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Have you said your sermon this morning? the road it travels is dusty and wide and goes round and round and round the mountain to say it is obvious is to say it is crowded with refugees you and the others on the road no destination in sight you are alive though boring at times and the smell of you is instant nausea you breathe white breath in the early morning air indeed you may have a flair for going round and round with a skip and a jump at the most unexpected moments wasn’t that you on a music box dancing in perfect porcelain? a quake threw you from your shelf but round the mountain you must go suppose for once you went up the mountain? would that be a different direction or just more tiring? would it disturb the order of the ten thousand of ten thousand things? do you care? do you know whose sermon this is? it’s a habit you’ll have for life although things do slow down fall into themselves and leave the world to silence and to aha? gotcha? you’re it for now but it won’t be long before another sucker comes this way and you can hide under the desk with the rest of us : look : sky and sea are an undifferentiated gray even the birds disappear but forecast faith in a word and the osprey is there again hanging head-down in the wind it’s plain that being unsure gives you your daily terror you even lift a prayer for it bells ring and you know it is the buoy off Saunders Reef the red light assures you the buoy is still there that no Debussy bells have come to dismantle your ears you’re safe in being where you are not that you’ve got a warranty for life no matter what the salesman said you signed up for Metaphysics 1 cost a bundle left you high and dry : how dare you take all hope away? well in the first place it crash-landed years ago you’ve been standing there imagining greaves breastplate helmet with plumes the whole she-bang but don’t weep today for what you did then there’s a lot to learn about letting go and you won’t hear a clang of armor when you do in your most invincible day you were a larva underfoot you lived by chance shape-shifting you are a fortunate one without a shell no plane overhead gun to your head you are accidentally free in the full terror of being who you are but tell me now this once and forever have you built your language out of the things you love?

I dated mostly police. I hated coastal solace. In navy posts I flourished. I inflate the cost of polish. I restrained my nest-egg worries. On planes I tested patience. I prayed for lusty follies. I betrayed my foster family. In ways I lost my malice. I craved a cloistered palace. I dared say the feast was ghoulish. I became a tourist: boorish. Unswayed by mystic knowledge, I raised a frosty chalice. I was upstaged and roasted: English. I obeyed a ghost who’s tall-ish. The play was close to flawless. I stayed and missed her no less. Then one day the fester wasn’t. I cried: the taste was more-ish.

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc. —Charles Dickens There might be a planet. Before that, though, there would have been a gas that coalesced into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more each minute, more each person, yes and every one of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages, it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr. Number One. And why, or even what he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo? sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment when our neural linkage first began to form, as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars, of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes, one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody else is waking up this morning with the need to be detached from any history, to stand here like a person in a play who enters onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then, of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero, unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity, no more than any one of us can be a human being unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation” so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere. No; there isn’t any“elsewhere.” When we sleep or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur, a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . . a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers, knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather, D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens, union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text on his easel; and the story—the only story we know, the story of Before—is recited.

“You knew who I was when I walked in the door. You thought that I was dead. Well, I am dead. A man can walk and talk and even breathe and still be dead.” Edmond O’Brien is perspiring and chewing up the scenery in my favorite film noir, D.O.A. I can’t stop watching, can’t stop relating. When I walked down Columbus to Endicott last night to pick up Tor’s new novel, I felt the eyes of every Puerto Rican teen, crackhead, yuppie couple focus on my cane and makeup. “You’re dead,” they seemed to say in chorus. Somewhere in a dark bar years ago, I picked up “luminous poisoning.” My eyes glowed as I sipped my drink. After that, there was no cure, no turning back. I had to find out what was gnawing at my gut. The hardest part’s not even the physical effects: stumbling like a drunk (Edmond O’Brien was one of Hollywood’s most active lushes) through Forties sets, alternating sweats and fevers, reptilian spots on face and scalp. It’s having to say goodbye like the scene where soundtrack violins go crazy as O’Brien gives his last embrace to his girlfriend-cum-Girl Friday, Paula, played by Pamela Britton. They’re filmdom’s least likely lovers—the squat and jowly alkie and the homely fundamentally talentless actress who would hit the height of her fame as the pillhead- acting landlady on My Favorite Martian fifteen years in the future. I don’t have fifteen years, and neither does Edmond O’Brien. He has just enough time to tell Paula how much he loves her, then to drive off in a convertible for the showdown with his killer. I’d like to have a showdown too, if I could figure out which pistol-packing brilliantined and ruthless villain in a hound’s-tooth overcoat took my life. Lust, addiction, being in the wrong place at the wrong time? That’s not the whole story. Absolute fidelity to the truth of what I felt, open to the moment, and in every case a kind of love: all of the above brought me to this tottering self-conscious state—pneumonia, emaciation, grisly cancer, no future, heart of gold, passionate engagement with a great B film, a glorious summer afternoon in which to pick up the ripest plum tomatoes of the year and prosciutto for the feast I’ll cook tonight for the man I love, phone calls from my friends and a walk to the park, ignoring stares, to clear my head. A day like any, like no other. Not so bad for the dead.

