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‘I have always felt that desolation, that hell itself, is most powerfully expressed in an uninhabited natural landscape at its bleakest.’ —Anthony Hecht 1. To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited landscape as far from nature as you can get without actually leaving the planet, a man-made moon waste on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, fired in the sun’s kiln through unending afternoons when I was nine or ten. I can never get the whole scene put together in my head, thanks to whatever guardian spirit flags down potentially dangerous intruders on the verge of memory, but parts of me hold parts of it: my ears play out the hissing wires’ repeated rise and fall, dry waves breaking above pavement; my nostrils chafe where fumes of gasoline weep from soft tarred patches in the asphalt; through a chainlink grid, my eyes take in some lot’s trapped beach, its black sand an amalgam of gravel, soot, and broken glass; or they blink in sequence with the traffic light’s perpetual solitaire at a carless intersection, flicking over greens, ambers, reds; my hands remember enough not to touch the shut steel trap doors of delivery chutes where air trembles over surfaces as at their beginnings in a furnace. What fills my mind to bursting is emptiness, the spirit of inverted Genesis transforming light and water’s urge towards fullness into a miracle of unearthly loss. 2. Sentries, a pair of gasoline pumps napped. Their rubber arms dangled groundwards and looped back up, hanging slack from the brass lapel their trigger-fingers hooked at shoulder height. They were no angels, but kept the gate of hell whenever I made visits to the angels. Behind them, next to a roll-up garage door always rolled up, with an invisible car always risen above the stone lintel on the hydraulic lift, a soft drink cooler sat coffin-like against the stucco wall. And always songs from a hidden radio promised cool mountain rivers to the hot flat city: somebody else must have listened, but I never saw a soul in all my visits. The angels’ wings fluttered the moment I raised the lid, a potent shimmer, as if the sun itself shone from the chest, not its reflections playing off the steel bars and icy waters. The angels sat in rows between the bars, their orders chevroned by the shapes and colours of their glass capes: the bluish, scalloped whorl of cherubim, the powers’ straight sheer crystal, the emerald flare of flaming seraphim— all emissaries from the sky-washed shore of heaven. To put a coin in the dispenser, slide one of them along its plated channel and lift it free through the chest’s narrow gate— to kiss the cold stars of its distillation— was not important; it was only important to see the angels swimming in the glitter and dip my fingers in their flickering water at the centre of that man-made desert, knowing that they were man-made, and might shatter.

god my darling do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law —Janabai, tr. Arun Kolatkar Chewing slowly, Only after I’d eaten My grandmother, Mother, Son-in-law, Two brothers-in-law, And father-in-law (His big family included) In that order, And had for dessert The town’s inhabitants, Did I find, says Kabir, The beloved that I’ve become One with.

The white chocolate jar full of petals swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger, marvellously striped and irritable, leaps on the table and without disturbing a hair of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses into the pot, right down its delicate spout. A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering, curling unerringly around the furry nuts of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing. Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy contemplation in the studio, the Garden of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons! There, while music scratches its scrofulous stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands, clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril at this moment caressing his fangs with a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages; which only a moment before dropped aspirin in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.

There is the one who turns A spoon over like a letter, Reading the teeth-marks Older than his own; The one who strikes a match, Its light flowering In his eyes, The smoke in his throat; The one who opens the mouth Of a dog to listen To the sea, white-tipped And blind, feel its way to shore. At night They walk in the streets, The dust skirting their legs Raw with lice And the wind funneled Through a doorway Where someone might pray For a loaf of good luck. * Somewhere the old follow Their canes down A street where the front Pages of a newspaper Scuttle faceless And the three-legged dog hops home. A door is locked twice And flies ladder a scale of fish. Somewhere a window yellows From a lantern. A child With fever, swabbed in oils And mint, his face Spotted like an egg, His cry no different Than the cry That shakes the trees lean. A candle is lit for the dead Two worlds ahead of us all.

