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They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales’ radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other —nothing about them of individuality. Instead they’re all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfilment of heaven’s template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving at this enameling, the jeweler’s made uncountable examples, each as intricate in its oily fabulation as the one before Suppose we could iridesce, like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer—would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They’d prefer, plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting forward, heedless of stasis. They don’t care they’re dead and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn’t care that they were living: all, all for all, the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular, or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.

Overhead, the match burns out, but the chunk of ice in the back seat keeps melting from imagined heat, while the old Hudson tiptoes up the slope. My voile blouse, so wet it is transparent, like one frightened hand, clutches my chest. The bag of rock salt sprawled beside me wakes, thirsty and stretches a shaky tongue toward the ice. I press the gas pedal hard. I’ll get back to the house, the dirt yard, the cesspool, to you out back, digging a well you could fill with your sweat, though there is not one reason I should want to. You never notice me until the end of the day, when your hand is on my knee and the ice cream, cooked to broth, is hot enough to burn the skin off my touch.

Peter Ciccariello provides an interesting dilemma to readers of his work. His process usually begins with the writing of a standard lineated poem, but he takes the text of that poem and wraps it around the landforms and ruins of an invented realm that he creates through meticulous computer modeling. The results are stunning and enigmatic textscapes that a reader must sift through carefully to imagine what they originally were and what they originally communicated.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

You hold onto life like a hostage. You're deeply embedded. You're an actor slipping into a new script. You're a comma Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem's pensive silence or some dark drama. You're a Charles Dickens character in the opium den Of a long life. All you want is to sleep through the nights after Satisfying intercourse, but your mimesis may have been Caught by sexually transmitted diseases. Disaster Is an evening when you're so hungry every apple core Evokes grocery stores. Being the only one and only, They can't clone or disown you. The only thing you lack is your Adult teeth, beneath the rotten teeth of what makes you lonely. And the truth is that devolution concurs with disposal Till it emerges, when entourage lobbies for Decalogue, And hype is the new preparation before its proposal, Calling for the removal of all shoes, shirts, and demagogues, And the zealous anti-Orientalists who refuse to Use anyone's last names first when denying them service at The sperm bank, where the preferred euphemism is "super glue." Remember the joke about the butcher who couldn't get fat? Rejuvenated vaginas and enhanced penises squeak Thanks to Puritanism gone gaga vis-à-vis bling-bling À la bada bing. People piled up form a sexual peak. Two condoms put up their dukes inside a contraceptive ring. Champagne is the new organizer for your political Campaign to conceive something tantamount to FASD Of the spirit. Were you surprised or did you wax critical When you emerged from the driveway to your domesticity Without any disease but your family's questionable Cultural history? Is it such a mystery that your Mediocrity's latently poised to emerge? That you're full Of traditional vulnerability? You'll pace the floor Until you face (at a number of paces proportional To the gravity of the insults that have been thrown your way) Yourself dressed like a clown. Your brain will halt to urbanely sprawl And then catapult your past beyond your future like a clay Pigeon across a clear blue sky, toward a lemonade stand At which the theory of other minds attempts to explain Why petroleum prices fluctuate with body count and Meaningful relationships end in kaleidoscopic pain.

sound opens sound shank of globe             strings floating out something like images are here opening up avenues to view a dome a distant clang reaches the edifice. understanding what it means to understand music

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. — Seferis , Mythistorema (for J. G. Farrell) Even now there are places where a thought might grow — Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned To a slow clock of condensation, An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft, Indian compounds where the wind dances And a door bangs with diminished confidence, Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels, Dog corners for bone burials; And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford, Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, Among the bathtubs and the washbasins A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. This is the one star in their firmament Or frames a star within a star. What should they do there but desire? So many days beyond the rhododendrons With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, They have learnt patience and silence Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood. They have been waiting for us in a foetor Of vegetable sweat since civil war days, Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure Of the expropriated mycologist. He never came back, and light since then Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain. Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something — A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane. There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking Into the earth that nourished it; And nightmares, born of these and the grim Dominion of stale air and rank moisture. Those nearest the door grow strong — ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’ The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning For their deliverance, have been so long Expectant that there is left only the posture. A half century, without visitors, in the dark — Poor preparation for the cracking lock And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen, Powdery prisoners of the old regime, Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms. Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms, They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith. They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say, ‘Let the god not abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’

