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In the heavy fashion magazines strewn here and there around the house the photos of objects and people mouth the word “money,” but you, assuming no one wants you anymore, mishear the message as “meaning.” Arousal follows. The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out. Awareness, always awareness. Don’t you see how these elaborate masks are turning you into a zombie? The private life is not for the eye but for the endless interior. It is trying to push all this crap aside and find the missing line. Nobody, least of all the future, cares about the outcome of this quest. It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life.

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire. Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

this little phase keeps on the same way without variety jazz and compromise making blue snow grow at the windows mohair fumes clog my throat like cats flames pounce without burning shadows gather in parkas at my back turn so i can see your face stand where i can see you man should someone phone i will tell whoever it is i cannot escape this night even saxophones do not dry light the brown sweat terror in white doorways under multicolored covers there is no way to sleep with the phone falling off the hook the blaring beep of warnings do not leave your house do not stay home this is the contradiction of when i live even fanfares and flourishes do not announce a truce with our personal assailants without variety blue dust blood traces in floor wax black fog and nappy lint colorless wax spreads broad tears across all the windows some permanent weather happened to this building some misplaced coal mine had its disaster here and i am alive inside

Themiscyra, 72 BC While Lucullus raided cherry orchards, he left us to besiege, grudgingly, this outlander fortress, named for an Amazon queen, while thinking of food and home. Not one of us has seen a single horse-borne warrior woman. Meanwhile, we dug a tomb. We intended it as the tunnel through which we’d claim the fort. We shored up the sifting roof and dug by lamps that shed more shadows than light. At last we formed up underground to attack with sword and fire, but the enemy tossed in hives, and in a cloud of stinging bees our torches jerked and swung or fell so we could hardly tell where to strike, or what, for next our enemy sent weasels in, and foxes, which seemed to be done in jest until we felt their teeth and heard, more than saw, the larger beasts. A wolf  began my death. I lay in men’s and weasels’ blood and heard the body that dropped at my side ask,What barbarian thought to make of thoughtless creatures weapons of war?

How is your life with that other one? Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars and a long coastline— and the memory of me is soon a drifting island (not in the ocean—in the sky!) Souls—you will be sisters— sisters, not lovers. How is your life with an ordinary woman? without the god inside her? The queen supplanted— How do you breathe now? Flinch, waking up? What do you do, poor man? “Hysterics and interruptions— enough! I’ll rent my own house!” How is your life with that other, you, my own. Is the breakfast delicious? (If you get sick, don’t blame me!) How is it, living with a postcard? You who stood on Sinai. How’s your life with a tourist on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?) is it to your liking? How’s life? Do you cough? Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind? How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising? How’s kissing plaster-dust? Are you bored with her new body? How’s it going, with an earthly woman, with no sixth sense? Are you happy? No? In a shallow pit—how is your life, my beloved? Hard as mine with another man? 1924

God prosper long our noble Queen, And long may she reign! Maclean he tried to shoot her, But it was all in vain. For God He turned the ball aside Maclean aimed at her head; And he felt very angry Because he didn’t shoot her dead. There’s a divinity that hedges a king, And so it does seem, And my opinion is, it has hedged Our most gracious Queen. Maclean must be a madman, Which is obvious to be seen, Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot Our most beloved Queen. Victoria is a good Queen, Which all her subjects know, And for that God has protected her From all her deadly foes. She is noble and generous, Her subjects must confess; There hasn’t been her equal Since the days of good Queen Bess. Long may she be spared to roam Among the bonnie Highland floral, And spend many a happy day In the palace of Balmoral. Because she is very kind To the old women there, And allows them bread, tea, and sugar, And each one to get a share. And when they know of her coming, Their hearts feel overjoy’d, Because, in general, she finds work For men that’s unemploy’d. And she also gives the gipsies money While at Balmoral, I’ve been told, And, mind ye, seldom silver, But very often gold. I hope God will protect her By night and by day, At home and abroad, When she’s far away. May He be as a hedge around her, As He’s been all along, And let her live and die in peace Is the end of my song.

