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Here’s a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me. Small then, and smaller. My desire’s to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart. And if the heart’s a rock I’ll whack it with this tin cup and eat the sparks, always screaming, always screaming for more.

The little pitiful, worn, laughing faces, Begging of Life for Joy! I saw the little daughters of the poor, Tense from the long day's working, strident, gay, Hurrying to the picture-place. There curled A hideous flushed beggar at the door, Trading upon his horror, eyeless, maimed, Complacent in his profitable mask. They mocked his horror, but they gave to him From the brief wealth of pay-night, and went in To the cheap laughter and the tawdry thoughts Thrown on the screen; in to the seeking hand Covered by darkness, to the luring voice Of Horror, boy-masked, whispering of rings, Of silks, of feathers, bought—so cheap!—with just Their slender starved child-bodies, palpitant For Beauty, Laughter, Passion, that is Life: (A frock of satin for an hour's shame, A coat of fur for two days' servitude; “And the clothes last,” the thought runs on, within The poor warped girl-minds drugged with changeless days; “Who cares or knows after the hour is done?”) —Poor little beggars at Life's door for Joy! The old man crouched there, eyeless, horrible, Complacent in the marketable mask That earned his comforts—and they gave to him! But ah, the little painted, wistful faces Questioning Life for Joy!

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moon's young, trying Their wings. Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone Wholly, into the air. I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine.

In the beginning, in the list of begats, one begat got forgot: work begets work (one poem bears the next). In other words, once there was air, a bird could be got. Not taken. Not kept. But conjured up.

These brown discolorations on a faded black- and-white photograph are not at all like a defect In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of “Crystallization” as Stendhal described it, in One of his more eccentric books about love. In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg From where it emerged, of this I’m certain, As something much richer than my own life, A jeweled branch of living history, now Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig Bog Lane. I’ll never know who it was, and anyway Why would I want to know who it was, Who slid the black hard plastic button to On One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven, So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open In my head, but the full force of color saturation Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems — It’s just that as my mother hauled the metallic Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew How biography is the steadying of only one kind Of lens, how memory offers different iterations; How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form Over time. During that summer, a world away, The first International Color Salon was organized In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar Imports meant that Ireland couldn’t reach a speed Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography Was ready for color, our brains were marked That year for realities more personal, realities brighter Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.

The child I was came to me once, a strange face He said nothing              We walked each of us glancing at the other in silence, our steps a strange river running in between We were brought together by good manners and these sheets now flying in the wind then we split, a forest written by earth watered by the seasons’ change. Child who once was, come forth— What brings us together now, and what do we have to say?

Since it always begins in the unlikeliest place we start in an obsolete country on no current map. The camera glides over flower beds, for this is a southern climate. We focus on medals, a horse, on a white uniform, for this is June. The young man waves to the people lining the road, he lifts a child, he catches a rose from a wrinkled woman in a blue kerchief. Then we hear shots and close in on a casket draped in the Austrian flag. Thirty-one days torn off a calendar. Bombs on Belgrade; then Europe explodes. We watch the trenches fill with men, the air with live ammunition. A close-up of a five-year-old living on turnips. Her older sister, my not-yet-mother, already wearing my daughter’s eyes, is reading a letter as we cut to a young man with thick glasses who lies in a trench and writes a study of Ibsen. I recognize him, he is going to be my father, and this is his way of keeping alive. Snow. Blood. Lice. Frostbite. Grenades. Stretchers. Coffins. Snow. Telegrams with black borders. On the wide screen my father returns bringing his brother’s body; my mother’s father brings back his son’s from the opposite edge. They come together under the oaks of the cemetery. All who will be my family are here, except my sister, who is not yet imagined. Neither am I, who imagine this picture, who now jump to my snowy birthday in the year of the million-mark loaf of bread. My early years are played by a blue-eyed child who grows up quickly, for this is a film of highlights, like all documentaries false to the life—the work of selective memory, all I can bear of a painful childhood. The swastika appears and remains as the huge backdrop against which we’re seen. The sound track of a hysterical voice is threatening us. We’re heard as whispers. Shortly before my city bursts into flames, my stand-in disappears from the film, which continues with scenes of terror and death I can’t bear to watch. I pick up a new reel, a strange sequel set in a different location and made in another language, in which I am back. The colors are bright, the sound track is filled with music, the focus gentle. A man is beside me. Time-lapse photography picks up the inchmeal growth of daughters toward the sky, the slow subversion of dark by gray hair. Little happens. The camera sums up the even flow of many years in a shot of a river. The principals from part one are missing, except for me who am the connection. The time is now, and I am playing myself.

I called Hart on my longer distance line And in case you didn’t know he is in heavine. Hart, I implored, I searched your book (Yes, you have a Collected) and could fine Nothing about the 36 cast iron bridges in Central Park, why didn’t you write about one At least. He said he wrote about the narrow Bow Bridge For peds built in 1878 which is sad and fine And always photographed through branches in the foregrine Which was sufficiently sad to make him weep all the tine He was trying to write the poem so he threw it away. He tried again and he uncontrollably wept agine. Did you try a third tine, I asked. No, he said, and here’s why: Life is uncontrollably sad all the time Unless we divert ourselves with art objects, Sex, or tequila or beer, and if we tell the truth About this, for instance when we feel it While looking at a photograph of the cast ine Bow Bridge or see in life not photos but the real bridge at a short destine Away with the actual park and branches around us, We feel like killing ourselves to stop the pain Or as you, Arthur, call it, the pine, So I didn’t try a third time To write the poem. Get off this line, He said. Wait! Don’t hang up, he said, I take it back, stay on the phine! Well, I considered calling on my second longer distance line Kenneth who in heavine has changed his name to Kenneth Kine And Barbara who I did call on my second longer distance line With Hart on hold and affirmed her name change to Barbara Gine But I didn’t ask those younger two about uncontrollable totally dominant sadness Or whether they had discarded their own poems about the 36 cast ine Bridges for people to walk on in Central Park Because they were weeping on the paper and pine Ing for Hart’s Big Deep Salty Lake to ease the pine. I didn’t call Frank because I never knew hine I mean him. I figured the next step was mine. So if you can believe it I hung up on Hart Crine.

National Museum of Scotland On the ground floor called "Beginnings," a fertility stone is displayed in the diamond-hard blue halogen, a line etching of an erection with two equal circles, as one sees in graffitti in the Underground. The stone is attributed to the Picts, of whom history says little, besides the Latin picti, painted people, tattooed. When set side by side with Latin engravings and Roman military hardware, the artifact makes them seem pitiful. In the museum you rise through time, the text written in first person plural as if all who enter are complicitous with the articles of defiance, Robert the Bruce, the long unveering heredity of defeat, the room of thumbscrews and "The Maiden" for severing heretical heads of witches, upward to the Reformation, then the rout of the Highlanders and the exile of the Bonnie Prince, until the museum seems like a deep well where the fertility stone of the painted people rests at its bottom, universal hieroglyph on which someone made a wish.

Begins in interruption: an ambulance bell at the center of sleep, the room tilts sideways, furniture slides, an octet of amber blue verres à liqueur, one with a cut at the lip, clatters as a quaalude light in tatters mattes the curtains ormolu: I miss you is what I want to say like a rocket stocked from the Reagan years, its radar gone haywire, wiring fried but live inside a bunker of some private Soviet Union you & I —