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Thou twist of gold, woven so curiously, Be filled with warmth and urgent tenderness, And cool not on her throat’s white nakedness, Like metal death, but burn insistently, Reminding her of me! To save her from the serpent’s little eye I set a stone of blue chalcedony Within a cunning loop—so it shall be Aware and mindful when her lashes lie Untaught of danger nigh. To keep her from the dragon’s hungry tooth In seven laps the quorls were subtly twined; From seven rivers grains of gold were mined, Hammered by black elves’ mauls, and tempered sooth In hissing brews uncouth. So lie within my satchel, Amulet, With many another dull and boughten thing, Till I am done with all my wandering And fix thee pendant on the carcanet Around her white neck set. For I have graven some small incantation In feathery lines upon this rounded wire— King Solomon made such for his desire, And Sheba’s throat was warm for subjugation Hearing the King’s translation.

I miss the moshpit pushed to the side of the bed. The hard and fast rules, the business, Walking across town the baby’s hand in mine Gave me anxiety Rosado barely mellowed. Who doesn’t love to hear about anxiety. You wouldn’t be too wrong to wake from dreaming Into an amusement park sluice of Rioja Eau de post-Auden thanks a lot Timex hubbub. Those feelings are in their way good luck. I don’t even need a communion wafer To feel the need to broadcast imprecations Fade like a docent as the hedge fund falls.

after Po Chü-i, for Robert Creeley We don’t lack people here on the Northern coast, But they are people one meets, not people one cares for. So I bundle my daughters into the car And with my brother poets, go to visit you, brother. Here come your guests! A swarm of strangers and children; But the strangers write verses, the children are daughters like yours. We bed down on mattresses, cots, roll up on the floor: Outside, burly old fruit trees in mist and rain; In every room, bundles asleep like larvae. We waken and count our daughters. Otherwise, nothing happens. You feed them sweet rolls and melon, drive them all to the zoo; Patiently, patiently, ever the father, you answer their questions. Later, we eat again, drink, listen to poems. Nothing occurs, though we are aware you have three daughters Who last year had four. But even death becomes part of our ease: Poems, parenthood, sorrow, all we have learned From these of tenderness, holds us together In the center of life, entertaining daughters By firelight, with cake and songs. You, my brother, are a good and violent drinker, Good at reciting short-line or long-line poems. In time we will lose all our daughters, you and I, Be temperate, venerable, content to stay in one place, Sending our messages over the mountains and waters.

at first they recce, easy, around the edge of  breath then gathered gangs unleash and breach but the wind has no objective, riding the slope of my roof

after Sappho Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, Except these kisses of my lips on thine Brand them with immortality; but me – Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold Cast forth of heaven, with feet of awful gold And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind, Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown, But in the light and laughter, in the moan And music, and in grasp of lip and hand And shudder of water that makes felt on land The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.

Touch swollen tonsils: gill slits. Inside eyelid: slimelight. Cheek: shark. Here foreknown I’ve dived down dawnless microbial snows, phosphor blue to blue- black, to black. I fend fish. I find the saffron curb of   the sulfur vent, veering voiceless again into the segmented, swaying, white, toothed tube- worm, Time.

It’s about                    Ball fits the ball,                      mitt, but the bat,                       not all and the mitt.             the time. Ball hits                      Sometimes bat, or it                     ball gets hit hits mitt.                    (pow) when bat Bat doesn’t                meets it, hit ball,                       and sails bat meets it.              to a place Ball bounces             where mitt off bat, flies               has to quit air, or thuds              in disgrace. ground (dud)            That’s about or it                             the bases fits mitt.                     loaded, about 40,000 Bat waits                    fans exploded. for ball to mate.                     It’s about Ball hates                  the ball, to take bat’s              the bat, bait. Ball                    the mitt, flirts, bat’s                 the bases late, don’t                   and the fans. keep the date.           It’s done Ball goes in                on a diamond, (thwack) to mitt,      and for fun. and goes out              It’s about (thwack) back           home, and it’s to mitt.                       about run.

How can we die when we're already prone to leaving the table mid-meal like Ancient Ones gone to breathe elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper's gone rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying for a long time: when we skip dance or town, when we chew. We've rounded out like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten through by wind—Sorry we rushed off; the food wasn't ours. Sorry the grease sits white on our plates, and the jam that didn't set— use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.

I never recline in splendor, I never take repose. The eyes of an old woman are blue and stick to me like insects to a screen. She is not hating me, though there are those who hate me, so I never lie in repose for fear that if I agree with the vulnerability of sleep, I'll make my own murder. I don't embrace the unconscious or analyze my dreams. The eyes of people who hate me might be spiders crawling on my hands, or snails that leave their shells, but I will not allow their acidic tounges to touch me. I belive in ghosts only now that her blue eyes stick to me like humidity. I will not outgrow my spite, though I read books that instruct me to. No, I'll always lie with my sleep beside me like a knife. I forgot my spite, once, only to wish I had not: He lay me upon the bed, crossed my arms across my chest, then fell to me, pressing a book between us. I never lie in repose. I am not a portrait. But I think so still my joints ache. One day, he shall not be the same (as I have never been the same), and we shall read upon his stone a verse attributed to my name. This is my foresight and my fright, blooming red in his eye's white.

L’ange Anatomique, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier Dagoty, 1746 Unfastened avidly from each ivory button of her spine, the voluntary muscles open virtuosities of red: Cinnabar the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal born between fog and frost, so many little deaths Buddhists refuse to wear robes soaked in its thousands. Sunsets of other centuries fade in galleries to ash. Red is fugitive: As the voice, the blow of gravity along a nerve opening to an ache the body can’t unhouse: As the carnation suffusing cheek and haunch like saucers from the king’s porcelain rinsed in candlelight. Gratuitous as the curl, the urn-shaped torso, the pensive, brimming gaze of pretty post-coital thought she half-turns over one excavated shoulder. As if to see herself in a mirror’s savage theater as elegy to the attempt to fill an exhausted form, to learn again the old ordeals of wound and hand and eye. To find the source of burning.