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Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it’s spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless.

When love was a question, the message arrived in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura was hardly to be believed. For flight, it took three stagehands: two on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you thought fancy rained like grace. Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all. Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor might cough. The passions, I take my clues from an obvious source, may be less like climatic events than we conventionalize, though I’ve heard of tornadoes that break the second-best glassware and leave everything else untouched. There’s a finer conviction than seamlessness elicits: the Greeks knew a god by the clanking behind his descent. The heart, poor pump, protests till you’d think it’s rusted past redemption, but there’s tuning in these counterweights, celebration’s assembled voice.

Fingers: Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets. We, active, differentiate the digits: Whilst you are merely little toe and big (Or, in the nursery, some futile pig) Through vital use as pincers there has come Distinction of the finger and the thumb; Lacking a knuckle you have sadly missed Our meaningful translation to a fist; And only by the curling of that joint Could the firm index come to have a point. You cannot punch or demonstrate or hold And therefore cannot write or pluck or mould: Indeed, it seems deficiency in art Alone would prove you the inferior part. Toes: Not so, my friends. Our clumsy innocence And your deft sin is the main difference Between the body’s near extremities. Please do not think that we intend to please: Shut in the dark, we once were free like you. Though you enslaved us, are you not slaves, too? Our early balance caused your later guilt, Erect, of finding out how we were built. Your murders and discoveries compile A history of the crime of being agile, And we it is who save you when you fight Against the odds: you cannot take to flight. Despite your fabrications and your cunning, The deepest instinct is expressed in running.

My dear, it was a moment to clutch at for a moment so that you may believe in it and believing is the act of love, I think, even in the telling, wherever it went. In the false New England forest where the misplanted Norwegian trees refused to root, their thick synthetic roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air, we held hands and walked on our knees. Actually, there was no one there. For forty years this experimental woodland grew, shaft by shaft in perfect rows where its stub branches held and its spokes fell. It was a place of parallel trees, their lives filed out in exile where we walked too alien to know our sameness and how our sameness survives. Outside of us the village cars followed the white line we had carefully walked two nights before toward our single beds. We lay halfway up an ugly hill and if we fell it was here in the woods where the woods were caught in their dying and you held me well. And now I must dream the forest whole and your sweet hands, not once as frozen as those stopped trees, nor ruled, nor pale, nor leaving mine. Today, in my house, I see our house, its pillars a dim basement of men holding up their foreign ground for you and me. My dear, it was a time, butchered from time that we must tell of quickly before we lose the sound of our own mouths calling mine, mine, mine.

In the woods off Ivory, just out of car-shot it’s not enough to say a mouse lies snug in a crib of roots, its fur sleek as babyskin, Lord the body warm. Too often a name subverts the pang it answers for, inwit of heart-light, the epiphanic clutch. I mean do you sense with more than a chill the tiny homely lumpliness of it there in the dirt as you orphan the dim of a cold October sun, no wound I can find anywhere on its, your, my small soft bodykins—yikes its left ear (the inner skin pink delicate svelte) twitches a little and I have this before thought tricks it whimsically lovely wink of the soul as mouse-force taking wing until the O-no letdown when a yellow jacket backs out, O sweetmeat funk and dandle of the brain asputter as it launches over frost-curled leaves and dollarweed seed strewn on the path like medallions glimpsed the second we— I mean all of us cold in the twilight—fly.

An erasure of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Palingenesis” I, sobbing in the rolling mist, Started for peopled days. In dreams A faded, lonely promontory shed petals. Belief exists. Cunning with its perfume Working from youth, defiance. A phantom Vanished. The swift surrenders, leap into The old dead heart of lies. I will give, remembering my turns Into foliage. Of what light unseen! What, what, what, what, what, what Will hold still without its end?

