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Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue Pour of tor and distances. God’s lioness, How one we grow, Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow Splits and passes, sister to The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch, Nigger-eye Berries cast dark Hooks— Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows. Something else Hauls me through air— Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels. White Godiva, I unpeel— Dead hands, dead stringencies. And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. The child’s cry Melts in the wall. And I Am the arrow, The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red Eye, the cauldron of morning.

It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts that brushed my face and I opened my eyes to see from a cleft in rock His backside; it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep my eyes closed and stand perfectly still in the garden till it leaves me alone, not to contemplate how this century ends and the next begins with no one I know having seen God, but to wonder why I get through most days unscathed, though I live in a time when it might be otherwise, and I grow more fatherless each day. For years now I have come to conclusions without my father’s help, discovering on my own what I know, what I don’t know, and seeing how one cancels the other. I've become a scholar of cancellations. Here, I stand among my father’s roses and see that what punctures outnumbers what consoles, the cruel and the tender never make peace, though one climbs, though one descends petal by petal to the hidden ground no one owns. I see that which is taken away by violence or persuasion. The rose announces on earth the kingdom of gravity. A bird cancels it. My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war. My father said,Never take your both eyes off of the world

I like when the form is kind of stuck-up even though I’ve got a Southern accent and my place looks like a graduate student’s. 1. I enjoy high art but realism swamps me. 2. The material world swamps me. 3. I came to understand the forms of realism, the aesthetic phenomenon. 4. You take a random person from daily life. 5. You take their dependence on their historical circumstances. 6. You make them the subject. 7. You see, they operate the modern. Things happen ... minutes, hours, days. The order of life coming from life itself. Back to life / Back to reality (like Soul II Soul). It is sublime and grotesque. 8. They make rich forms. Something steady. Less manic. Something real like a bell inside the Golden Seahorse Gift Shop. Don’t take me on that ride. I don’t want to go down. 9. To what degree are the subjects taken seriously? They naturally swim beneath the icy sheets and find breathing holes. They may remember their arctic homes. They are one of the park’s most sociable creatures. I said enter the water with them. Graceful imitation of strange palms and seaflowers. A seaflower of a thousand colors, aquarium pigmented. It is my violent passion for seaflowers, Molly. I want the entire underwater palace built of roaring seaflowers! Beluga! Beluga! Wither and mow. The child’s song. Emerald kayak and the femme fatale who sleeps in it, Victorian, long, frothy hair and the death drive, flesh like the statement, “I lost a friend in the sea garden.” The notes, staccato, vortex, paradisiacal, gold bell in a coffin just in case I wake up. And the way darkness tunnels inside a car on its way to its pinpoint destination. No one tells you the moon’s going to end up like this. No one. So you just move towards it. That’s all the moon ever was. Ding. Ding.

This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises. This is the very beginning. The first-person narrator introduces himself, tells us about his lineage. The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings. Here the climbers are studying a map or pulling on their long woolen socks. This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn. The profile of an animal is being smeared on the wall of a cave, and you have not yet learned to crawl. This is the opening, the gambit, a pawn moving forward an inch. This is your first night with her, your first night without her. This is the first part where the wheels begin to turn, where the elevator begins its ascent, before the doors lurch apart. This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore. Cities have sprouted up along the rivers teeming with people at cross-purposes— a million schemes, a million wild looks. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent. This is the sticky part where the plot congeals, where the action suddenly reverses or swerves off in an outrageous direction. Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph to why Miriam does not want Edward's child. Someone hides a letter under a pillow. Here the aria rises to a pitch, a song of betrayal, salted with revenge. And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge halfway up the mountain. This is the bridge, the painful modulation. This is the thick of things. So much is crowded into the middle— the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados, Russian uniforms, noisy parties, lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall— too much to name, too much to think about. And this is the end, the car running out of road, the river losing its name in an ocean, the long nose of the photographed horse touching the white electronic line. This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade, the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening. Here the stage is littered with bodies, the narrator leads the characters to their cells, and the climbers are in their graves. It is me hitting the period and you closing the book. It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck. This is the final bit thinning away to nothing. This is the end, according to Aristotle, what we have all been waiting for, what everything comes down to, the destination we cannot help imagining, a streak of light in the sky, a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

