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The message I found on the Post-it note went thus: love truth; expect to be found out. Kid-style capitals proved I wrote it, but left no clue why I'd swelled into a fat clause no editor could edit; then, an entry on a shrink's list of patient slang for sex— her desk Norwegian teak, the mug of tea on which she had affixed her Post-it notes hot against her knuckle, their lips of stickum loosening . . . And yet, I knew the note to peel away at hour's end would terminate our sessions—cool as the draft her linen skirt was lifting to: Love, just stay benighted, given everything I know you've got to hide.

They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks. Where the oak throws its handful of shadows Children are gathering fireflies. I wait in the deep olive flux As their cries ricochet out of the dark. Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak. It foists its mouthful of sibilants On a sky involved with a stillborn moon, On the stock-still cottages. I lean Into the dark. On tiny splints, One trellised rose is folding back Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake. Rowboats bob on the thick dark Over my head. My fingers wave Goodbye, remember me. I love This cold, these captive stars. I shake My blanket of shadows. I breathe in: Dark replenishes my two wineskins. My eyes are huge, two washed-out mollusks. Oars fall, a shower of violet spray. When will my hosts deliver me, Tearing me with their wooden hooks? Lights flicker where my live heart kicked. I taste pine gum, they have me hooked. They reel me in, a displaced anchor. The cygnets scatter. I rise, I nod, Wrapped in a jacket of dark weed. I dangle, I am growing pure, I fester on this wooden prong. An angry nail is in my tongue.

For Rafael Heliodoro Valle I set out from the Port of Acapulco on the twenty-third of March And kept a steady course until Saturday, the fourth of April, when A half hour before dawn, we saw by the light of the moon That a ship had come alongside With sails and a bow that seemed to be of silver. Our helmsman cried out to them to stand off But no one answered, as though they were all asleep. Again we called out: “ WHERE DID THEIR SHIP COME FROM ?” And they said: Peru! After which we heard trumpets, and muskets firing, And they ordered me to come down into their longboat To cross over to where their Captain was. I found him walking the deck, Went up to him, kissed his hands and he asked me: “What silver or gold I had aboard that ship?” I said, “None at all, None at all, My Lord, only my dishes and cups.” So then he asked me if I knew the Viceroy. I said I did. And I asked the Captain, “If he were Captain Drake himself and no other?” The Captain replied that “He was the very Drake I spoke of.” We spoke together a long time, until the hour of dinner, And he commanded that I sit by his side. His dishes and cups are of silver, bordered with gold With his crest upon them. He has with him many perfumes and scented waters in crystal vials Which, he said, the Queen had given him. He dines and sups always with music of violins And also takes with him everywhere painters who keep painting All the coast for him. He is a man of some twenty-four years, small, with a reddish beard. He is a nephew of Juan Aquinas,* the pirate. And is one of the greatest mariners there are upon the sea. The day after, which was Sunday, he clothed himself in splendid garments And had them hoist all their flags With pennants of divers colors at the mastheads, The bronze rings, and chains, and the railings and The lights on the Alcazar shining like gold. His ship was like a gold dragon among the dolphins. And we went, with his page, to my ship to look at the coffers. All day long until night he spent looking at what I had. What he took from me was not much, A few trifles of my own, And he gave me a cutlass and a silver brassart for them, Asking me to forgive him Since it was for his lady that he was taking them: He would let me go, he said, the next morning, as soon as there was a breeze; For this I thanked him, and kissed his hands. He is carrying, in his galleon, three thousand bars of silver Three coffers full of gold Twelve great coffers of pieces of eight: And he says he is heading for China Following the charts and steered by a Chinese pilot whom he captured ...

Things I left on your paper: one of the craziest episodes that ever overtook me. Do you like espionage? A watered charm? My pod cast aside, I’ll walk in the human street, protect the old jib from new miniseries. I could swear it moved in incomplete back yards to endorse the conversation, request to be strapped in. Then it will be time to take the step giving fragile responses, and finally he wrote the day. It happened in the water so that was nice. It comes ready conflated: vanilla for get lost, flavor of the time of his sponsor’s destiny. Be on that sofa. I was crossing the state line as they were reburying the stuff. You break the time lock, the bride’s canister    ... but we did say that we’d be back.

