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I hate the word, and I guess that’s why it is said? People love to hurt one another. It is what makes us human. I do love dogs. They don’t seem to be evil unless humans make them that way. Dogs can maul and they can sniff out bombs. They’ll get as close to you as they can while you’re sleeping. They’ll share heat and scent in the crook of your knees. Is there really a thing such as innocence? I have desired from birth to live. Daily, I wrestle the tight arms of guilt. At the shelter, the adoption coach told us that our new dog was highly food motivated. I have been called a bitch. Our dog trembles when he’s afraid and the only thing we can do is wait for the fear to leave. There’s no comforting him. In a dream they held me down, scrawled BITCH across my chest in old embers. They covered my head as a weapon was raised. I had a dog who once kept me from walking into the arroyo. She blocked my path and wouldn’t move. I’ll never know what, or who, she saved me from.

Foreseeing typographical errors on their gravestones, the children from infancy—are bitter. Little clairvoyants, blond, in terror. Foreseeing the black and yellow room behind the eyelids, the children are bitter—from infancy. The blue egg of thirst: say hello. Foreseeing the lower lips of glaciers sliding toward their own lips, the children from infancy—are bitter. Them, rats, snakes: the chased and chasers. Foreseeing a dust-filled matchbox, the heart, the temples’ temples closing, the children are bitter—from infancy. From the marrow in the marrow: the start.

One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic sky east-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia. Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, even backlit by a devouring glare that whitened its edges, bent the bars. Waters apart from society by choice, their living room the aftermath of accident or crime. When the storm comes, we will see into it, there will be no near and no far. In sixty-five-foot 
seas for the Ocean Ranger, green turned to black then white as molecules changed places in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the way wood passes into flame, and communication errors into catastrophic failure for the Piper Alpha offshore from Aberdeen. It burned freely. If I don’t come home, is my house in order? Big fear travels in the Sikorsky. Twelve-hour shifts travel with them, the deluge system, aqueous foam. Machinery’s one note hammering the heart, identity compressed with intentions, drenched, the tired body performs delicately timed, brutal tasks no training adequately represents and which consume the perceivable world. In beds on the drilling platform in suspended disbelief, identified by the unlovely sea’s aggression, no sleep aids, should a directive come. Underwater welders deeply unconscious. Survival suits profane in lockers. By dreams of marine flares and inflatables, buoyant smoke, percolating fret, one is weakened. Violence enters the imagination. Clouds previously unrecorded. Unlocked, the gates of light and technology of capture in bitumen oozing from fractures in the earth or afloat like other fatty bodies, condensed by sun and internal salts, harassing snakes with its fumes. Light-sensitive bitumen of Judea upon which Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce recorded the view from his bedroom. It looked nice. A new kind of evidence developed from the camera obscura of experience and memory, love-object to dote on and ignore. Collectible photochrome postcards. Storm surge as weather segment, tornados on YouTube relieve us of our boredom. In the rain, drizzle, intermittent showers, unseasonable hurricane threatening our flight plans, against a sea heaving photogenically, straining at its chains like a monster in the flashbulbs, on wet stones astonishingly slick, we take selfies, post them, and can’t undo it. Meaning takes place in time. By elevated circumstance of Burtynsky’s drone helicopters, revolutionary lenses pester Alberta’s tar sands, sulphur ponds’ rhapsodic upturned faces, photographs that happen in our name and in the name of composition. Foreground entered at distance, the eye surveils the McMurray Formation’s freestanding ruin mid-aspect to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation space, low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy, reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the size of England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated, blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue. The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem, with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future, like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure, Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63, the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers remain unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches, white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now, though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon’s Jackfish is five-star, an obvious exception. But Mackenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealis — years ago we would have burned them to the ground. Suncor Firebag has Wi-Fi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasu — we’re guests, after all, not prisoners, right? Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mold, botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it’s not a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments, fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms strung out on whatever and general offense and why doesn’t anyone smoke anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River’s color isn’t good. Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places? Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled by a bear at the front lines of project expansion into the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many sparrows. They pay for insignificance with their lives. It’s the structure. Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day, in the minutes before sunset it’s still legal to hunt. One might, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, at a certain remove from principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presence of the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosive vapors unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltrates your mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whom grown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compound emitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signature approximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together. The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek asphaltos, “to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist’s earth that resists decay, resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burn the houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock, raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution. Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black grave of Athabasca-Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines of Lac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We’re all downstream now. Action resembles waiting for a decision made on our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which, like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatic tenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition, but eventually discolors to a black treacle that degrades any pigment it contacts. Details in sections of Raft of the Medusa can no longer be discerned. In 1816, the Medusa’s captain, in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran aground on the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents, refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other, 147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboats of the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there, risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive, small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizon include the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wish to be included in the scene. One can’t be sure if the brig,Argus, is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance, in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassion of a new age onboard. Géricault’s pyramidical composition — dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed upward toward an emotional peak — an influence for Turner’s Disaster at Sea, the vortex structure of The Slave Ship: all those abandoned, where is thy market now? It’s difficult to imagine everyone saved, it’s unaffordable. Waves disproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulating the speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautiful when you don’t go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you, rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairs to your bedroom, you can’t think of it generally then. The 
constitution of things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us. Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regions — floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven’t seen the last of reveal in stagnancies and bloat what’s altered, as avernal exhalations of mines and flares are altered but don’t disappear. Still, iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the trip to photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when, aflame in light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.

