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This is the body of, waiting to turn on. graced with a little tremor, a little-known form, a fibrous hook, a flimsy lever that makes the jar work a lever and a clasp :voila. The pathetic filofax unfurls, the owl describes; on air; makes an apse; lopes left off the phonepole, woodenly. we rise above the wind park, commemorially. our whorled fossil, pinned open. our emergency kit holds aspirin. digitalis. adrenalin-in-in.

Then the pulse. Then a pause. Then twilight in a box. Dusk underfoot. Then generations. — Then the same war by a different name. Wine splashing in the bucket. The erection, the era. Then exit Reason. Then sadness without reason. Then the removal of the ceiling by hand. — Then pages & pages of numbers. Then the page with the faint green stain. Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded, is thrown onto a wagon. Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else. Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else. Then the page scribbled in dactyls. Then the page which begins Exit Angel. Then the page wrapped around a dead fish. Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean. Then a nap. Then the peg. Then the page with the curious helmet. Then the page on which millet is ground. Then the death of Ursula. Then the stone page they raised over her head. Then the page made of grass which goes on. — Exit Beauty. — Then the page someone folded to mark her place. Then the page on which nothing happens. The page after this page. Then the transcript. Knocking within. Interpretation, then harvest. — Exit Want. Then a love story. Then a trip to the ruins. Then & only then the violet agenda. Then hope without reason. Then the construction of an underground passage between us.

Everyone comes back here to die as I will soon. The place feels right since it’s half dead to begin with. Even on a rare morning of rain, like this morning, with the low sky hoarding its riches except for a few mock tears, the hard ground accepts nothing. Six years ago I buried my mother’s ashes beside a young lilac that’s now taller than I, and stuck the stub of a rosebush into her dirt, where like everything else not human it thrives. The small blossoms never unfurl; whatever they know they keep to themselves until a morning rain or a night wind pares the petals down to nothing. Even the neighbor cat who shits daily on the paths and then hides deep in the jungle of the weeds refuses to purr. Whatever’s here is just here, and nowhere else, so it’s right to end up beside the woman who bore me, to shovel into the dirt whatever’s left and leave only a name for some- one who wants it. Think of it, my name, no longer a portion of me, no longer inflated or bruised, no longer stewing in a rich compost of memory or the simpler one of bone shards, dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes, the roots of the eucalyptus I planted in ’73, a tiny me taking nothing, giving nothing, and free at last.

“We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer. The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families andfuneral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel.” —Ed Mazoue, New Orleans City Real Estate Administrator and Person in Charge of the City’s Cemeteries There’s nothing but mud. The ground looks dry and firm, but underneath is a stew of storm. Stout shovels, rusted, grow gummed and heavy with what I heft and rearrange. Progress is slow. The sun so often steams me shut, and I have to stop to gulp sugared bites of tea, flick away sweat with my swollen fingers, swat hard at sluggish flies who hover, like they know. And when I start again, there’s a rhythm to it, some ticking jazz that gets my square hips involved. I craft a chant purely for downbeat: Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss it. Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss it. My untried muscles blaze, joints click, pulse clutches my chest. Whole clocks later, I pause to relish the feat, to marvel at the way I’ve compromised the earth, how I’ve been that kind of God for a minute. But only time has moved. It’s like trying to reach the next world with a spoon. My boy would have laughed. Daddy, you better sit down and watch some ball game, and we’d settle, Sunday lazy, his squirm balanced on my belly. He needed what I was and what I wasn’t. Giggling in little language, he lobbed me the ball soft, walked slower when I was at his side, shared puffed white bread and purple jelly. He waited patiently for me after dark while I shuffled piles of books, looking for a bedtime drama of spacemen or soldiers, some crayoned splash to wrap his day around. But every night, when I opened the door to his room, all I saw was a quivering mountain of Snoopys, Blues, and Scoobys. Underneath them, his happy body could barely cage breath. Giggles unleashed his toes. My line, then:Where are yoooou? Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss it. Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss— With the dirt balanced high, screaming my shoulder, I think hard on those nights of tussle and squeal. I want to feel his heat and twist in my arms again. I have to dig.

