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Fireplace blocked, sealed with cardboard, and taped. Furniture trashed, paneling smashed. On the second floor mid-corridor, a rotting cat furry and fey in a nap of  gore glued flat to a spot on the floor, ether-sweet in a frieze of decay, up-staring, popeyed, pissed. The screens I installed belled out, belled in. Every window cracked, broken, or forgotten, left open. The in-gusting Atlantic left smelling sick. A shade softly crashed on a sash, finish nails and a bare molly bolt fanfared me from the gloom. Google the address: from outer space it’s a bare green blot, treeless, erased, terns where we made love, gulls where we fought.

All the dead kings came to me At Rosnaree, where I was dreaming, A few stars glimmered through the morn, And down the thorn the dews were streaming. And every dead king had a story Of ancient glory, sweetly told. It was too early for the lark, But the starry dark had tints of gold. I listened to the sorrows three Of that Eire passed into song. A cock crowed near a hazel croft, And up aloft dim larks winged strong. And I, too, told the kings a story Of later glory, her fourth sorrow: There was a sound like moving shields In high green fields and the lowland furrow. And one said: ‘We who yet are kings Have heard these things lamenting inly.’ Sweet music flowed from many a bill And on the hill the morn stood queenly. And one said: ‘Over is the singing, And bell bough ringing, whence we come; With heavy hearts we’ll tread the shadows, In honey meadows birds are dumb.’ And one said: ‘Since the poets perished And all they cherished in the way, Their thoughts unsung, like petal showers Inflame the hours of blue and grey.’ And one said: ‘A loud tramp of men We’ll hear again at Rosnaree.’ A bomb burst near me where I lay. I woke, ’twas day in Picardy.

Dead love, by treason slain, lies stark, White as a dead stark-stricken dove: None that pass by him pause to mark Dead love. His heart, that strained and yearned and strove As toward the sundawn strives the lark, Is cold as all the old joy thereof. Dead men, re-arisen from dust, may hark When rings the trumpet blown above: It will not raise from out the dark Dead love.

Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night. —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” We spend our lives trying to grasp the premise. William Blake is not, for instance, William Blake, but rather a 19th century accountant from Cleveland on the lam for murder & the theft of a horse. In the closing scene, he is going to die, & so is Nobody, his half-Blackfoot, half-Blood guide. Sure, this is a Western, a morality tale about a destiny made manifest through the voice of a gun & a hero whose mythic flight from innocence destroys him. But we all come to the end of the line soon enough. The obvious just seems wiser when Nobody says it.Time, it turns out, is the most common noun in the English language, as if by constant invocation, we could keep it at bay. Yesterday, I sat in another state on a large rubber ball in my brother’s basement bouncing my newborn nephew in my arms. His mother, on the phone with a friend, asks what we should fear more, the hobo spider or the poison that kills it. I want to whisper into his ear something that feels like knowledge: Once upon a time, there was nothing & one day, there will be nothing again. This is the faraway place to which his tiny weight calls me. If he could understand the words. I think, he would know what I mean, having only just sprung himself from that fine sea. Sometimes we coo to soothe him:Don’t cry, Little Bird. I know, I know. But only the roar of the vacuum finally calms him, for nothing sounds as much like the lost world of the womb as the motors of our machines. The root of travel means torture, having passed from Medieval Latin into Old French. As the action opens, Johnny Depp, shot in black & white, is already rocking into night on a train. And soon, he will begin his dying. This is not to say that the inky band fanning across the morning blue of a kestrel’s tail feathers has no meaning, or the first fingers of rust coming into bloom on the green enameled chassis of a Corona typewriter left in the rain. Direct observation, the naturalist Niko Tinbergen assures us, is the only real thing. Perhaps this is what I should tell him. Or that this moment, too, is a part of some migration. Every snow bunting composes its own song, & a careful watcher can tell one kittiwake from its neighbor by the little dots on the tips of its wings. The most used verb is also the most humble— merely to be. Nobody can teach to William Blake the auguries of William Blake. We are, instead, our own vatic visions, bumbling prophets. Our sense of ourselves as invented as film. Later, in an ocean-going canoe lined with cedar boughs, he will drift out into cold breakers, two bullets in his chest. But, here, in his small hat & wire glasses, he still seems sweetly comic. He holds up a letter; someone’s promised him a job. His fancy plaid suit makes him look like a clown.