Black, like the memory-wound, the eyes dig toward you in the by heart-teeth light- bitten crownland, that remains our bed: through this shaft you have to come— you come. In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. The namegiving has an end, over you I cast my lot.

I was someone's honor's student once, a sticker, a star. I aced Home Ec and Geometry; I learned to stab a fork, steer my mother's car. Old enough to work, I refreshed the salad bar at Steak & Ale, scarcity a line I couldn't fail. The summers between university, interned at AT&T, in the minority outreach they called Inroads. My boss, Vicki, had two roommates, whom she called, simply, The Gays, crashing on her floor. That was before I was gay, I won't try to say with a straight face. Like anyone really cares, I care. What I'm trying to say: all this prepared me for these squat blinking office accessories. The dry drinking after the accidental reply-all. By now there's a lot to lose. Little by little, I have become so careful, no talk of politics, or orientation: I let them say, he's “a homosexual,” without an arch correction. At a fondue buffet in Zurich, our dumb- founded senior group director—when I let slip, damn it, my trip with a twenty-year-old—inquired, They're always over seventeen, right? I told her of course, god yes, and, seething, smiled, which I'm famous for. I didn't want to scare her. But I tell you, I'm keeping score. E-mail is no more than a suicide I'd like to please recall. Note my suicide. I'm paid to multitask, scramble the life out of fun: Monday I will ask— every dash a loaded gun, every comma, a knife— you to bury the black-box file.

The most popular “act” in Penn Station is the three black kids in ratty sneakers & T-shirts playing two violins and a cello—Brahms. White men in business suits have already dug into their pockets as they pass and they toss in a dollar or two without stopping. Brown men in work-soiled khakis stand with their mouths open, arms crossed on their bellies as if they themselves have always wanted to attempt those bars. One white boy, three, sits cross-legged in front of his idols—in ecstasy— their slick, dark faces, their thin, wiry arms, who must begin to look like angels! Why does this trembling pull us? A:Beneath the surface we are one. B:Amazing! I did not think that they could speak this tongue.

for Jim Hendrix, hoodoo from his natural born He frightens all the witches and the dragons in their lair He cues the clear blue daylight and He gives the night its dare He flaps His wings for warning and He struts atop a mare for when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee In His coal black plumage and His bright red crown and His golden beaked fury and His calculated frown in His webbed footed glory He sends Jehovah down for when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee O they dance around the fire and they boil the gall of wolves and they sing their strange crude melodies and play their weirder tunes and the villagers close their windows and the grave- yard starts to heave and the cross wont help their victims and the screaming fills the night and the young girls die with open eyes and the skies are lavender light but when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee Well the sheriff is getting desperate as they go their nature’s way killing cattle smothering infants slaughtering those who block their way and the countryside swarms with numbness as their magic circle grows but when He crows they tremble and when He comes they flee Posting hex-signs on their wagons simple worried farmers pray passing laws and faking justice only feed the witches brew violet stones are rendered helpless drunken priests are helpless too but when He crows they quiver and when He comes they flee We have seen them in their ritual we have catalogued their crimes we are weary of their torture but we cannot bring them down their ancient hoodoo enemy who does the work, the trick, strikes peril in their dead fiend’s hearts and pecks their flesh to quick love Him feed Him He will never let you down for when He crows they quiver and when He comes they frown

