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For Jack the Ripper walking tours Come ye learned, ye loquacious, ye lost. Walk a pentagram around ego, erudition, experience. Our shuls, mosques, and homes be yours. Our murdered laid bare, our slums still teem, our souls sold. As for us, we marvel as our own effluvia swirls widdershins.

Here is where You can get nowhere Faster than ever As you go under Deeper and deeper In the fertile smother Of another acre Like any other You can’t peer over And then another And everywhere You veer or hare There you are Farther and farther Afield than before But on you blunder In the verdant meander As if   the answer To looking for cover Were to bewilder Your inner minotaur And near and far were Neither here nor there And where you are Is where you were

When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine Like the burnished spears of a field of gold; When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine, And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold; Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle, For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle. And you take a stalk that is straight and long, With an expert eye to its worthy points, And you think of the bubbling strains of song That are bound between its pithy joints— Then you cut out strings, with a bridge in the middle, With a corn-stalk bow for a corn-stalk fiddle. Then the strains that grow as you draw the bow O’er the yielding strings with a practiced hand! And the music’s flow never loud but low Is the concert note of a fairy band. Oh, your dainty songs are a misty riddle To the simple sweets of the corn-stalk fiddle. When the eve comes on and our work is done And the sun drops down with a tender glance, With their hearts all prime for the harmless fun, Come the neighbor girls for the evening’s dance, And they wait for the well-known twist and twiddle, More time than tune—from the corn-stalk fiddle. Then brother Jabez takes the bow, While Ned stands off with Susan Bland, Then Henry stops by Milly Snow And John takes Nellie Jones’s hand, While I pair off with Mandy Biddle, And scrape, scrape, scrape goes the corn-stalk fiddle. “Salute your partners,” comes the call, “All join hands and circle round,” “Grand train back,” and “Balance all,” Footsteps lightly spurn the ground, “Take your lady and balance down the middle” To the merry strains of the corn-stalk fiddle. So the night goes on and the dance is o’er, And the merry girls are homeward gone, But I see it all in my sleep once more, And I dream till the very break of dawn Of an impish dance on a red-hot griddle To the screech and scrape of a corn-stalk fiddle.

I can see her in the kitchen, Cooking up, for the hundredth time, A little something from her Limited Midwestern repertoire. Cigarette going in the ashtray, The red wine pulsing in its glass, A warning light meaning Everything was simmering Just below the steel lid Of her smile, as she boiled The beef into submission, Chopped her way Through the vegetable kingdom With the broken-handled knife I use tonight, feeling her Anger rising from the dark Chambers of the head Of cabbage I slice through, Missing her, wanting To chew things over With my mother again.

How tired are you? How benevolent the cause for those slim, aching moments of blinding obscurity, and the blinds drawn and the sunlight louvered until even the knickknacks cling to their dust as to Time passing passing, if even that. The yearning to be not bothered, to be passed on the street, the rehab, the food mart, the many shoppe window reflections. So many times, the eyes averted in fear, so many times you remain obscure, even to your more obscured self. A silence charting your whereabouts at the many roundabouts, the Tenderloins forever unnamed. Even the sounds of the half-painted trams remain silent in passing. Their wheels grinding yet silent. The rain silent. The accusations even more silent, or the “friends” who never talk back, clouded in darkness. The landscapes drifting. The equestrian trots drifting. All the genres mixed up or simply misplaced. The memories gone blank. The mundane measured in hours, minutes, or decades, intervening, descending.

Like a child, mind wants to play, but even the butterflies are on the clock. Still, attention is happy to comport with the swallowtail as it jerkily rounds the corner. Like a child, mind follows, imitates. First and last it loves sequence. I’ve counted up to one this season.

She says my hair smells like corn tortillas. I raise an eyebrow. After all those honeysuckle and papaya shampoos, I can’t believe my scalp hasn’t soaked up the scent of blossom or the perfume of rainfall. No, she’s my mother, and she insists that even as a little girl, my whole bedroom breathed corn tortillas. Pressing nose to pillowcase, I search for masa, reach back before molcajete and plow to a dusky meadow, its bed of soil flecked with teosinte, ancestor grasses. Up through the dark follicles of my skull covered in sun-cracked husks, push the black-brown silk strands, cocooning thirsty kernels. Maíz sprouts into fields of thought bearing hybrid rows of words that fall like teeth from the mouths of the dead.

Muses that sing love's sensual empery, And lovers kindling your enraged fires At Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye, Blown with the empty breath of vain desires; You that prefer the painted cabinet Before the wealthy jewels it doth store ye, That all your joys in dying figures set, And stain the living substance of your glory; Abjure those joys, abhor their memory, And let my love the honour'd subject be Of love, and honour's complete history. Your eyes were never yet let in to see The majesty and riches of the mind, But dwell in darkness; for your god is blind.

When for the thorns with which I long, too long, With many a piercing wound, My Saviour’s head have crowned, I seek with garlands to redress that wrong: Through every garden, every mead, I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers), Dismantling all the fragrant towers That once adorned my shepherdess’s head. And now when I have summed up all my store, Thinking (so I myself deceive) So rich a chaplet thence to weave As never yet the King of Glory wore: Alas, I find the serpent old That, twining in his speckled breast, About the flowers disguised does fold, With wreaths of fame and interest. Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them, And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem! But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame, Either his slippery knots at once untie; And disentangle all his winding snare; Or shatter too with him my curious frame, And let these wither, so that he may die, Though set with skill and chosen out with care: That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread, May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting you were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain brown envelopes for the return of your very “Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues give the fullest treatment in literature yet to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin, who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,” instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long, neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites: I swear to you, it was just my way of cheering myself up, as I licked the stamped, self-addressed envelopes, the game I had of trying to guess which one of you, this time, had poisoned his glue. I did care. I did read each poem entire. I did say everything I thought in the mildest words I knew. And now, in this poem, or chopped prose, no better, I realize, than those troubled lines I kept sending back to you, I have to say I am relieved it is over: at the end I could feel only pity for that urge toward more life your poems kept smothering in words, the smell of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses to write. Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell— their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.