I will enter you as hope enters me, through blinding liquid, light of rain, and I will stay inside until you send me out; I will stay inside until you ground me. We cannot outrun the rain. So many summers I have tried. So many summers. But when the rumble calls after the spark there can be no escape. No outstripping the drench soak, the wet sheath, the water caul. This is more than you want to hear. Much more than I want to tell you. Tabernacle transporting my life from the desert, you, the faith I am born and reborn into, you, rescuer, deliverer of rain.

Aship, reel in fountainhead enclosure of roses skies indigo, gold moon Omphalos triumphant “only connect” end, point of beginning of old, apotheosis chandelier fond du lac cross (mortal) hid boundary compass beyond confines music of the spheres solved, mosaic of Cosmos snowflakes lit darkest sea, bowsprit the deeps bound white antipodes such conflagration of souls Dawn in Erewhon, corporeal cornucopia one being, surround in bloom flow essential seed portal system Milky Way as Unmoved Mover under orders axis mundi, ascend scale organism omnipotent poised in flesh, awake horns psaltery Fanfare for the Common Man mind set razor an edge, blood fulfill final ablution fire purify baton Oompapah! to lead the band anystray orchestra knows who destination core of the universe (so rings redwood of eons) gospel sentience Lo!allegro non troppo remake mankind, a joyous noise into the void “from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” as speech arc Simulacrum, O chorus us Homo Sapiens in a major key! tools, consonant & vowel to fashion a voice commensurate wheel of time Origins great aorta leaved from the wrist up, but yet to attain the skies all arrowed a rainbow midair, ad astra per aspera countdown for Lift Off

One morning you open one eye and listing to the south it bulks like a barn, noiseless, derelict planks horizontal and deeply grooved. A rudder the size of your front door pivots as you push. Once inside you can smell the fear of every winged, creeping and four-legged thing: no water, no straw, just shadow and bare wood. Where is the one promised to wake beside you forever? Ox-eyed daisies, goldenrod, clover— why are you breathing among them, why don't you gather the outcast beasts or become one...

Is like a lyric poem with seven basic themes first the cottonpicker dragging behind it a wagon of testicles a pair of pliers which can fill in for a cross in a pinch then there is the warm pond between the maiden’s thighs next we have some friends of yours and mine who shall be with us always Pablo the artist the pubis of the moon Pablo the cellist panther of silence Pablo the poet the point of no return and in case of emergency the seventh and final theme of this systematic poem is the systematic way death undresses in front of you

Through the meridian’s fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails that beat the ground before them as they crawl. Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh to lean from the curving bows, to trail their fingertips in the water . . . All alone on the landmass, the Ship’s Artist simply draws what he sees: red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet and fish with weeping human faces. The sonic boom arrives at his feet in the palest ripples. In the painting, Gloriana rides under arms towards Tilbury Town. Her profile shimmers in the sodium lights that seem to cast no shadows before or behind her. Like compass pencils of light, their fingertips spread out the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae. Orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor. Now under radar they study the green road glowing and add a late-rising moon. The sea so full of maprooms, and the cliffs chalked with weaponry symbols, trailing the phosphorescence of minesquads. Only the grassblown Norman ringmounds go on dreaming of Monet picture hats and streaming scarves, the bunker disguised as a picnic, that went on forever. Now the Cathedral at Bayeux, with its window and views, is rolled up and the Conqueror’s navy on its blue worsted waves and Hengist and Horsa, the Escorial with its green shoals of ships, all are safely rolled up. Behind the Atlantic Wall, that Rommel called “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” the white-and-liver-cows moo through the milky light. The human faces carved on Norman beams face out to the sea, which has grown this answering forest of rigging. And very soon, just as soon as the sea can see the land and the land the sea the two of them will go to war.

for Robert Lowell This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. Once up against the sky it's hard to tell them from the stars— planets, that is—the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it's still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owls' nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!