The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear. The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now. Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended—stopped and held. What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! have they gone into you! Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul’s sack Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled? None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth. What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop. The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, Those dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’ But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love, The impetuous storm of savage love. Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke, What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul With lightning and thunder from your mined heart, Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed? A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness. They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads. Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye, The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences. Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said, The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight. Will they come? Will they ever come? Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face.

They hail me as one living, But don't they know That I have died of late years, Untombed although? I am but a shape that stands here, A pulseless mould, A pale past picture, screening Ashes gone cold. Not at a minute's warning, Not in a loud hour, For me ceased Time's enchantments In hall and bower. There was no tragic transit, No catch of breath, When silent seasons inched me On to this death .... — A Troubadour-youth I rambled With Life for lyre, The beats of being raging In me like fire. But when I practised eyeing The goal of men, It iced me, and I perished A little then. When passed my friend, my kinsfolk, Through the Last Door, And left me standing bleakly, I died yet more; And when my Love's heart kindled In hate of me, Wherefore I knew not, died I One more degree. And if when I died fully I cannot say, And changed into the corpse-thing I am to-day, Yet is it that, though whiling The time somehow In walking, talking, smiling, I live not now.

In my coat I sit At the window sill Wintering with snow That did not melt It fell long ago At night, by stealth I was where I am When the snow began

They work fingers to bone & borrow smudged paper, then make promises to family, unmerciful gods, the unborn. Some eat a favorite meal three times in a row. Others partake only a pinch of soil before boarding half-broken boats & rubber rafts — half of the young women big with life inside them, flesh & blood for daydreams of the Arabian nights, as makeshift charts & constellations work their way through war & rumors of war. The smugglers count their loot. Hard winds rattle gongs over sea salt till the rusty engines die, & cries alert mermaid sirens as pirated schooners adrift under a mute sky rock to & fro, & the fight goes out of the few alive. Their loved ones & friends, lost folk songs, mountains & valleys, all left behind. Searchlights spot the dead hugging the living, & draglines raise only those who were braver than us. The lucky ones stumble out of stupor, tried by raging water beneath black skies, listening to the albatross talk.

It is the great arguments we are proud of, over a nibbled peach, hair in the comb, a faulty lube job; the reconciliations were always naked in borrowed rooms, sometimes in Queens or Staten Island, we touched each other shyly—we reminded each other of loneliness and funk and beautiful pigeons with oil-slick necks, cooing bitterly— but there we lost each other in forgiveness; keeping score, being wounded even in triumph, walking home down leafy avenues etched with the faint double line of extinct trolleys, caressing carved hearts under a sheen of sap with a ragged nail, sleeping alone, choosing the dream of betrayal, entering by the wide door and waking dead—there we were superb. In Brooklyn we held our own.

He arrives in the courtyard with two cartons of juice, each of which he’ll tip and drain at one go in the heat, and a sack of food for the roses. He looms over his tools, blond and dusty as a stalk of ripe wheat, surely someone’s prized lover. Centuries bask among his hybrid teas, and he shakes his capable handfuls of food into their beds until nothing but roses nose the blues between lake and garden, lake and sky, the lapse of lawn where a party could be if those who lived here once returned to pour the wine. She’d be the sort to tuck a bud behind her ear, and he to catch one in his teeth. But alas, we’re guests of the present, expectant and sultry; all graciousness is fled, and rain fills the spent blooms, tumbles their tops, weighted with ruffles and shocks of pink. The gardener too disappears with his breeches the color of mustard and cinched with a string, gone back into the pages of Hardy or Lawrence. Perhaps, he’ll appear again Tuesday next, but he won’t look any of us living in the eye.