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities; Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness, Bareheaded, Shoveling, Wrecking, Planning, Building, breaking, rebuilding, Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth, Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs, Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle, Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people, Laughing! Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

chicago: city of ice-cold wind — elbow city of the rectangular block, where bigger thomas choked mary dalton in a drunken stupor on cottage grove, that great avenue divider between the haves & have-nots, where my uncle sydney fled after escaping an alabama chain gang a quarter after midnight &, consequently, cleaved the tennessee river (shackles & all) into another state of freedom. chicago: home of the case pocketknife, the nickel-plated snub nose, the banana-suit wearer, gold tooth & all. they migrated from alabama red dirt, from arkansas cotton fields bowlegged & pigeon-toed, & if you’ve ever resided on the west side, then you might as well been living in lil’ mississippi: natchez, vicksburg, grenada, yazoo city, booneville. chicago: home of the winding el, the circling loop, the midnight cruise down lake shore from hyde park straight to buddy guy’s 
legends; all them blues in one locale. the one-night stands the city gives you — the identity it injects then sucks from your marrow; the lives gunned down. chicago: where gwendolyn brooks scribed In the Mecca featuring 
pepita, our tragic protagonist: assaulted, murdered & forgotten by blue lives matter in ’68 & today nothing has changed. chicago: come sit in the corrupted light.

Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally pissed by jumbo wreaths and ribbons municipal good cheer yoked around their heads. Mealy mist. Furred air. I walk north across the river, Christmas lights crushed on skyscraper glass, bling stringing Michigan Ave., sunlight’s last-gasp sighing through the artless fog. Vague fatigued promise hangs in the low darkened sky when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees, switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing the bare wintering branches, black-on-black shining, and I’m in a moment more like a fore-moment: from the sidewalk, watching them poised without purpose, I feel lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things when from their stillness, the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing, smithereened back and forth, now already gone to follow the river’s running course.

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here. The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and terrible sky. In country like this there Can be no God but Jahweh. In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago passes its natural gas in flames Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high. The stench stabs at your eyeballs. The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton steel of a bombed-out town. Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men doing strong things in Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light and the furnace door opening with a Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange? It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or a Nazi who wished there were people Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers, whose old man spent most of his life in there, Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into the black sand.” It was 5 years until I could afford to recognize the ferocity. Friends helped me. Then I put some Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant. Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible a hundred yards away — and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel at its ear Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a Light in there. His color faded with his life. A small green fish . . . All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding planet, even here. Far gentler Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is always and only with what we build on top of it. There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing To some ill-invented Thunderer Brooding above some unimaginable crag . . . It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it all depends for its existence Only and utterly upon our sufferance. Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I knew again that never will the Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparalleled monstrocity. It Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a blind, red, rhinoceros. It’s already running us down. You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away. I don’t know what you’re going to do about it, But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just going to walk away from it. Maybe A small part of it will die if I’m not around feeding it anymore.

(Sonata for an Orchestra) Chicago is an overgrown woman wearing her skyscrapers like a necklace ... Chicago’s blood is kaleidoscopic Chicago’s heart has a hundred auricles *       *       * From the Congo to Chicago is a long trek —as the crow flies

The Chichimecas are in the hills. They have built a huge bonfire. I am at my window with a telescope counting shadows flickering in front of the flames. There must be at least a thousand Chichimecas and their many dogs, for they are the dog people. Maybe there is only one Chichimeca and his dog pacing back and forth in front of the fire trying to make me think that there are one thousand Chichimecas in the hills. There are Chichimecas in the alley. They have taken down the street signs and built another bonfire—STOP, SCHOOL CROSSING, SLIPPERY WHEN WET, the Chichimecas are showing a preference for S’s slithering into smoke. The Chichimecas have broken into the abandoned train station from one of my poems. The one where the sound of the plastic tips of my shoelaces clicks against pavement like lobsters. They are cooking the lobsters in a steel drum. After they have devoured the lobsters, they lie down with their dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the Chichimecas, for they have found aerosol paint cans and they are holding rags soaked with paint spray to their noses. This makes the moon come down. Chichi mommy,chichi mommy, chant the Chichimecas as they fall asleep in a pile with their many dogs. Chichi mommy as they snore and dream that the stars are dripping milk into their open mouths.