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(Vienna) I Shut out the light or let it filter through These frowning aisles as penitentially As though it walked in sackcloth. Let it be Laid at the feet of all that ever grew Twisted and false, like this rococo shrine Where cupids smirk from candy clouds and where The Lord, with polished nails and perfumed hair, Performs a parody of the divine. The candles hiss; the organ-pedals storm; Writhing and dark, the columns leave the earth To find a lonelier and darker height. The church grows dingy while the human swarm Struggles against the impenitent body’s mirth. Ashes to ashes. . . . Go. . . . Shut out the light. (Hinterbrühl) II And so the light runs laughing from the town, Pulling the sun with him along the roads That shed their muddy rivers as he goads Each blade of grass the ice had flattened down. At every empty bush he stops to fling Handfuls of birds with green and yellow throats; While even the hens, uncertain of their notes, Stir rusty vowels in attempts to sing. He daubs the chestnut-tips with sudden reds And throws an olive blush on naked hills That hoped, somehow, to keep themselves in white. Who calls for sackcloth now? He leaps and spreads A carnival of color, gladly spills His blood: the resurrection—and the light.

I am so done with feeling Xmas Amaryllis grow in places where thralls go free I am not quite enough for the woodland; promoting myself again after all accused men have been named In Casablanca I wait for livestock to come through luxe doors for thighs to grow less through absorption My killer is not going to be invited to this Ornamenting party and I am blue daisies casting O’s wide in anointment Now that he’s gone I am free to torch down the Valley                        la spiaggia of pure Purple                         small neck in hand

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike; Eat I must, and sleep I will, — and would that night were here! But ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike! Would that it were day again! — with twilight near! Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do; This or that or what you will is all the same to me; But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through, — There's little use in anything as far as I can see. Love has gone and left me, — and the neighbors knock and borrow, And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, — And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow There's this little street and this little house.

When the puppy snarfles for breakfast I wake to the radiator gurgling then feet crunching the reticent snow. Before I was born, Mother sewed her own suits. What do her ashes know? • Father shoved snow off the supine roof. Mother crafted Christmas ornaments: glue and glitter and red balls. No tinsel, no angels. Her death started in the living room. • For bonsai, pliers the size of a nail clipper, spools of wire and a fist-sized rock. One bore a petite pomegranate, never to eat, not to touch. Her death began with a baseball bat. • In the vineyard, he secured the strongest cane from training stake to fruiting wire. Pruning with handsaw and lopper. He’d leave a spur for the next season. He shoved her away with direct objects. • In a cold snap if one pipe freezes, the rest may freeze as well. Even before the puppy snarfles. Even before a baby brother arrived in the misleading car in Mother’s arms. • After the war, after she met Father, she smoked cigarettes but didn’t cha-cha anymore. She’d light up and blow smoke out the apoplectic window. He found the ashes on the sill. • Fireflies blinked for mates or prey outside the savvy window of my own first home. On the stereo, a bluesman cried, I need my ashes hauled! The dress was too smart to wear. • I tucked away our baby’s pink layette in circumspect mothballs for a christening that never took place. As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted. More than anything, I love tidal pools. • I know her ashes are at Father’s, lost in his charnel of junk mail. He claims that thieves have stolen that box, his knob cutter and root hook. He says, remains aren’t ashes anyways. • Winter stripped everything to the limb and dejected nest. No angels, no crèche. I don’t know whose recollections are suspect: after leaving Maui, Mother learned to swim. She loved tidal pools more than anything. • In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire — through blinds, the wind blusters and the browbeaten trees creak in the orchard. The rain pours then stops for sun. If he lost Mother’s ashes what more could I stand? • Omusubi tastes best on black beaches. Since Mother never learned to swim, did she watch her five brothers from a blanket? On the intransigent subway, I don’t know if I’ve passed my station. (His mother said yes—) Iron: I bit my lip again. • Mother showed our baby how to sift flour and how to crank an eggbeater. After Father lost her, he barred everyone from the rooms and the yard where at night long red worms slither up from the ground. • Her ashes know: before the puppy snarfles, Father shoves snow off the supine roof; for bonsai, use pliers the size of a nail clipper; in the vineyard, the strongest canes; in a cold snap, a hair dryer on frozen pipes; fireflies blinked for mates or prey outside while I tucked away my baby’s pink layette. Her ashes know their box is in the living room where she didn’t cha-cha anymore. Where has winter stripped everything to the nest? In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire and I know omusubi tastes best on black beaches. She knew to show her granddaughter how to sift flour.

You were carried here by hands and now the wind has you, gritty as incense, dark sparkles borne in the shape of blowing, this great atmospheric bloom, spinning under the bridge and expanding— shape of wind and its pattern of shattering. Having sloughed off the urn's temporary shape, there is another of you now— tell me which to speak to: the one you were, or are, the one who waited in the ashes for this scattering, or the one now added to the already haunted woods, the woods that sigh and shift their leaves— where your mystery billows, then breathes.

Ashglory behind your shaken-knotted hands at the threeway. Pontic erstwhile: here, a drop, on the drowned rudder blade, deep in the petrified oath, it roars up. (On the vertical breathrope, in those days, higher than above, between two painknots, while the glossy Tatarmoon climbed up to us, I dug myself into you and into you.) Ash- glory behind you threeway hands. The cast-in-front-of-you, from the East, terrible. No one bears witness for the witness.

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains The ash the great walker follows the possessors Forever Nothing they will come to is real Nor for long Over the watercourses Like ducks in the time of the ducks The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky Making a new twilight Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead Again again with its pointless sound When the moon finds them they are the color of everything The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed The dead go away like bruises The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands Pain the horizon Remains Overhead the seasons rock They are paper bells Calling to nothing living The possessors move everywhere under Death their star Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows Like thin flames with no light They with no past And fire their only future

The huge scar-pocked palm leaf outside the papeterie in Papeete. The bikini billboard at the bus station of a busy mining town in Bohemia. That moment’s hesitation in the photo studio: how did I come to appear in this light? The philologist’s pink index card, his commentary on a line from the Iliad. Letters that the lazy postman left behind in a sack labeled “Destination: The Azores.” Now it’s turned out different after all, so different from what we imagined in our evening courses. No idea who it is will one day give the speech to summon up an army of heroes. Fighting machines were the latest hit when our children’s children still went to the movies. What now? How should I pass my days, with the world exposition long since over? Discovered by divers, far from the coast, a yellow pianola at the bottom of the sea. The calm of images thick with dreams in the banana republic of the real. Translated from the German

Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.

You fools who ask what god is should ask what life is instead. Find a port where lemon trees bloom. Ask about places to drink in the port. Ask about the drinkers. Ask about the lemon trees. Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask. Translated from the Korean