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It is always the same: she is standing over me in the forest clearing, a dab of blood on her cheek from a rabbit or a deer. I am aware of nothing but my mutinous flesh, and the traps of desire sent to test it— her bare arms, bare shoulders, her loosened hair, the hard, high breasts, and under a belt of knives and fish-lures, her undressed wound. Every night the same: the slashed fetlock, the buckling under; I wake in her body broken, like a gun.

My story’s told in the mis-dial’s hesitance & anonyms of crank calls, in the wires’ electric elegy & glass expanded by the moth flicker of filament. I call a past that believes I’m dead. On the concrete here, you can see where I stood in rust, lashed to the grid. On the corner of Pine & Idlewood, I’ve seen a virgin on her knees before the angel of a streetlight & Moses stealing the Times to build a fire. I’ve seen the city fly right through a memory & not break its neck. But the street still needs a shrine, so return my ringing heart & no one to answer it, a traveler whose only destination is waywardness. Forgive us our apologies, the bees in our bells, the receiver’s grease, days horizoned into words. If we stand monument to anything, it’s that only some voices belong to men.

What night-rule now about this haunted grove? The spirits have dispersed, the woods faded to grey from midnight blue leaving a powdery residue, night music fainter, frivolous gods withdrawing, cries of yin and yang, discords of the bionic young; cobweb and insects, hares and deer, wild strawberries and eglantine, dawn silence of the biosphere, amid the branches a torn wing — what is this enchanted place? Not the strict groves of academe but an old thicket of lost time too cool for school, recovered space where the brain yields to nose and ear, folk remedy and herbal cure, old narratives of heart and hand, and a dazed donkey, starry eyed, with pearls and honeysuckle crowned, beside her naked nibs is laid. Wild viruses, Elysian fields — our own planet lit by the fire of molten substance, constant flux, hot ice and acrobatic sex, the electric moth-touch of desire and a new vision, a new regime where the white blaze of physics yields to yellow moonlight, dance and dream induced by what mind-altering drug or rough-cast magic realism; till morning bright with ant and bug shines in a mist of glistening gism, shifting identities, mutant forms, angels evolved from snails and worms.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    ...    Yo no sé! — César Vallejo They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals they had programmed and there are blows in life so powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches and there was water and it poured in through our mouths and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we had been and the bodies of the people we had loved and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy

They took my body to the forest They asked me to climb a ladder I did not want to climb a ladder But they forced me to climb the ladder If you don’t climb the ladder we will bury you in the foamy mud I had to decide: should I die by hanging or by burial I climbed the ladder and they wrapped a belt around the thick limb of a tree And then when I could no longer breathe they tossed me into a stream And I floated to the edge of the village where someone prayed for my soul It’s like this in a lullaby for the end of the world: The options for the end are endless But this is not really a lullaby for the end of the world It’s about the beginning what happens when we start to rot in the daylight The way the light shines on the ants and worms and parasites mauling our bodies It’s about the swarms of dogs gnawing our skin and bones Do you know what it’s like when a ghost licks your intestines Do you know what it’s like when a rat devours your brain To avoid the hole the children must sing sweetly, softly To avoid the hole they must fill their songs with love

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.

for Jane —ALL  HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE SIZE OF OSTRICHES, they turned and walked away from us and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two but this was the nineteen-forties, in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. It was getting dark and the trees around the bridge almost glowed like a scene by Palmer. The two Giant Birds—Aepyorni—from Madagascar, extincted A.D. one thousand, turned and walked from us across the bridge. Even in the semi-darkness the softness of their brown feathers made curls pliant as a young mother’s hair. There was a sweet submission in the power of their enormous legs (giant drumsticks). Their tiny heads (in proportion to their bodies) were bent utterly submerged in their business and sweeping side to side as a salmon does—or as a wolf does— but with a Pleistocene, self-involved gentleness beyond our ken. My heart rose in my chest (as the metaphysical poets say “with purple wings of joy.”) to see them back in life again. We both looked, holding hands, and I felt your wide-eyed drinking-in of things. Then I turned and viewed across the darkening field and there was a huge flightless hunting fowl (the kind that ate mammals in the Pliocene). He stood on one leg in the setting sun by the sparkling stream that cut across the meadow to the bridge. He had a hammer head and curled beak, and after my initial surge of fear to see the field was dotted, populated, by his brethren, each standing in the setting sun, I saw their stately nobility and again the self-involvement. We followed the Aepyorni across the old wooden bridge made of huge timbers. The bridge was dark from the shadows of the poplars and the evergreens there. The stream was dimpled with flashing moonlight —and I think it had a little song. Then I found that on the bridge we were among a herd of black Wildebeests—Black Gnus. One was two feet away—turned toward me— looking me eye-into-eye. There was primal wildness in the upstanding coarse (not sleek as it really is in Africa) fur on the knobby, powerful-like-buffalo shoulders. (Remember this is a dream.) I passed by him both afraid and unafraid of wildness as I had passed through the herd of zebras at the top of Ngorongoro Crater in front of the lodge, where from the cliff we could see a herd of elephants like ants, and the soda lake looked pink because of flamingos there. There is an essence in fear overcome and I overcame fright in passing those zebras and this black Wildebeest. Then we passed over the heavy bridge and down a little trail on the far side of the meadow, walking back in the direction we had been. Soon we came to a cottage of white clapboards behind a big white clapboard house and knocked on the door; it was answered by a young man with long hair who was from the Incredible String Band. He took us inside and he played an instrument like a guitar and he danced as he played it. The lyre-guitar was covered with square plastic buttons in rows of given sizes and shapes. The instrument would make any sound, play any blues, make any creature sound, play any melody…I wanted it badly—it was a joy. My chest rose. I figured I’d have to, and would be glad to, give twenty or thirty thousand for it… Then the dream broke and I was standing somewhere with Joanna to the side of a crowd of people by a wall of masonry and I reached into my mouth and took from my jaw (all the other persons vanished and I was the center of everything) a piece which was eight teeth fused together. I stared at them wondering how they could all be one piece. They were white…It was some new fossil. Down on the bone there were indentations like rivulets like the flowing patterns of little rivers.

Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow — You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand — How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep — while I weep! O God! Can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

1    There are few probabilities through Which dreamers do not pass. . . The first dream Is the bright red dream Of our mother’s heart. It is her sacrifice Of something eternal In herself, for us. The Arabs say Blood has flowed Let us begin again. The heart is like a cup, or a coffer, or a cave. It holds the image of the sun within us. It is a center of illumination and happiness and wisdom. To dream of the heart is always to dream of the importance of love. . . The second dream is the inauguration Of the soul. In this dream we are Confronted by a host of birds. . . Some were guileless Like the doves,