New England. Alas, dear Mother, fairest Queen and best, With honour, wealth, and peace happy and blest, What ails thee hang thy head, and cross thine arms, And sit i’ the dust to sigh these sad alarms? What deluge of new woes thus over-whelm The glories of thy ever famous Realm? What means this wailing tone, this mournful guise? Ah, tell thy Daughter; she may sympathize. Old England. Art ignorant indeed of these my woes, Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose, And must my self dissect my tatter’d state, Which Amazed Christendom stands wondering at? And thou a child, a Limb, and dost not feel My weak’ned fainting body now to reel? This physic-purging-potion I have taken Will bring Consumption or an Ague quaking, Unless some Cordial thou fetch from high, Which present help may ease my malady. If I decease, dost think thou shalt survive? Or by my wasting state dost think to thrive? Then weigh our case, if ‘t be not justly sad. Let me lament alone, while thou art glad. New England. And thus, alas, your state you much deplore In general terms, but will not say wherefore. What Medicine shall I seek to cure this woe, If th’ wound’s so dangerous, I may not know? But you, perhaps, would have me guess it out. What, hath some Hengist like that Saxon stout By fraud and force usurp’d thy flow’ring crown, Or by tempestuous Wars thy fields trod down? Or hath Canutus, that brave valiant Dane, The regal peaceful Sceptre from thee ta’en? Or is 't a Norman whose victorious hand With English blood bedews thy conquered Land? Or is ‘t intestine Wars that thus offend? Do Maud and Stephen for the Crown contend? Do Barons rise and side against their King, And call in Foreign aid to help the thing? Must Edward be depos’d? Or is ‘t the hour That second Richard must be clapp’d i’ th’ Tower? Or is it the fatal jar, again begun, That from the red, white pricking Roses sprung? Must Richmond’s aid the Nobles now implore To come and break the tushes of the Boar? If none of these, dear Mother, what’s your woe? Pray, do not fear Spain’s bragging Armado. Doth your Ally, fair France, conspire your wrack, Or doth the Scots play false behind your back? Doth Holland quit you ill for all your love? Whence is this storm, from Earth or Heaven above? Is ‘t drought, is ‘t Famine, or is ‘t Pestilence? Dost feel the smart, or fear the consequence? Your humble Child entreats you shew your grief. Though Arms nor Purse she hath for your relief— Such is her poverty,—yet shall be found A suppliant for your help, as she is bound. Old England. I must confess some of those Sores you name My beauteous Body at this present maim, But foreign Foe nor feigned friend I fear, For they have work enough, thou knowest, elsewhere. Nor is it Alcie’s son and Henry’s Daughter Whose proud contention cause this slaughter; Nor Nobles siding to make John no King, French Louis unjustly to the Crown to bring; No Edward,Richard, to lose rule and life, Nor no Lancastrians to renew old strife; No Crook-backt Tyrant now usurps the Seat, Whose tearing tusks did wound, and kill, and threat. No Duke of York nor Earl of March to soil Their hands in Kindred’s blood whom they did foil; No need of Tudor Roses to unite: None knows which is the Red or which the White. Spain’s braving Fleet a second time is sunk. France knows how of my fury she hath drunk By Edward third and Henry fifth of fame; Her Lilies in my Arms avouch the same. My Sister Scotland hurts me now no more, Though she hath been injurious heretofore. What Holland is, I am in some suspense, But trust not much unto his Excellence. For wants, sure some I feel, but more I fear; And for the Pestilence, who knows how near? Famine and Plague, two sisters of the Sword, Destruction to a Land doth soon afford. They’re for my punishments ordain'd on high, Unless thy tears prevent it speedily. But yet I answer not what you demand To shew the grievance of my troubled Land. Before I tell the effect I’ll shew the cause, Which are my sins—the breach of sacred Laws: Idolatry, supplanter of a Nation, With foolish superstitious adoration, Are lik’d and countenanc’d by men of might, The Gospel is trod down and hath no right. Church Offices are sold and bought for gain That Pope had hope to find Rome here again. For Oaths and Blasphemies did ever ear From Beelzebub himself such language hear? What scorning of the Saints of the most high! What injuries did daily on them lie! What false reports, what nick-names did they take, Not for their own, but for their Master’s sake! And thou, poor soul, wast jeer’d among the rest; Thy flying for the Truth I made a jest. For Sabbath-breaking and for Drunkenness Did ever Land profaneness more express? From crying bloods yet cleansed am not I, Martyrs and others dying causelessly. How many Princely heads on blocks laid down For nought but title to a fading Crown! ‘Mongst all the cruelties which I have done, Oh,Edward’s Babes, and Clarence’s hapless Son, O Jane, why didst thou die in flow’ring prime?— Because of Royal Stem, that was thy crime. For Bribery, Adultery, for Thefts, and Lies Where is the Nation I can’t paralyze? With Usury, Extortion, and Oppression, These be the Hydras of my stout transgression; These be the bitter fountains, heads, and roots Whence flow’d the source, the sprigs, the boughs, and fruits. Of more than thou canst hear or I relate, That with high hand I still did perpetrate, For these were threat’ned the woeful day I mocked the Preachers, put it fair away. The Sermons yet upon record do stand That cried destruction to my wicked Land. These Prophets’ mouths (all the while) was stopt, Unworthily, some backs whipt, and ears crept; Their reverent cheeks bear the glorious marks Of stinking, stigmatizing Romish Clerks; Some lost their livings, some in prison pent, Some grossly fined, from friends to exile went: Their silent tongues to heaven did vengeance cry, Who heard their cause, and wrongs judg’d righteously, And will repay it sevenfold in my lap. This is fore-runner of my after-clap. Nor took I warning by my neighbors’ falls. I saw sad Germany’s dismantled walls, I saw her people famish’d, Nobles slain, Her fruitful land a barren heath remain. I saw (unmov’d) her Armies foil’d and fled, Wives forc’d, babes toss’d, her houses calcined. I saw strong Rochelle yield’d to her foe, Thousands of starved Christians there also. I saw poor Ireland bleeding out her last, Such cruelty as all reports have past. Mine heart obdurate stood not yet aghast. Now sip I of that cup, and just ‘t may be The bottom dregs reserved are for me. New