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Out of a high meadow where flowers bloom above cloud, come down; pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice. Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir, surprise in the perfect leg-stems and queries unstirred by recognition or fear pooled in the deep eyes. Come down by regions where rocks lift through the hot haze of pain; down landscapes darkened, crossed by the rift of death-shock; place print of a neat hoof on trampled ground where not one leaf or root remains unbitten; but come down always, accompany me to the morass of the decaying mind. There we’ll share one rotted stump between us.

“endlessly making an end to things” —Celan I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil, a seal, a slick when I took my hands away from her throat—the way she liked in loving to have her pearls exchanged for the torque of my fingers and so kill her eminence for a second. The queen is dead. Long live the queen. The evidence was volatile, was fugitive, was a story told in menstrual blood and glycerines, Chanel and boss sauce. It failed in the telling to be events and sequence, the spell of water and bridge, and became rain and distance, the first faint smell of rose dismembering, masking the rigor mortis of the coyotes. I took my hands away as from the child sleeping or from the hot stove, and I was no longer I. I saw the sky in the windshield of another city. The sky an empty karate studio, the sky Route 95. Because she saw herself everywhere, The sky a fugue, the folds of a gown where the dragons are. there could be no other. A film was her darling, the sky Artists’ Supplies, the sky six-thirty darkening. a mirror of her hair—fixed or deranged Sky of correspondences, the color of G minor, the taste of gray. She thought, from the audience: I should be up there. February sky a copy center, relocated elsewhere. I loved to go out into the audience, the bebopist said, and walk in the crowd to feel what they feel. Jumping down from the bandstand, I broke my foot, lay there, had to blare it from my back. The sky nineteenth-century smoke, the sky a drum, then here comes the bass solo. Vote Hoffa , the sky says, labor sky, the dollar soaring with the yen. The sky popularized, blue-red, the access and the factory. I take myself to the movies—the romance of sheets, the dustup of things and her magnificent face: stylish, the sky inside her eyes, chlorine and glass. I tithe to the darkness and I’m glad for the dark two hours where I undo her, where I remember the eye I indulged, the opposite of sacrifice, the lamb’s throat uncut, the woolly body kindled in the green like a dream of Lorca’s, betrayed in the telling. The sky Repairables, the sky Pony Rides. Some nights in the house by the river, I walked out into a collective dream of home—an overstory overlooking a body of water—where I found the horse like smoke or luck, a muscled earth, an avatar, and I held him, face to flank, and felt the skeleton under the skin and the fear of the human touched back by hunger. The great white eye another moon. It was a lesser and a greater form of the feeling after fucking, if it has a form, if its past is present. Sky an empty shelf in the Salvation Army Thrift Store. A few fine hairs like her lashes on my hands The sky a white peony, the sky a paper life. when I came back and found her bound in the sheets, the opposite of spectacle, not absorbing the gaze but giving off light like night water, giving back the gorgeous I had inscribed there, a fallen form, small, fursheen, film still, a body suddenly small enough to fill a tear duct. The sky a shell, a lull in the shelling. What was it like, the loving? Like Sarajevo under siege, no electricity, no gas, no water, and yet the dance goes on in which a bathtub is filled, and, although the theater is twenty degrees, the dancer of the god-kissed tendons for her finale jumps into it—the leap that takes away the breath and rations it to everyone, and it’s the only bath for anyone in two months. The sky orchestra and karma, the sky Gold Bought and Sold. The windows of the house I won’t live in held light and the island fires on the river, held hawk and heron. Under siege in dream, the panes slash my face when they shatter with difference, inside, outside, with distance, what was not. A second dream: kids go by on bikes and big wheels, their faces grown up and disfigured, scabbed, hydrocephalic with sadness. Finally the whole body The sky a gray whale, the sky magnanimous and cruel. and not just its parts, wants to be unloved, beginning The sky Purgatory Road, the sky a god mouth, a crow. with its parts, the fetish of her: a cell from the lining, spit, a follicle, the thousand ships of her face, the torso and ratio, rib whittle, unbound feet, beginning to become vast, nothing you can touch, a taste, The sky a copper pot blackened, picked clean of puchero . a smell, familiar and far away, unlocked by thaw, feral and essential, like a language lost, like night illuminated by the night.

I need more time, a simple day in Paris hotels and window shopping. The croissants will not bake themselves and the Tower of London would Like to spend a night in the tropics with gray sassy paint. It has many Wounds and historic serial dreams under contract to Hollywood. Who will play the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who will braid her Hair? Was it she who left her lips on the block for the executioner, Whose hands would never find ablution, who would never touch a woman Again or eat the flesh of a red animal? Blood pudding would repulse him Until joining Anne. That is the way of history written for Marlow and Shakespear. They are with us now that we are sober and wiser, Not taking the horrors of poetry too seriously. Why am I telling you this Nonsense, when I have never seen you sip your coffee or tea, In the morning? Not to mention, Never heard you sing, although some claim it is quite grand. Will you teach me to sing like Chaliapin? Will I impress you with my Cartoon Russian accent? I like sour cream and borsht; We went to school together. My minor was caviar and blinis. This is what it means to listen to Boris Godunov late at night. Cool mornings are for Lakmé and songs of flowers for misplaced lovers. But why should we speak in a foreign language to each other, We are not birds. I have other stories too strange and beautiful to be Told. They have no sound or memory. They will rest on your lips when You bring your hands to your mouth to stop their gush of air against your Face. We should go back and meet again at the street fair of cufflinks. Our hearts teach us how to fly with wings of pain. That is the price of the disarticulated lessons we should not abstain from Playing. The accumulated misdemeanors add up to the most egregious Felony: ignoring the demands of the heart. We remain in abeyance to The muses who are only interested in their outcomes, We are just the worms on their hooks of selfishness. What do they care, we are not Greek. We are just a dream of pleasant Comic arias that suffice as whims in the morning. We are small enemies to them with strange large hearts that control the Weather in the heavens. They cannot change or unteach us not to Trespass their quarters of endowment. Perhaps, after all, you are an Affable spirit bubbling over with your own deductions to minimize the Pointed dots in your beautiful endeavors. Although I feel like a bird with a broken wing, Each day I think of you I fumble an attempt to fly to impress you with The color of my paper wings.

