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I: THE MOTOR: 1905 From hedgerows where aromas fain would be New volleyed odours execrably arise; The flocks, with hell-smoke in their patient eyes, Into the ditch from bawling ruin flee: Spindrift of one abominated sea Along all roads in wrecking fury flies Till on young strangled leaf, on bloom that dies, In this far plot it writes a rune for me. Vast intimate tyranny! Nature dispossessed Helplessly hates thee, whose symbolic flare Lights up (with what reiterance unblest!) Entrails of horror in a world thought fair. False God of pastime thou, vampire of rest, Augur of what pollution, what despair?

A noisome thing that crawls by covert path, For glad, unfearing feet to lie in wait; No part in summer’s fellowship it hath, From mirth and love and music alienate. Yet once it flashed across the close, brown grass In the noon sun, and, as it quivered there, The spell of beauty over it did pass, Making it kin with earth and light and air. I knew that Life’s imperial self decrees That this, the loathliest of living things, By patient ways of cycled centuries, Slow creeping, shall at last attain to wings.

For John Ashbery We pullmaned to Peoria. Was Gladys glad, Skippy missed Sookie so. So Peru-ward, home. “I’ll sew buttons on dresses yet.” Nike’s peach-knife nicked little finger Chinese straw finger-cuffed to Minna’s Siamesed. Hartford, how are your wheres, our whens? Or extirpated traumas’ gifted guilt smothered aboard a club car. Lake Ontario spilled Jo Jo’s knapsack: “Pasternak.” An alligator ate an alligator- trapping monkey. We ate because “it’s dark, it’s air-conditioned” like lurching to the movies, shot marbles in lobbies. What interests? Takes? Escapes? Eat, moth-light, part and apart, slowly we slow waiters serve hot plates.

At my side the Demon writhes forever, Swimming around me like impalpable air; As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever And fills me with an eternal guilty desire. Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses, Apearing in woman's most seductive forms, And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses, Lips grow accustomed to his lewd love-charms. He leads me thus, far from the sight of God, Panting and broken with fatigue into The wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad, And into my bewildered eyes he throws Visions of festering wounds and filthy clothes, And all Destruction's bloody retinue.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown. For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still! And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride; And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail: And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown. And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal; And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Cabbage—the first word put down with his new pen, a trophy pen, like a trophy wife, not cheap, absurd to use a ballpoint pen for a task like this, a challenge, for which he’d also bought a new, but antique, rolltop desk recently restored, with matching chair, also not cheap, and for which he’d renovated the attic room with pine-paneled walls, bookshelves, and a good light for his new office or weekend office, a place planned for many years, even before college, back in high school in fact, a resolve rare in his life, but about which he’d dreamed in free moments at work, and which kept him sane during those tedious years of doing the taxes for strangers, but now at last begun, excitingly begun, as he leaned forward with pen raised to put down on paper the first word of his first novel.

There’s a joke that ends with —huh? It’s the bomb saying here is your father. Now here is your father inside your lungs. Look how lighter the earth is — afterward. To even write the word father is to carve a portion of the day out of a bomb-bright page. There’s enough light to drown in but never enough to enter the bones & stay.Don’t stay here, he said,my boy broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry anymore. So I ran into the night. The night: my shadow growing toward my father.

Newspaper says the boy killed by someone, don’t say who. I know the mother, waking, gets up as usual, washes her face in cold water, and starts the coffee pot. She stands by the window up there on floor sixteen wondering why the street’s so calm with no cars going or coming, and then she looks at the wall clock and sees the time. Now she’s too awake to go back to bed, she’s too awake not to remember him, her one son, or to forget exactly how long yesterday was, each moment dragged into the next by the force of her will until she thought this simply cannot be. She sits at the scarred, white kitchen table, the two black windows staring back at her, wondering how she’ll go back to work today. The windows don’t see anything: they’re black, eyeless, they give back only what’s given; sometimes, like now, even less than what’s given, yet she stares into their two black faces moving her head from side to side, like this, just like I’m doing now. Try it awhile, go ahead, it’s not going to kill you. Now say something, it doesn’t matter what you say because all the words are useless: “I’m sorry for your loss.” “This too will pass.” “He was who he was.” She won’t hear you out because she can only hear the torn words she uses to pray to die. This afternoon you and I will see her just before four alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a navel orange secured under her arm, and we’ll look away. Under your breath make her one promise and keep it forever: in the little store-front church down the block, the one with the front windows newspapered, you won’t come on Saturday or Sunday to kneel down and pray for life eternal.

Greed got in the way. We built a fake estate. Levinas said to see ourselves we need each other yet doorbells, rows of them, glow in the night village a string of lit invitations no elbow has leaned into (both arms embracing messages). Unanswered the doors are rotting from the bottom up. It’s another perplexing pothole in our road, loves. Hard core from the quarry might make it level, hard core and cunning speculation into matters concerning love and doubt, concerning want and plenty. O the places where pavement runs out and ragwort springs up, where Lindenwood ends but doesn’t abut anywhere neatly, a petered-out plot of Tayto tumbleweeds, bin bags, rebar, roof slates, offcuts, guttering, drain grilles, doodads, infill, gravel! A not-as-yet nice establishment, possessing potential where we have no authorized voice but are oddly fitted out for the pain it takes to build bit by bit. When the last contractions brought us to the brink of our new predicament, we became developers.

For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture: coyote voices fluting across the greening rise to the east where the deer have almost ceased to pass now that the developers have carved up yet another section, filled another space with spars and studs, concrete, runoff. Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand; only three years past came great horned owls who raised two squeaking, downy owlets that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail. It was on an August afternoon that you drove in, curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek, that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight, three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze, who vanished when you turned your head. We have felt the presence on this land of others, of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up, turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals; their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.