England. To all you’ve said, sad mother, I assent. Your fearful sins great cause there ‘s to lament. My guilty hands (in part) hold up with you, A sharer in your punishment’s my due. But all you say amounts to this effect, Not what you feel, but what you do expect. Pray, in plain terms, what is your present grief? Then let’s join heads and hands for your relief. Old England. Well, to the matter, then. There’s grown of late ‘Twixt King and Peers a question of state: Which is the chief, the law, or else the King? One saith, it’s he; the other, no such thing. My better part in Court of Parliament To ease my groaning land shew their intent To crush the proud, and right to each man deal, To help the Church, and stay the Common-Weal. So many obstacles comes in their way As puts me to a stand what I should say. Old customs, new Prerogatives stood on. Had they not held law fast, all had been gone, Which by their prudence stood them in such stead They took high Strafford lower by the head, And to their Laud be ‘t spoke they held ‘n th’ Tower All England’s metropolitan that hour. This done, an Act they would have passed fain No prelate should his Bishopric retain. Here tugg’d they hard indeed, for all men saw This must be done by Gospel, not by law. Next the Militia they urged sore. This was denied, I need not say wherefore. The King, displeased, at York himself absents. They humbly beg return, shew their intents. The writing, printing, posting to and fro, Shews all was done; I’ll therefore let it go. But now I come to speak of my disaster. Contention’s grown ‘twixt Subjects and their Master, They worded it so long they fell to blows, That thousands lay on heaps. Here bleeds my woes. I that no wars so many years have known Am now destroy’d and slaughter’d by mine own. But could the field alone this strife decide, One battle, two, or three I might abide, But these may be beginnings of more woe— Who knows, the worst, the best may overthrow! Religion, Gospel, here lies at the stake, Pray now, dear child, for sacred Zion’s sake, Oh, pity me in this sad perturbation, My plundered Towns, my houses’ devastation, My ravisht virgins, and my young men slain, My wealthy trading fallen, my dearth of grain. The seedtime’s come, but Ploughman hath no hope Because he knows not who shall inn his crop. The poor they want their pay, their children bread, Their woful mothers’ tears unpitied. If any pity in thy heart remain, Or any child-like love thou dost retain, For my relief now use thy utmost skill, And recompense me good for all my ill. New England. Dear mother, cease complaints, and wipe your eyes, Shake off your dust, cheer up, and now arise. You are my mother, nurse, I once your flesh, Your sunken bowels gladly would refresh. Your griefs I pity much but should do wrong, To weep for that we both have pray’d for long, To see these latter days of hop’d-for good, That Right may have its right, though ‘t be with blood. After dark Popery the day did clear; But now the Sun in’s brightness shall appear. Blest be the Nobles of thy Noble Land With (ventur’d lives) for truth’s defence that stand. Blest be thy Commons, who for Common good And thy infringed Laws have boldly stood. Blest be thy Counties, who do aid thee still With hearts and states to testify their will. Blest be thy Preachers, who do cheer thee on. Oh, cry: the sword of God and Gideon! And shall I not on them wish Mero’s curse That help thee not with prayers, arms, and purse? And for my self, let miseries abound If mindless of thy state I e’er be found. These are the days the Church’s foes to crush, To root out Prelates, head, tail, branch, and rush. Let’s bring Baal’s vestments out, to make a fire, Their Mitres, Surplices, and all their tire, Copes, Rochets, Croziers, and such trash, And let their names consume, but let the flash Light Christendom, and all the world to see We hate Rome’s Whore, with all her trumpery. Go on, brave Essex, shew whose son thou art, Not false to King, nor Country in thy heart, But those that hurt his people and his Crown, By force expel, destroy, and tread them down. Let Gaols be fill’d with th’ remnant of that pack, And sturdy Tyburn loaded till it crack. And ye brave Nobles, chase away all fear, And to this blessed Cause closely adhere. O mother, can you weep and have such Peers? When they are gone, then drown your self in tears, If now you weep so much, that then no more The briny Ocean will o’erflow your shore. These, these are they (I trust) with Charles our king, Out of all mists such glorious days will bring That dazzled eyes, beholding, much shall wonder At that thy settled Peace, thy wealth, and splendour, Thy Church and Weal establish’d in such manner That all shall joy that thou display’dst thy banner, And discipline erected so, I trust, That nursing Kings shall come and lick thy dust. Then Justice shall in all thy Courts take place Without respect of persons or of case. Then bribes shall cease, and suits shall not stick long, Patience and purse of Clients for to wrong. Then High Commissions shall fall to decay, And Pursuivants and Catchpoles want their pay. So shall thy happy Nation ever flourish, When truth and righteousness they thus shall nourish. When thus in Peace, thine Armies brave send out To sack proud Rome, and all her vassals rout. There let thy name, thy fame, and valour shine, As did thine Ancestors’ in Palestine, And let her spoils full pay with int’rest be Of what unjustly once she poll’d from thee. Of all the woes thou canst let her be sped, Execute to th’ full the vengeance threatened. Bring forth the beast that rul’d the world with’s beck, And tear his flesh, and set your feet on’s neck, And make his filthy den so desolate To th’ ‘stonishment of all that knew his state. This done, with brandish’d swords to Turkey go,— (For then what is it but English blades dare do?) And lay her waste, for so’s the sacred doom, And do to Gog as thou hast done to Rome. Oh Abraham’s seed, lift up your heads on high, For sure the day of your redemption’s nigh. The scales shall fall from your long blinded eyes, And him you shall adore who now despise. Then fullness of the Nations in shall flow, And Jew and Gentile to one worship go. Then follows days of happiness and rest. Whose lot doth fall to live therein is blest. No Canaanite shall then be found ‘n th’ land, And holiness on horses’ bells shall stand. If this make way thereto, then sigh no more, But if at all thou didst not see ‘t before. Farewell, dear mother; Parliament, prevail, And in a while you’ll tell another tale.

