’d wish to return to. Every- thing was everything, nothing no less. No less newly arrived or ancestral, of late having to do with the naming of parts... Rolling hills rolled up like a rug, raw sprawl of a book within a book without a name known as Namless, not to be arrived at again... It was the Book of No Avail we were in did we dare name it, momentary kings and queens, fleet kingdom. Land fell away on all sides. Past Lag we caught ourselves, run weft at last adequate, shadowless, lit, left up Atet Street, legs tight, hill after hill after hill. Had it been a book Book of Opening the Book it would’ve been called, kept under lock and key... Hyperbolic arrest. Ra was on the box. It was after the end of the world... To lie on our backs looking into the dark was all there was worth doing, each the aroused eye one another sought, swore he or she saw we lay where love’s pharaonic torso lay deepest, wide-eyed all night without sleep... “String our heads with straw,” we said, half-skulls tied with catgut, strummed... Scratched our strummed heads, memory made us itch. Walked out weightless, air what eye was left... Someone said Rome, someone said destroy it. Atlantis, a third shouted out... Low ride among ruins notwithstanding we flew. Swam, if often seemed, underwater, oddly immersed, bodies long since bid goodbye, we lay in wait, remote muses kept us afloat. Something called pursuit had us by the nose. Wafted ether blown low, tilted floor, splintered feet. Throated bone... Rickety boat we rode... As though what we wanted was to be everywhere at once, an altered life lived on an ideal coast we’d lay washed up on, instancy and elsewhere endlessly entwined

These brown piles of stubble hills have failed. They should be more • It should be difficult but not impossible to transmute latitude into a thought a god could hold. • Barred light: dunes coming on and on. • The eye, yes, must move to prevent blank spots from making themselves known.

Said the Eye one day, “I see beyond these valleys a mountain veiled with blue mist.  Is it not beautiful?” The Ear listened, and after listening intently awhile, said, “But where is any mountain?  I do not hear it.” Then the Hand spoke and said, “I am trying in vain to feel it or touch it, and I can find no mountain.” And the Nose said, “There is no mountain, I cannot smell it.” Then the Eye turned the other way, and they all began to talk together about the Eye’s strange delusion.  And they said, “Something must be the matter with the Eye.”

After John Milton Our light is never spent. Is spent. Thus have we scooped out maceration reservoirs. We will blaze forth what remains as pixels. Great angels fly at our behest between towers, along axons and dendrites, so that things stand as they stand in the recruited present.

the only parts of the body the same size at birth as they’ll always be. “That’s why all babies are beautiful,” Thurber used to say as he grew blind—not dark, he’d go on to explain, but floating in a pale light always, a kind of candlelit murk from a sourceless light. He needed dark to see: for a while he drew on black paper with white pastel chalk but it grew worse. Light bored into his eyes but where did it go? Into a sea of phosphenes, along the wet fuse of some dead nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn’t be found. I’ve used up three guesses, all of them right. It’s like scuba diving, going down into the black cone-tip that dives farther than I can, though I dive closer all the time.

How much death works, No one knows what a long Day he puts in. The little Wife always alone Ironing death’s laundry. The beautiful daughters Setting death’s supper table. The neighbors playing Pinochle in the backyard Or just sitting on the steps Drinking beer. Death, Meanwhile, in a strange Part of town looking for Someone with a bad cough, But the address is somehow wrong, Even death can’t figure it out Among all the locked doors ... And the rain beginning to fall. Long windy night ahead. Death with not even a newspaper To cover his head, not even A dime to call the one pining away, Undressing slowly, sleepily, And stretching naked On death’s side of the bed.

It had almost nothing to do with sex. The boy in his corset and farthingale, his head- voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin was not and never had been simply in our pay. Or was it some lost logic the regional accent restores? A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant laborer playing Thisby botching similes and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night and said It’s wet and, making the connection he has had to learn by rote,You’re sad. It’s never not like this for him.As if, the adolescents mouth wherever California spills its luminous vernacular.As if, until the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just say we’ll live here for a while. O habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young friend it’s never not some labored simulacrum, every tone of voice, each give, each take is wrested from an unrelenting social dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how odd to be this and no other and, like all the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder we pass for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance: minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard and now she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s misreading. Reader, it’s sharp as the lion’s tooth. Who takes the weeping away now takes delight as well, which feels for all the world like honest work. They’ve never worked with mind before, the rich man says. But moonlight says,With flesh.

Dear lost sharer of silences, I would send a letter the way the tree sends messages in leaves, or the sky in exclamations of pure cloud. Therefore I write in this blue ink, color of secret veins and arteries. It is morning here. Already the postman walks the innocent streets, dangerous as Aeolus with his bag of winds, or Hermes, the messenger, god of sleep and dreams who traces my image upon this stamp. In public buildings letters are weighed and sorted like meat; in railway stations huge sacks of mail are hidden like robbers' booty behind freight-car doors. And in another city the conjurer will hold a fan of letters before your outstretched hand— "Pick any card. . . " You must tear the envelope as you would tear bread. Only then dark rivers of ink will thaw and flow under all the bridges we have failed to build between us.

Switzerland, 1920 Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country, I square the egg and put it in a letter that all may read, gilding each word a little so that touched, it yields to a secret stirring, a small gold bird on a spring suddenly appearing to sing a small song of regret, elation, that overspills all private bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War, I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court. All for a bored Czarina! My version of history fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale, hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets! The old riddle of the chicken and the egg is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque of the imagination, the egg came first, containing, as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses inducing unrest among those too hungry to see the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat. Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all beautiful forms, a box without corners in which anything can be contained, anything except Time, that old jeweler who laughed when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks and watches of a country precisely ordered and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize. Three times I kiss you in memory of that first Easter, that first white rising, and send this message as if it could save you: Even the present is dead. We must live now in the future. Yours, Fabergé.