Openly, yes, With the naturalness Of the hippopotamus or the alligator When it climbs out on the bank to experience the Sun, I do these Things which I do, which please No one but myself.  Now I breathe and now I am sub- Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object In view was a Renaissance; shall I say The contrary?  The sediment of the river which Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used To it, it may Remain there; do away With it and I am myself done away with, for the Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was There to begin With.  This elephant skin Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light Can filter—cut Into checkers by rut Upon rut of unpreventable experience— It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the Hairy toed.  Black But beautiful, my back Is full of the history of power.  Of power?  What Is powerful and what is not?  My soul shall never Be cut into By a wooden spear; through- Out childhood to the present time, the unity of Life and death has been expressed by the circumference Described by my Trunk; nevertheless, I Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it Has its centre Well nurtured—we know Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where ? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of The wind.  I see And I hear, unlike the Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear, That tree trunk without Roots, accustomed to shout Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact By who knows what strange pressure of the  atmosphere; that Spiritual Brother to the coral Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light Becomes a nebulous green.  The I of each is to The I of each, A kind of fretful speech Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is? Black earth preceded by a tendril?  It is to that Phenomenon The above formation, Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely— That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first Time, a substance Needful as an instance Of the indestructibility of matter; it Has looked at the electricity and at the earth- Quake and is still Here; the name means thick.  Will Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no Beautiful element of unreason under it?

Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders! If one of you found a gap in a stone wall, the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs; mothers and daughters, old grandfather-father, cousins and aunts, small bleating sons— followed onward, stupid as sheep, wherever your leader’s sheep-brain wandered to. My grandfather spent all day searching the valley and edges of Ragged Mountain, calling “Ke-day!” as if he brought you salt, “Ke-day! Ke-day!” *         *         * When the shirt wore out, and darns in the woolen shirt needed darning, a woman in a white collar cut the shirt into strips and braided it, as she braided her hair every morning. In a hundred years the knees of her great-granddaughter crawled on a rug made from the wool of sheep whose bones were mud, like the bones of the woman, who stares from an oval in the parlor. *         *         * I forked the brambly hay down to you in nineteen-fifty. I delved my hands deep in the winter grass of your hair. When the shearer cut to your nakedness in April and you dropped black eyes in shame, hiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide, I brought grain to raise your spirits, and ten thousand years wound us through pasture and hayfield together, threads of us woven together, three hundred generations from Africa’s hills to New Hampshire’s. *         *         * You were not shrewd like the pig. You were not strong like the horse. You were not brave like the rooster. Yet none of the others looked like a lump of granite that grew hair, and none of the others carried white fleece as soft as dandelion seed around a black face, and none of them sang such a flat and sociable song. *         *         * Now the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return, even if I should search the valleys and call “Ke-day,” as if I brought them salt. Now the railroad draws a line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple lean from cellarholes and cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain except where machines make snow and cables pull money up hill, to slide back down. *         *         * At South Danbury Church twelve of us sit— cousins and aunts, sons— where the great-grandfathers of the forty-acre farms filled every pew. I look out the window at summer places, at Boston lawyers’ houses with swimming pools cunningly added to cowsheds, and we read an old poem aloud, about Israel’s sheep, old lumps of wool, and we read that the rich farmer, though he names his farm for himself, takes nothing into his grave; that even if people praise us, because we are successful, we will go under the ground to meet our ancestors collected there in the darkness; that we are all of us sheep, and death is our shepherd, and we die as the animals die.

He said – long ago – that myth was dead. He meant it. “Myth is dead!” “Long live myth!” They are playing out something. Legendary. Picks up her glass. She has a glass, with coffee, ice and milk in it. Thinks about the refugees on the road. Road to what, to where? With nothing but their clothes on their backs. Mythic and literal. How to speak about them and why? How to speak to them. To keep them in mind. In our minds. “Bless you and keep you,” so the prayer says.