Sylvia Plath is setting my hair on rollers made from orange-juice cans. The hairdo is shaped like a pyre. My locks are improbably long. A pyramid of lemons somehow balances on the rickety table where we sit, in the rented kitchen which smells of singed naps and bergamot. Sylvia Plath is surprisingly adept at rolling my unruly hair. She knows to pull it tight. Few words. Her flat, American belly, her breasts in a twin sweater set, stack of typed poems on her desk, envelopes stamped to go by the door, a freshly baked poppyseed cake, kitchen safety matches, black-eyed Susans in a cobalt jelly jar. She speaks a word, “immolate,” then a single sentence of prophecy. The hairdo done, the nursery tidy, the floor swept clean of burnt hair and bumblebee husks.

Olive seashells in the air you can eat. The very inner of the inner ear in the breeze. Last night my son dreamt about falling out of trees. I had almost forgotten that we were simians. The fiddlehead turns on itself but only ever in love. Green cinnamon roll, a snake too small to hunt anyone. Curled in like my son’s fingers, his fists. More beautiful than a spider fern, spun-in island, moldy tongue of a hippopotamus, the eye of the forest. When my son wakes up screaming I don’t pick him up right away. I tell him where he is and who I am. At night all the fiddlehead wants to do is sleep. When I sleep I dream about death adders curling around his soft body, all of us making the same kinds of sounds.

is not a man being swallowed by a fish with eyes like eight-point throwing stars it’s a man being swallowed by a war a man being taken into the mouth of a woman or being swallowed by his work it’s a man traveling far inside a book a man being swallowed up in smoke he swallows the smoke, that blends around him like a thought it’s a man being swallowed by a sound he shapes it so he lives inside a song of a man being swallowed by his kin, his skin a man being swallowed by the State (Leviathan in 1948) It’s a man being swallowed by another man literally, eaten as a pathway to god it’s a man being swallowed by a sight he cannot reach, cannot touch, cannot trace it’s a man who won’t recognize his face who can’t fit the parts, or find the place it’s a man in triumph over death who laughs and beats the dust from his clothes a man tasting dust inside the laugh it’s a man who listens to the clock a man with nothing to exchange a rude man, his twin he leaves behind it’s a man who wants to be a bride a man being swallowed by his fault with something old to show and new to hide it’s a man who tries to haul the rope a man who stooping can’t provide a man who can’t forget his name it’s a man who doesn’t know his worth it’s a man being swallowed by his wrath his youth, yield, luck, the law, his fear, the fog, his fame it’s a man being swallowed by a coat his father’s coat, he smells of the fit a man being swallowed by his vows it’s a man softly squeezing for the vein he never finds it, he’s minding the road it’s a man being swallowed by a room in which he finds a man being swallowed by a fish it’s a man who thinks what’s in a man who exits into night at closing time the figure of a man being swallowed by a fish.

We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket about to settle into the shape of the present which, if we wanted to imagine it as a person, would undoubtedly look startled— as after a verbal berating or in advance of a light pistol-whipping. The camera came and went, came and went, like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse. The crew was acting like a litter of mimics trying to make a killing. Anything to fill the vacuum of time. The wind whirred and tracked the clouds. The credits, we were told, would take the form of a semi-scrawl, urban-sprawl, graffiti-style typography. The soundtrack would include instrumental versions of "Try a Little Tenderness." Our handler, who was walking backward in order to maintain constant eye contact with us, nearly stumbled over a girl in a sheath and pearls who was misting a shelf of hothouse flowers. While the two apologized to each other, we stood and watched the fine spray settle over the leaves and drip onto the floor. On the way out, we passed a door with a small window reinforced with wired glass through which we could see a nurse positioning a patient on a table. We swore afterward we'd heard her say, "Lie perfectly still and look only inward." A clock chimed and as the others were audibly counting backwards from five to zero, I thought I heard someone say, "Now let go of this morbid attachment to things."

Grass grew long in the story. Pieces clung to bedclothes. In the night he believed he grew taller. Grass covered the dream of a serpent, eyes sunk in his head, tail of silk clover. The dream translated into silver tone. More serpent heads and the dream turned into an opera. It was the opera that made the dreamer famous. Location of opera could be in any country, could be Antarctica, more likely Finland, where they believe in silk clover, it is gold in a land of starved desire for summer. The opera had a clover leaf copied in porcelain by Aalto, the famous designer, who sewed the clover leaf into a white curtain. He designed a window for the man when he looks out to sea in his serpent costume. This opera that begins with a dream traveled to Rome and Zagreb, traveled across continents, once by camel. The travels became more famous than the opera. People began to forget whether the grass really had grown long, and where the serpent came from. The opera was called by another name and included a gold limousine. Somewhere in Oceania they added mermaid elves.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

There was a bucket, there was a wall, there was a woman and a man. The woman carried the bucket and the man was the wall. There was no place else to go. It was a long, long time for there was much to carry and there was much to wall. There was a path ran straight from the well to the hole in the wall. There was a path ran crooked from the well to the wood. There was something in the wood bigger than the bucket. Woe to the man, woe to the wall. Woe to the bucket at the edge of the wood.