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I wanted to be seen. But who would see me? I couldn’t think of the name for anything but a flower. The government makes coins that size and shape so your hand can feel safe holding them. The pictures stamped remind us where we are, or how the landscape we live in connects itself, through common value, to a different place. On this one, a spinnaker sails past a bridge. On that, a diamond shines like a child’s stilled top over a bird, as if the diamond made the natural world — bird, forest, state flower, sheaf of healthy corn, shining water — out of proportion in relation to itself. I love this. My own state has a bear, so small and out of proportion to me that my life- line can cross behind it. At last I do not fear that but feel proud the animal can sit in my palm so silently until I spend it. And if I lose it, then it becomes even more quiet. Most still just have an eagle, so it is as if 30 eagles were passed over from one hand to another when the one charged with arranging things for his Savior’s dinner arranged his Savior’s death. Heavier the yoke of heat in solitude. A walk uphill does not feel manageable. Who will see me?

Some years there exists a wanting to escape— you, floating above your certain ache— still the ache coexists. Call that the immanent you— You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you. Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence. And still this life parts your lids, you see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave— / I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place. Wait. The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. The opening, between you and you, occupied, zoned for an encounter, given the histories of you and you— And always, who is this you? The start of you, each day, a presence already— Hey you— / Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day. The outside comes in— Then you, hey you— Overheard in the moonlight. Overcome in the moonlight. Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you hear this—what happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you He is speaking of the legionnaires in Claire Denis's film Beau Travail and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze— The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. / And still a world begins its furious erasure— Who do you think you are, saying I to me? You nothing. You nobody. You. A body in the world drowns in it— Hey you— All our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer. / Don't say I if it means so little, holds the little forming no one. You are not sick, you are injured— you ache for the rest of life. How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body? Even now your voice entangles this mouth whose words are here as pulse, strumming shut out, shut in, shut up— You cannot say— A body translates its you— you there, hey you / even as it loses the location of its mouth. When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places, when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on, you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you. You slow all existence down with your call detectable only as sky. The night's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle to the sun ready already to let go of your hand. Wait with me though the waiting, wait up, might take until nothing whatsoever was done. / To be left, not alone, the only wish— to call you out, to call out you. Who shouted, you? You shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you, go nowhere, be no one but you first— Nobody notices, only you've known, you're not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad— It's just this, you're injured. / Everything shaded everything darkened everything shadowed is the stripped is the struck— is the trace is the aftertaste. I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done— The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much to you—

/ You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind. As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going. / When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in 
silence you are bucking the trend. / When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you. He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say. Now there you go, he responds. The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile. / A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers. / The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked. At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard? It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry. I am so sorry, so, so sorry. /

I’m a pipe cleaner. A drop of moisture on the big nose. A pushing landscape, indecipherable. You speak of a very good sort of Englishness. That world could stand as a mallet. A one-body god with penis or not. I want only to admire the grass. The great locks of trees. That the idea is enough. My bringing herbs to myself thyself. My life hits my ears. A shredded pinky stream of bass and corrugated paper. Who is it that actually sees herself? The heart center of the fragrance billowing toward its end. My mother crammed in her room next to her mother. She was obedient. She was the method and voted for the wrong person. Our sore throats were our throats. We said to ourselves in our clay structures we are the motherboards. We’ll pull the blue ox back into our barn where the three kings still kneel. We cleaned the stable. We pushed the brush over the beautiful animals.

To the north, along Orange Blossom Trail, thick breath of sludge fires. Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie who loves the freezing trees but cannot save them. Snow fine as blown spiders. The news: nothing. Large rats breed on the beach driving smaller ones here. Today both traps sit sprung.

Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking With the grief of being left, A dog bereft. Right now, a car is parking. The dog emits Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow That float upward from the street below To where another victim sits: Who listens to the whole city And the dog honking like a car alarm, And doesn’t mean the dog any harm, And doesn’t feel any pity.

