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Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations, sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum carcass I'd found collapsed against the house. Forensics tells us the backyard is Panama before quinine, an ecosystem unto itself, civil war of mongoose, snake, and cat. The cause of the possum's death was obvious, this near-biblical dryness that lasted the summer. This morning I found a carapace, a palmetto bug in my shower, dead in his search for water. He got flushed, a Viking funeral; minutes later I heard about Rocky, 48, complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, who went the same week as John, 47, though by less violent means. I'd never introduced either to my family, and now I am covering the mirrors. Pictures from a decade ago exist without context, the bars in them closed, marriages shattered on the pebbly coast of installment debt, bands broken up by midnight arguments dead men can't recall. Forgive us our trespasses, yes, but also this literalism. Let us frame the only surviving picture of the three of us in a rectangle of thorns before we take communion out in the street. I will let those candles burn, burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick, Barracuda, then tell you how I would have laid down my life for either of those two men, and I have nothing to offer now they have done that for me.

Department of Trance Department of Dream of Levitation Department of White Fathom Department of Winding Sometimes my son orders me lie down I like when he orders me lie down          close your eyes Department of Paper Laid Gentry Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper he covers me with then sings I like best the smallest sounds he makes then Department of This Won’t Sting Am I slipping away Department of Violet Static as if he were a distant station Department of Satellite My child says you sleep Department of Infinitely Flexible Web and covers my face with blankness Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein Department of Eyelash I can’t speak or even blink or the page laid over my face will fall Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall He says Mama don’t look Department of You Won’t Feel a Thing I cannot behold Department of Pinprick He will not behold Department of Veils and Chimes of Lungs Afloat in Ether I like this best Department of Spider Vein when I am most like dead and being with him then, Department of Notes Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random I must explain to my child that sleep is not the same as dead Department of Borderlessness so that he may not be afraid of Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids so I can lie and listen not holding not carrying not working Department of Becalmed             faint sound of him I am gone His song is the door back to the room I am composed of the notes

The next morning I felt that our house had been lifted away from its foundation during the night, and was now adrift, though so heavy it drew a foot or more of whatever was buoying it up, not water but something cold and thin and clear, silence riffling its surface as the house began to turn on a strengthening current, leaving, taking my wife and me with it, and though it had never occurred to me until that moment, for fifteen years our dog had held down what we had by pressing his belly to the floors, his front paws, too, and with him gone the house had begun to float out onto emptiness, no solid ground in sight.

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied Specks to range on window sills at home, On shelves at school, and wait and watch until The fattening dots burst, into nimble Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how The daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too For they were yellow in the sun and brown In rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

When the beautiful young man drowned— accidentally, swimming at dawn in a current too swift for him, or obedient to some cult of total immersion that promised the bather would come up divine, mortality rinsed from him— Hadrian placed his image everywhere, a marble Antinoüs staring across the public squares where a few dogs always scuffled, planted in every squalid little crossroads at the furthest corners of the Empire. What do we want in any body but the world? And if the lover’s inimitable form was nowhere, then he would find it everywhere, though the boy became simply more dead as the sculptors embodied him. Wherever Hadrian might travel, the beloved figure would be there first: the turn of his shoulders, the exact marble nipples, the drowned face not really lost to the Nile—which has no appetite, merely takes in anything without judgment or expectation— but lost into its own multiplication, an artifice rubbed with oils and acid so that the skin might shine. Which of these did I love? Here is his hair, here his hair again. Here the chiseled liquid waist I hold because I cannot hold it. If only one of you

This lip, too, used to curl a little easier, and we, all of us, must enter our Vegas years. Blessed the pacemakers, blessed the painkillers, blessed our famed quiffs grown flyaway, grown thin, the gray starting to sprout under the dye. So much to hide beneath the spit and mascara. So much to powder puff and trim. Nose hairs, for instance, and sideburns, the skin seasick as we’re made to play dress-up one final time. A daughter’s bracelet slipped over a wrist, and, for the ring finger, a lightning bolt ring. How far we venture from a love of peanut butter and Wonder Bread, how far from a Stutz Bearcat and Kahlil Gibran. From codeine, meperidine, diazepam, the room with the teddy bears and the empty syringe. How far from the last book we dived into to learn about sexual positions and astrological signs. And far, too, from the myth of our baritones coming alive in Tupelo, of how we could turn on and off the rain. “That’s the way the mop flops,” I think he’d say, as they lay him out flat under the chandelier, then in the limousine. “That’s the way the mop flops,” as five men enter his mausoleum with water, cement, and a wheelbarrow full of sand, the instruments set down, the stage lights dimmed, “Thank you very much! Goodnight, Graceland.”

Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, Gentle and merciful and just! Who, in the fear of God, didst bear The sword of power, a nation’s trust! In sorrow by thy bier we stand, Amid the awe that hushes all, And speak the anguish of a land That shook with horror at thy fall. Thy task is done; the bond are free: We bear thee to an honored grave, Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave. Pure was thy life; its bloody close Hath placed thee with the sons of light, Among the noble host of those Who perished in the cause of Right.

A car’s backfire rifles the ear with skeleton clatter, the crowd’s walla walla draws near, caterwaul evaporating in thin air. Silence is dead. (Long live silence.) Let’s observe a moment of it, call it what it’s not: splatter of rain that can’t soothe the window’s pane, dog barking up the wrong tree. Which tree, which air apparent is there to hear a word at its worth? Hammer that drums its water-logged warning against the side of the submarine: I’m buried to the hilt like the knife, after it’s thrown, continues to bow to the apple it’s split.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.