In the ditch, half-ton sections of cast-iron molds hand-greased at the seams with pale petroleum waste and screw-clamped into five-hundred-gallon cylinders drummed with rubber-headed sledges inside and out to settle tight the wet concrete that, dried and caulked, became Monarch Septic Tanks; and, across the ditch, my high school football coach, Don Compo, spunky pug of a man, bronze and bald, all biceps and pecs, raging at some “attitude” of mine he snipped from our argument about Vietnam— I mean raging, scarlet, veins bulging from his neck, he looked like a hard-on stalking back and forth— but I had started college, this was a summer job, I no longer had to take his self-righteous, hectoring shit, so I was chuckling merrily, saying he was ludicrous, and he was calling me “College Man Ryan” and, with his steel-toed workboot, kicking dirt that clattered against the molds and puffed up between us. It’s probably not like this anymore, but every coach in my hometown was a lunatic. Each had different quirks we mimicked, beloved bromides whose parodies we intoned, but they all conducted practice like boot camp, the same tirades and abuse, no matter the sport, the next game the next battle in a neverending war. Ex-paratroopers and -frogmen, at least three finally convicted child molesters, genuine sadists fixated on the Commie menace and our American softness that was personally bringing the country to the brink of collapse— in this company, Don Compo didn’t even seem crazy. He had never touched any of us; his violence was verbal, which we were used to, having gotten it from our fathers and given it back to our brothers and one another since we had been old enough to button our own pants. Any minute—no guessing what might trigger it— he could be butting your face mask and barking up your nostrils, but generally he favored an unruffled, moralistic carping, in which I, happy to spot phoniness, saw pride and bitterness masquerading as teaching. In the locker room, I’d sit where I could roll my eyeballs as he droned, but, across the ditch, he wasn’t lecturing, but fuming, flaring as I had never seen in four years of football, and it scared and thrilled me to defy him and mock him when he couldn’t make me handwash jockstraps after practice or do pushups on my fingertips in a mud puddle. But it was myself I was taunting. I could see my retorts snowballing toward his threat to leap the ditch and beat me to a puddle of piss (“you craphead, you wiseass”), and my unspading a shovel from a dirt pile and grasping its balance deliberately down the handle and inviting him to try it. Had he come I would have hit him, There’s no question about that. For a moment, it ripped through our bewilderment, which then closed over again like the ocean if an immense cast-iron mold were dropped in. I was fired when the boss broke the tableau. “The rest of you,” he said, “have work to do,” and, grabbing a hammer and chisel, Don Compo mounted the mold between us in the ditch and with one short punch split it down the seam.

One says: please no inner life, manners by all means, but nothing affective, that’s no compensation for the insufferable difficulties of outward-directed expression— those cerebralized city-Styxes when my little prince pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst, and it’s no different now the contraries are not easy to reconcile but when you survey the provinces the inner life has it by a neck.

How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill. Not seriously ill, just a little under the weather. To feel slightly peaked, indisposed. Plagued by a vague ache, or a slight inexplicable chill. Perhaps such pleasures are denied to those who never feel obliged. If there are such. How pleasant to convey your regrets. To feel sincerely sorry, but secretly pleased to send them on their way without you. To entrust your good wishes to others. To spare the equivocal its inevitable rise. How nice not to hope that something will happen, but to lie on the couch with a book, hoping that nothing will. To hear the wood creak and to think. It is lovely to stay without wanting to leave. How delicious not to care how you look, clean and uncombed in the sheets. To sip brisk mineral water, to take small bites off crisp Saltines. To leave some on the plate. To fear no repercussions. Nor dodge the unkind person you bug. Even the caretaker has gone to the party. If you want something you will have to get it yourself. The blue of the room seduces. The cars of the occupied sound the wet road. You indulge in a moment of sadness, make a frown at the notion you won't be missed. This is what it is. You have opted to be forgotten so that your thoughts might live.

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er; Far off the noises of the world retreat; The loud vociferations of the street Become an undistinguishable roar. So, as I enter here from day to day, And leave my burden at this minster gate, Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, The tumult of the time disconsolate To inarticulate murmurs dies away, While the eternal ages watch and wait. II How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers! But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves, And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air, This mediæval miracle of song! I enter, and I see thee in the gloom Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine! And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. The air is filled with some unknown perfume; The congregation of the dead make room For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine; Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. From the confessionals I hear arise Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies, And lamentations from the crypts below; And then a voice celestial that begins With the pathetic words, "Although your sins As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow." With snow-white veil and garments as of flame, She stands before thee, who so long ago Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe From which thy song and all its splendors came; And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name, The ice about thy heart melts as the snow On mountain heights, and in swift overflow Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame. Thou makest full confession; and a gleam, As of the dawn on some dark forest cast, Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase; Lethe and Eunoë — the remembered dream And the forgotten sorrow — bring at last That perfect pardon which is perfect peace. I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze With forms of Saints and holy men who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendor upon splendor multiplied; And Beatrice again at Dante's side No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love And benedictions of the Holy Ghost; And the melodious bells among the spires O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above Proclaim the elevation of the Host! O star of morning and of liberty! O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines Above the darkness of the Apennines, Forerunner of the day that is to be! The voices of the city and the sea, The voices of the mountains and the pines, Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines Are footpaths for the thought of Italy! Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights, Through all the nations, and a sound is heard, As of a mighty wind, and men devout, Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes, In their own language hear thy wondrous word, And many are amazed and many doubt.