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My foot’s asleep, my seat is sore. You said “another hour” before. You say “an hour” every time. Your hours are much longer than mine.

Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

Pushed prow southerly into the golden wind: hurt the eyes: gold pelted water: so looked less far away: plovers huddling on the tide's last piece of shore: Rise up in brightness: clap wings:: I told myself I'll go where eagles go: if to brimstone: my wake a narrow river back to its source in cedar: and when sunlight embers the shore's soft fleece will be before me.

(for Phil Garrison and Peter Lamborn Wilson) As ashes are the shadow of smoke, panic is the shadow of light, beef the shadow of grass, love the shadow of attention, psychology the shadow of plastic the shadow of oil the shadow of giant ferns the shadow of bacteria the shadow of light’s grandmother, rosy finch the shadow of loon, jealousy & myth twin shadows of desire, Europe shadow of a desert river, idea the shadow of pain, sleep the shadow of bread, liquid the shadow of lust, time the shadow of et cetera, logos is the shadow of what happens. Take some broad-shouldered little fart, at las- t, fresh from the 5 o’clock (morn) shadow of barbarism, squatting over barley-paste, hot goat, dried fig (meal the shadow — since the shadows were removed from rocky Grecian hills, trees cut away, soil reduced to olive grounds — down to shadow of surroundings — of Homeric heaps of meat that cast deadanimal-shaped shadows by the tents on the sandy shores of Ilium) squatting over his shapeless shadow in the shadow of the Parthenon — itself shadow form from wood, “in the light of” stone. Well now, there’s been some organized ruckus in his medium, rare town, which, God knows, nobody there “thought” would survive, a golden paradigm, for thousands of Apollonian twirls. Who knows what they thought of what they thought? It must’ve been intensely local; that the universe crept into valley code was just brain refreshment. Dirt was all around. Some bright body shambled the streets — in mud & heat — barely shook his bald, Why is the sky blues into registration, virgin ears & experienced buttholes, as the shadow of estrangement from a bloody dream’s red tape, & got chemicaled, but Mr. Broad Wit seized evaporation from the street to isolate spirit of spearmint from what had always gone before. Summer was a-comin’ in still (Lawdy! sing coo-coo!), facts & symbols be-danced & babblin’ beat of a million bovine feet upon the tender luxury sidewinding from the brain. So he thought “Thought!” Why not? Natural! in a sense. Never before had such perfect innocence been explored like new property. Well, such a new idea as “idea” looks pretty good till you can check out how it settles into the ground. Blood’s biodegradable but logos piled up like a plastic eyesore, fore- shadowed a bloodless dry reign, precipitation of pedestrain pedantry, pedestrian mind for millenia, postulating its pustulations of post- & pre-, professing everything, subjugating us all in the tick-tech burned-out success of a nob objectivity, turning babble to a soapy bubble up up & away until pop! goes the wizard. Aw c’mon, the alchemy that pilfers from golden sundance volumes of German silver sucks tongue of essence — ah yes, essence, with its can-do incandescence, like “Lovelight’s our leverage to spring some uptight average from alla this quotidian sewage &italicize it, boot it through the uprights to an airy footnote.” So anyway this guy imagined up God outa the play-dough of his panicked exclusions & then compounded the felony by trying to imitate the damn thing, double-indemnity solipsism in the fool’s guise of cool & wise utopian Republic! Razional! Sozialismus! Computerized zoosphere! Hologram rain forest — a more direct use of light. But despite all right & crystal wings, thinking that — “The-variability-of-the-world-has-no-more-reality-than-the-shadows-on-a-cave-wall”— has no more reality than Plato’s reflection in the waters of a Theater-of-Dionysus Port-O-Let. Well, he thought he was correting a mess & left a mess of shadows for our meat. If unity really strung out from above, not shot up from below, we’d have no babies to throw out with anybody’s rationalized bathwater. Islands in the stream of biosphere placidly gavotte drinking play-tonic sprinkled geo- metrically, until the teleology becomes archaic — & eats it too. The world pole-flips one more time, mechanically geo- mantric, shakes the pants off of objective dance to reveal gradual chance, just numbers having a ball, as the rationale of it all. Back up a hemidemisecond! My better half says — “In the winter the house is all shadow.” But the long hot summer of essentialism “was” a system of no resistance — & all the psychological shit that makes a toilet contemplative, inner-directed: a pure good-bye. Yet it was hard (abstract thought), difficult to invent, like anything you can’t immediately step on, phrase or foot — (& 4 is the shadow of 3 is the shadow of 2 is the shadow of 1 & old is the shadow of Jung & red is the shadow of orange & dots the shadow of dot & hand is the shadow of and however the shadow of breath & season the shadow of winter the step the shadow of the gesture & soprano is the shadow of the star & ring’s shadow is “orange” & window shadow of the shadow.) —after all, Empedocles & Anaximander had illuminated life as shadows of whatever, up from sea-slime, dissolving to the harmony of a sphere. Logos, in the light, is only haze, a honey-head, that the shape be kept as “beautiful.” (& the shadow structure is the real — it’s not being looked at nor still distorted by leftover rays in the shadowee, nor in such relation to light as shadowing implies: once you’ve taken in the light, you’re artificially simple for good — bedazzled. Chiaroscuro conjures up dichotomy — Step 1, then, as it loses all idea to total presence, becomes invisible enough. & we’re home. Lightning strikes — OK. Half-known moves around the kitchen. The cereal box is food for thought. Is it easier to be right when you’re already wrong? Hmm, cool today; better pull on my dark-blue paradigm. The quality of nothing is not strained, but saying so’s tense like a cartoon zebra. “The variability of the world” — incidental winks of it start to party into view — absolutely hot & cool, at the moment, is, & likely to remain so.) Eat a fig. Drink some coffee. Went driving today ’73 bug mid-Sunday plus live-in sweetie over littered subtle prairie out to Erie where we coffee smoke four baconstrips & country fries breathed in the work like hell old dirt streets & east to Firestone Screwball pool coke & ice Route 52 two dozen silver queen Indian corn Valmont Road yellow plum tomatoes cloudy light above Kiowa Peak stoplight bickyard pond by Public Service.