1 Under this Luxemburg of heaven, upright capstan, small eagles. . . . is the port of N.Y. . . . . gilders, stampers, pen makers, goldbeaters, apprehensions of thunder speed the whore indifference son glioma Tammany, McCoy, the bonze doors of the Guarantee Trust, the copper spandrels. Orangerie and game room with Old English tall twisted stem engraved goblets and Royal Copenhagen porcelain. A mutton fat jade Chien Lung bowl a toilet bottle amethyst stopper & monogram shield. A technical display. You bought a perfume bottle and a Chinese shawl. Susannah set a headstone in St. Paul. I’m inside waiting for a surprise I’m in love with the girl on the Wabash I’m alone with a hand in my hand and a pair of wonderful eyes but I’m blue I have to speak I want to do I want to see the sights obscure me the facts secure me The Maine sails out to sea the undertaker drives to Hartford Yesterday the ducks flew in a mackerel sky. I had the allotropes of vision, something historical at the controls of North America, heavyweight and metaphorical. What are the facts? they swept the city hall today they set the lathe dogs trimmed the tool posts scraped the bearings shellacked the knots, they set the capital upon the shaft. Somebody has to drive the spikes pitch the gears oil the cams somebody has to kill the whisky somebody has to speak What are the facts? 2 Inland is the goat in open field. The milk is marketed. Attend our table. The sand and fluorspar and the soda ash make a blue aventurine glass for this city, a lion rampant on his hind feet, royally clawing, tail whipped up. 3 come, great city, give us that old-time vaudeville ”During the water-movement of the French horns and the lovelace of a violin a wire from my girl, `I love you but I need a deposit.‘ Even the ventriloquist’s dummy laughed after we combed his pretty red hair and set him on his tricycle.“ Do you know the story of Sal? She was a lonely little gal with the lovelight in her eyes and Mr. H. H. at the ivories and she was happy (honest to God) In the season of Romain effects and synthetic American lights she drove into a California suburb in a high-compression gull-line Suiza rolling her Klieg eyes like revolving doors whereupon the jackass full of animal gas floated blissfully into the dance of the seven veils, yakking, ‘I have that funny feeling again, it must be love.’ Commentary: nothing so marks the copulative man as a corkscrew and a bottle opener. Question: Could you stand an old man to a cup of coffee? It’s hard walking with this silver plate in my head. Come, great city, you have full powers of attorney to protect your friends. 4 Immigrants from Warsaw move into a furnished room close to the stores under St. Chrysostom’s carillon with a porcelain pitcher and bath and hand towels on the bed rails. A new sign appears in the ground-floor window: Smocking, Hemstitching, Rhinestone Setting Our hour from here a loggia above the pepper trees a tiny cascade and vines above the bath house men and women driving on the fairway, laughing surrounded by Galloway pottery, garden furniture and white daisies. 5 When the light sprang from the sea, blowing, the window sintered and blew like Venus revealing my tenderness and many minds the way a night shot discovers a beast drinking and my responsibilities eating me as dogs eat gizzard. I saw the city changed set up like laboratory glassware, amines of herring brine, the malic acid of the sea buckthorn, glass-enclosed prescription balance, steel and agate, Fabrik Koln a physics clear as alcohol, La Vita Nuova, I hardly knew. Creditors dined at the Cliquot Club, they read the papers, trade changed. Their horses died, the big-bellied; their dogs slept in the steam heat. An ambulance with modest glass doors and a silver cross keeps night watch: A surgeon. Delicate nickel-plated instruments are laid on trays. Illuminated on the operating table naked glassblowers, gunsmiths, barbers, clerks, importers, old men from hotels, pink and tailored, naphtha-smelling Irish priests, cravat-and-boy face of the movie usher, Frankel, Shmulik, Old Country watchmakers then a white horse in the park, cigars and politics. The city wrapped in cellophane, an act-born eggshape twisted like Ugolino one sea-water, one circulatory system of man observing his magnificent urea.

I. The Day Dreamers All day all over the city every person Wanders a different city, sealed intact And haunted as the abandoned subway stations Under the city. Where is my alley doorway? Stone gable, brick escarpment, cliffs of crystal. Where is my terraced street above the harbor, Café and hidden workshop, house of love? Webbed vault, tiled blackness. Where is my park, the path Through conifers, my iron bench, a shiver Of ivy and margin birch above the traffic? A voice.There is a mountain and a wood Between us—

My father, rather a quiet man, told a story only the one time, if even then—he had so little need, it seemed, of being understood. Intervals of years, his silences! Late in his life he recalled for us that when he was sixteen, his papa entrusted to him a wagonload of hogs, which he was to deliver to the train depot, a half-day’s ride from home, over a hilly dirt road. Lightly he held the reins, light his heart, the old horses, as ever, willing. In town at noon he heard the station- master say the train had been delayed, would not arrive until that evening. The boy could only wait. At home they’d wait for him and worry and would place the kerosene lamp in the window. Thus the day had turned to dusk before he turned about the empty wagon, took his weary horses through the cloud of fireflies that was the little town. In all his years he’d never seen those lights—he thought of this, he said, until he and his milk-white horses came down the last moonlit hill to home, drawn as from a distance toward a single flame.

As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: All was black, In heaven no single star, on earth no track; A brooding hush without a stir or note, The air so thick it clotted in my throat; And thus for hours; then some enormous things Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings: But I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire; The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death; Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold: But I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Lo you, there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell For Devil's roll-call and some fête of Hell: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Meteors ran And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span; The zenith opened to a gulf of flame, The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame: The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Air once more, And I was close upon a wild sea-shore; Enormous cliffs arose on either hand, The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand; White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew; The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue: And I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: On the left The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft; There stopped and burned out black, except a rim, A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim; Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west, And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest: Still I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: From the right A shape came slowly with a ruddy light; A woman with a red lamp in her hand, Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand; O desolation moving with such grace! O anguish with such beauty in thy face. I fell as on my bier, Hope travailed with such fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: I was twain, Two selves distinct that cannot join again; One stood apart and knew but could not stir, And watched the other stark in swoon and her; And she came on, and never turned aside, Between such sun and moon and roaring tide: And as she came more near My soul grew mad with fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Hell is mild And piteous matched with that accursèd wild; A large black sign was on her breast that bowed, A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud; That lamp she held was her own burning heart, Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart; The mystery was clear; Mad rage had swallowed fear. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: By the sea She knelt and bent above that senseless me; Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there, She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair; She murmured words of pity, love, and woe, She heeded not the level rushing flow: And mad with rage and fear, I stood stonebound so near. As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: When the tide Swept up to her there kneeling by my side, She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne Away, and this vile me was left forlorn; I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart, Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart: They love; their doom is drear, Yet they nor hope nor fear; But I, what do I here?