I was pre-Pandoran once, clear & amok, scarlet free where scarcely orange or purple romed: all font, Greek, drunk, then, then Tyred, vinegar aspect for breakfast. How I seam now in video footage of national folding where only arson lives lives. Its source is valid because Google calls it 100% relevant and government, which is apt since it’s an historical event. I reseek and pall this chunk’s vocation. Viatical my neighbor asks if I’d ride in the trunk, no kid: my hatchback is mined in the parking lot for its sparkplugs beyond the bar. She masking he then is captured by the faith-based; once she creams, he stops calling it vocation. Down here, they have imported the clouds from Japan, and I hear them, sardine. Keez me, gaghrl, yer old wahn. Geta-crushing Shoji of the air will remember cat-noise and –fish for complements as the King of Terror will never have forced the possible Fed you you you’re not—not. Postal will be yours and you, bulk predellal, tardy urinals on vehicles, art naught but an empty he-port. Grey they err over joy, toupeeing space as picture meant to do. I stream, hand mover, reek, occupy ice and call that night. Of all indecipherably you finally type to say you hosted Uncle Chen in your backyard exclusive. Wake, it’s time to smell the smoke. Darling I incensed. Once could have been your she-port; pretty noun look ahead to repast and yr Gruyerer aspect. Hype alone remains inside the box.

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

If one takes a walk on a clear sunny day in middle April, when the first willows are in bloom, one may often see young bumblebee queens eagerly sipping nectar from the catkins

My Daddy’s forehead is so big, we don’t need a dining room table. My Daddy’s forehead so big, his hat size is equator. So big, it’s a five-head. Tyra Banks burst into tears when she seen my Daddy’s forehead. My Daddy’s forehead got its own area code. My Daddy baseball cap got stretch marks. My Daddy pillowcase got craters. His eyebrows need GPS to find each other. My Daddy forehead lives in two time zones. Planets confuse my Daddy forehead for the sun. Couch cushions lose quarters in the wrinkles in my Daddy forehead. My Daddy so smart, he fall asleep with the movie on and wake up soon as the credits start to roll. My Daddy so smart, he perform surgery on his own ingrown toenail. Momma was not impressed, but my Daddy got brains. My Daddy know exactly how to drive me to my friend’s house without lookin at no map. My Daddy born here, he so smart, he know the highways like the wrinkles in his forehead. He know the free clinics like the gray hairs on his big ass head. My Daddy so smart, he wear a stethoscope and a white coat. My Daddy drive to work in a minivan only slightly bigger than his forehead, that’s just how my Daddy rolls. My Daddy got swag. My Daddy dance to “Single Ladies” in the hallway. My Daddy drink a small coffee cream and sugar. My Daddy drink a whole can of Red Bull. My Daddy eat a whole pack of sour Skittles and never had a cavity. My Daddy so smart, he got a pullout couch in his office. Got a mini fridge there too. Got a cell phone, and a pager, and a email address where I can leave him messages when he’s not at home. My Daddy’s not home. Momma saves a plate that turns cold. But when my Daddy does come home, he got a office in his bedroom too. Computer screen night light, Momma says she can’t sleep right, but my Daddy got work, my Daddy at work, at home, in the attic, with the TV on, in the dark, from the front yard, through the windows, you can see him working, glass flickering, my house got its own forehead, glinting, sweaty, in the evening, while my Daddy at work, at home, in his own area code, a whole other time zone.

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel, a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill that skims along over the basement floor wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the master ribs of a web in which some thought is caught dead center in its own small world, a thought so far from the touch of things that we can only guess at it. If mine, it would be the secret dream of walking alone across the floor of my life with an easy grace, and with love enough to live on at the center of myself.

— for David Lehman Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. —William Wordsworth Going to hell so many times tears it Which explains poetry. —Jack Spicer The day the war against Iraq begins I’m photographing the yellow daffodils With their outstretched arms and ruffled cups Blowing in the wind of Jesus Green Edging the lush grassy moving river Along with the swans and ducks Under a soft March Cambridge sky Embellishing the earth like a hand Starting to illustrate a children’s book Where people in light clothes come out To play, to frisk and run about With their lovers, friends, animals, and children As down every stony back road of history They’ve always done in the peaceful springs —Which in a sense is also hell because The daffodils do look as if they dance And make some of us in the park want to dance And breathe deeply and I know that Being able to eat and incorporate beauty like this I am privileged and by that token can Taste pain, roll it on my tongue, it’s good The cruel wars are good the stupidity is good, The primates hiding in their caves are very good, They do their best, which explains poetry. What explains poetry is that life is hard But better than the alternatives, The no and the nothing. Look at this light And color, a splash of brilliant yellow Punctuating an emerald text, white swans And mottled brown ducks floating quietly along Whole and alive, like an untorn language That lacks nothing, that excludes Nothing. Period. Don’t you think It is our business to defend it Even the day our masters start a war? To defend the day we see the daffodils?