When you said that you wanted to be useful as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.” Then you said you would not trade our Mondays, useful for two thousand years, for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. I said, “Endless are the wonders to which I can only say ‘ah,’ that our ‘Ah’ who art in heaven can easily become the ‘ah, ah’ that comforts a baby.” Then you said, “Go make a living on metaphors for ‘ah,’” that I, a lunatic, secretly want to be the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a fifty-story-high collaboration of art and science, a mirror of light that might be seen five or ten days out to sea, Poseidon standing on my shoulders, the Library of Alexandria at my back, all the wonders of Greek Africa. I said, “Today is Monday. I want little more than to be a hand-mirror my wife carries in her purse with a hankie to stop my hemorrhaging humility.”

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. I write of youth, of love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness. I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris. I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white. I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The court of Mab, and of the fairy king. I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat behind the one you there are Then the I not part of the you equation, but the spider trying to build where it is written vibrates tentative I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore crystal region in its light, there are failures and there are failures But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the final catch, trounced morning this is awful but none other available, words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind I am hopefully this is position of the world overcome by and by the wind takes our voice the collateral one voice after Diane Ward

On the way to the village store I drive through a down-draft from the neighbor’s chimney. Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves backlit by sun, reminding me of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother’s vengeful God, the one who disapproves of jeans and shorts for girls, dancing, strong waters, and adultery. A moment later the smoke enters the car, although the windows are tight, insinuating that I might, like Judas, and the foolish virgins, and the rich young man, have been made for unquenchable fire. God will need something to burn if the fire is to be unquenchable. “All things work together for the good for those who love God,” she said to comfort me at Uncle Hazen’s funeral, where Father held me up to see the maroon gladiolus that trembled as we approached the bier, the elaborate shirred satin, brass fittings, anything, oh, anything but Uncle’s squelched and made-up face. “No! NO! How is it good to be dead?” I cried afterward, wild-eyed and flushed. “God’s ways are not our ways,” she said then out of pity and the wish to forestall the argument.

Because he barely heard the voice of God above the hum of other choristers— batwing and bird-whistle, gathering thunder, the hiss of tides retreating, children, cattle; because he could not readily discern the plan Whoever Is In Charge Here has, he wondered about those who claimed to have blessed assurances or certainty: a One and Only Way and Truth and Life, as if Whatever Breathes in Everything mightn’t speak in every wondrous tongue; as if, of all creations, only one made any sense. It made no sense to him. Hunger he understood, touch, desire. He knew the tenderness humans could do, no less brutalities.  He knew the cold morning, the broad meadow, the gold sunset. One evening on the hill of Knocknagaroon, the Atlantic on one side, the Shannon on the other, the narrowing headlands of the peninsula out behind him, the broad green palm of Moveen before him, it seemed he occupied the hand of God: open, upturned, outstretched, uplifting him.

What if   it were possible to vanquish All this shame with a wash of   varnish Instead of wishing the stain would vanish? What if   you gave it a glossy finish? What if   there were a way to burnish All this foolishness, all the anguish? What if   you gave yourself   leave to ravish All these ravages with famished relish? What if   this were your way to flourish? What if   the self   you love to punish — Knavish, peevish, wolfish, sheepish — Were all slicked up in something lavish? Why so squeamish? Why make a fetish Out of everything you must relinquish? Why not embellish what you can’t abolish? What would be left if   you couldn’t brandish All the slavishness you’ve failed to banish? What would you be without this gibberish? What if   the true worth of the varnish Were to replenish your resolve to vanquish Every vain wish before you vanish?