προσέλθετε For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon

Take any desired height, or place points for top of head and heels. Divide into eights. . . . 8.  Head tilted back between the headboard slats. Eyes glass boxes filling up with light. Later, drained to a blue-gray, the color of good government. 7.  Thus, we see that commodification is a function of local necessity. a.  As Angelenos collect percolating shade in shallow pans, to leach the arsenic out of the light. b.  “And then I buried it.” “Where, exactly? And when?” “In the chest. Insertion point at the base of the throat. You were still asleep.” “But what is it, exactly? I mean, I can’t figure out its precise extent. I mean, I can feel it there sometimes, like stitches, or sometimes like a flanged or branching bone.” 6.  Cross-hatchings of street noise and the Minotaur with his boy’s body. Narrowing. Rib cage the verge of a canoe. Armpit a whiff of pencil lead. 5.  “If you want to fuck me with that bottle, Mr. Arbuckle, best take the foil off first.” 4.osculation: a.  The act of kissing. A kiss. b.Math. A point where two branches of a curve have a common tangent and extend in both directions of the tangent. c.  To the ankles. Or to the knees. Or just unzipped enough. 3.  Charmeuse chemise. A shuddering fall. Miss Adelaide Hall on the chaise longue singing I ain’t much caring / Just where I willend. Then jerked upright, skirt hiked to the knee, that bridge stretching out under every skip-step. Slaphappy scat-puppet of the fixed smile, the meanwhile,Ain’t got nobody to love now. 2.  The bone begging bowl. The foot that pushed it away. 1.  “I want to leave you exactly as I found you.”

“The writer. It’s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that winter of our nation’s discontent. That first time I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great named cats you gassed in the move.I couldn’t keep them. You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers,firme from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes from the nose to the hair to the shaking tip. My favorite tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from Goodwill. What ever becomes of the heart our common child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black felt pen? Who gets what? Who knows what becomes of the rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning I sat waiting for the surgeon’s suction. What ever becomes of waiting and wanting, when the princess isn’t ready and the queen has missed the boat, again? Do you still write those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinsky’s ace letting go? Like:Lorna meets Oliver North and she kicks his butt

"Dullness of words where God speaks. A dark which feels good. Drawn curtains. On the dark page lines continue the crease and the dream, the space between." -Reb Rissel 1 "Hope: the following page. Do not close the book." "I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope." "Perhaps hope is the book." 2 "In my dialogues there are no answers. But sometimes a question is the flash of an answer. "My route riddled with crystals." -Reb Librad And Yukel said: "If an answer were possible death would not travel alongside life, life would not have a shadow. The universe would be light. "Contradiction is the scream of a soul drawn and quartered by the moment. Did not Reb Sedra write: 'Here is grain for your field: a grain of life, a grain of death. The grain of life will nourish your death, the grain of death feed your life.'" ("Death will get the better of me. God can only help me in the void."

Close to the door in my dream the small signs I saw a brown sign with wisdom on it I saw a brown one leaning with wisdom on it fringe of a mirror my mother leaning over a pond cupping water leaning against the moulding cardboard or wood which materials do you does your wisdom prefer which a- partment in a summer with someone I felt brave to have touched her love the screen door and the dogs and the cats always getting out. That was the fear two signs fading but recalling they had faded like words fade in stone because of the rain and the days and waking and the dream is leaving with every step leaning over the meat because I do not want you to have died in vain kissing the turkey and the neck of  my dog all animals am I. all dreams, all stone all message am I.

the car had a cover over it and it was over the wheels and it hurt my ass and I couldn’t sleep. It seems I should move, go forward now I was wandering through the jungle anywhere on earth but I was a woman in bed in New York and how many people have died in wild places dreaming you were still in bed would you know. Travel well I said to my dog when she went on her journey thinking of a cheap movie I’ve thought this was an urn turning this was on water this was flat but now I see light between the trees I see water trickling through stone this is not made of   language but energy that will stop when I die the dream dies too one bolt