There is a hornet in the room and one of us will have to go out the window into the late August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge in being humane to hornets but not much. A launch draws two lines of wake behind it on the bay like a delta with a melted base. Sandy billows, or so they look, of feathery ripe heads of grass, an acid-yellow kind of goldenrod glowing or glowering in shade. Rocks with rags of shadow, washed dust clouts that will never bleach. It is not like this at all. The rapid running of the lapping water a hollow knock of someone shipping oars: it’s eleven years since Frank sat at this desk and saw and heard it all the incessant water the immutable crickets only not the same: new needles on the spruce, new seaweed on the low-tide rocks other grass and other water even the great gold lichen on a granite boulder even the boulder quite literally is not the same II A day subtle and suppressed in mounds of juniper enfolding scratchy pockets of shadow while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump— stands shadowless in an overcast of ripe grass. There is nothing but shade, like the boggy depths of a stand of spruce, its resonance just the thin scream of mosquitoes ascending. Boats are light lumps on the bay stretching past erased islands to ocean and the terrible tumble and London (“rain persisting”) and Paris (“changing to rain”). Delicate day, setting the bright of a young spruce against the cold of an old one hung with unripe cones each exuding at its tip gum, pungent, clear as a tear, a day tarnished and fractured as the quartz in the rocks of a dulled and distant point, a day like a gull passing with a slow flapping of wings in a kind of lope, without breeze enough to shake loose the last of the fireweed flowers, a faintly clammy day, like wet silk stained by one dead branch the harsh russet of dried blood.

Imagine cities you’ve Inhabited, streets Paved in lava stone. You never intended to pray In the temples, had Nothing to sell. Now imagine yourself Returning to those same cities. Hunt for people you knew, Knock on their doors. Ask yourself Where are the vases, animals Etched in gold? Where are the wines From distant places, Banquets ferreted From the bowels of the earth? While you were missing Other people wore Your garments, Slept in your bed. How frightening The man who said In his affliction Wood has hope. Cut down It will flourish. If the root grows old And the trunk withers In dust, at the scent of water It will germinate.

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll. Yes, yes, we know that we can jest, We know, we know that we can smile! But there's a something in this breast, To which thy light words bring no rest, And thy gay smiles no anodyne. Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul. Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet The same heart beats in every human breast! But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb? Ah! well for us, if even we, Even for a moment, can get free Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd; For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd! Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be— By what distractions he would be possess'd, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity— That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being's law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally. But often, in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves— Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpress'd. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but 't is not true! And then we will no more be rack'd With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. Only—but this is rare— When a belovèd hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafen'd ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.

Watch the fire undress him, how flame fingers each button, rolls back his collar, unzips him without sweet talk or mystery. See how the skin begins to gather at his ankles, how it slips into the embers, how it shimmers beneath him, unshapen, iridescent as candlelight on a dark negligee. Come, look at him, at all his goods, how his whole body becomes song, an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope. Listen as he lets loose an opus, night’s national anthem, the tune you can’t name, but can’t stop humming. There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

I’m being carried down the Burlington Arcade by Beadles in top hats, jewelers on both sides holding out their hands and wrapped in cashmere. When people speak of near-death experiences they’re always going through tunnels, they’re happy, they’re never going through the Burlington Arcade. Eric says, It’s good to see you wearing clothes and I have to admit he’s wearing the most beautiful trousers and I say, Eric you’re not supposed to be in this poem. Get back into your shop! I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. The Head Beadle’s saying “Burlington Gardens!” Should I tip him? Am I dead? What happens next?

—an Ode to Bob Ross When I was younger, I watched the world blend on PBS. The painter with the Jewfro hypnotized me. With a thumb hooked through the palette, he painted forward from the base coat like a god might use a blueprint. Behind the image is always the word: light. On top came tiny crisscross strokes of phthalo blue. A rapturous pinwheel of words unveiled sky. Two sharp strokes of titanium white slashed with gray from the master's knife became wings, gulls taking flight. I begged for nothing but paints that summer. Already equipped -with an afro, I sat before the paper and the cakes of color and tried to figure out the path to cerulean, the wrist twist to evergreens and the motion for clouds. The oversaturated paper dried and cracked with the fine lines of lightning. The worlds he reproduced might as well have been Asgard or Olympus. How I longed for a visit. Might he come armed with a fan brush and dressed in a button down? To be soothed by his voice and taken, lured from the dining-room table and shown the suburb's majesty. Look son, he might say, at the pile of autumn leaves, the shade on that forest-green trash bag. Using his two-inch brush he'd blend the prefab homes on the hill until they seemed mysterious, folded hues of Prussian blue, Van Dyke brown, and a blaze of alizarin crimson.