A Translation for Robert Jones A diamond Is there At the heart of the moon or the branches or my nakedness And there is nothing in the universe like diamond Nothing in the whole mind. The poem is a seagull resting on a pier at the end of the ocean. A dog howls at the moon A dog howls at the branches A dog howls at the nakedness A dog howling with pure mind. I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull’s belly. The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond Two words called seagull are peacefully floating out where the waves are. The dog is dead there with the moon, with the branches, with my nakedness And there is nothing in the universe like diamond Nothing in the whole mind.

Raven steals your name for an autumn joke: buries you along with it under the thickest hemlock known to chipmunks. Too bad you were awake for the event. He accuses you of asking all the wrong questions over and over. You attempt revolt to prove his medicine wheel is cracked and filling up its own pit. He hollers your face is unmasked and madness has found a home. All stink and rotten fur, he says to you, claims you had a choice and forgot what it was. Now he says your pain must run for the river, the river for the wind. He chuckles and the dark chatters, turning you around until your shadow is the earth’s.

A man who’s trying to be a good man but isn’t, because he can’t not take whatever’s said to him as judgement. It causes him, as he puts it, to react. His face and neck redden and bloat, a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children but provoking hilarity at work where one guy likes to get his goat by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers on his computer screen while he’s in the john, then gathers a group into the next cubicle to watch when he comes back. He has talked to his minister and to his wife about learning how not to react, to make a joke, and he has tried to make jokes, but his voice gets tense, they come out flat, so even his joke becomes a joke at his expense, another thing to laugh at him about. He has thought to turn to them and ask, Why don’t you like me? What have I done to you? But he has been told already all his life: self-righteous goody two-shoes, a stick up your ass. They are right. He has never never never gotten along. He says nothing this time, just peels off the bumper sticker, crumples it gently, places it gently by his mousepad to dispose of later properly, comparing his suffering to Christ’s in Gethsemane spat upon and mocked (his minister’s advice), and tries a smile that twists into a grimace, which starts the hot blood rising into his face. This is what they came for, to see Dickhead, the bulging vein, the skull stoplight red, and indeed it is remarkable how gorged it gets as if his torso had become a helium pump, so, except for him whose eyes are shut tight, they burst into laughter together exactly at the moment cruelty turns into astonishment.