Ventriloquy is the mother tongue. Can you colonize rejection by phrasing your request, “Me want?” Song: “I’m not a baby. Wa, Wa, Wa. I’m not a baby. Wa, Wa, Wa. I’m crazy like you.” The “you” in the heart of molecule and ridicule. Marks resembling the holes in dead leaves define the thing (moth wing). That flutter of indifference, feigned? But if lapses are the dens strategy aims to conceal, then you don’t know what you’re asking.

For Adrienne Rich [Our burden to carry as she did shift the weight of song, heft and gnosis “body poetics” as a total event her fullness rare in the amnesiac Kulchur awake, awareness & urgency when poetry serves] name appears everywhere and in dream body armor removed what now, legacy,archivum we female archons preserve of intensity a durance a hand you recognize (sounds sound) assurance as lives on drank of that drank of this almost suffocated, then drowned downed but never what only she could only know as herself living in the brute time speak of a syntax of rendition? the politics of Empire chip away as poetry attests,give it up curve of a water-starved globe to follow and be following? racism, sexism, struggle everything in intense grasp of consciousness — cut in crystal observation for her rapid and perched intellectus privacy opens to vibrant light this is stuff of Eros, of empathy passionate edge of Adrienne the American Skeptic I feel you consociational in this light a term of anthropology, to study intersections in the annals we share intergenerational, interspecies, interlanguage move in parallelograms getting it right as she did Solstice, Boulder, Colorado 2012 High Park fires distress

It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast winds. I sleep beneath the roof’s steep pitch, my mattress flat on the boards, looking up at the high ceiling, where morning diffuses downward in grains of bright dust. This was the old painter’s studio. The light in those famous canvases is still here —he couldn’t carry it away with him— though his paintings took away everything else, opening space with a stroke of blue or yellow. I think of his violent loves, the stories they still tell about him here. But how quiet and alive his paintings were, how they quiver with the life not yet realized. The town is quiet in September. Sometimes I hear people talking in the street. Last night someone said they were going to wait for Michael, and a voice said that Michael had gone home. I walk the narrow path down to the marsh. Wind hard in the dunes. Rain as I’m returning, cutting through twisting streets, past gardens bent low with rain, their colors a wash of gold. I feel the air surround my body, feel it move between my legs and between each finger, as I walk, not mastering space, but in it. And when the clouds open, the sky suddenly wide and high, no roof of leaves, it seems there’s nowhere to go but into wind or water. I climb the narrow stairs that keep turning, twisting inward until they meet the ceiling, which opens and I rise through the floor, released into an openness I never learn to expect. At the yellow table I sit and read an interview with Picasso’s lover, Francoise Gilot, the only one to leave him and have another life. She says she was not destroyed by him, as the others were: “Because I am of the stuff that cannot be destroyed.” I felt something blow through me then. Some devouring wind. Surely, then, I am of the stuff that can be destroyed. Haven’t I felt it? The breaking of all I was? Don’t I sit and count my losses, here in this room where all the life I knew has ended, so bare with desire I seem to be eating sky? That’s how it is here: I’m lonely, sad; the wind blows along the roof and I can’t sleep. Rain runs down the walls and streams across the floor, leaving dirty puddles on the boards. A yellow table and a cupboard painted blue, three chairs that don't match, or even balance rightly, a dented bucket, its metal reflecting darkly what is, what cannot be taken away. What’s beautiful here? The whole thing is beauty, a clarity not in things but around them, complete. And still, I seem to remain, somehow, myself, to remain at least something, at a loss to know how much can be taken from me and leave me only changed, not ruined, alert in an emptiness so alive I recognized it as my life. What would be left, the shape of it then, this life? I said some beauty, or radiance, an endless space I fall into or am taken up by, a brightness that holds me, gathers light in the center of empty space, like a vision of the life I have not lived.

“Take me with you” my mother says standing in her nightgown as, home from college, I prepare to leave before dawn. The desolation she must face was once my concern but like a bobber pulled beneath the surface by an inedible fish she vanished into the life he offered her. It stopped occurring to me she might return. “I’ll be back” I say and then I go.