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The Canasta Players: Seven at Autumn's Gold We real old. We bell-tolled. We dilate. We stagflate. We sing thin. We shake Schwinn. We shit-doled. You stuff gold.

We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep adding and striking skills from the bottoms of our r é sum é s under constant revision like the inscriptions on tombs shared for generations unnervingly up to date Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write: I visited a country where kittens lay  dying under every bench, in every gutter, next to every  cigarette butt. One  made  me  weep. Two   made   me  worry.  Three   made   me look  away.  I  visited  a  city  with  very  few strays.  The   first   one   I   saw   I   adopted. What  could  it  mean? —posted by Sarah. 6.18.06 Hit “publish” and look away The New Violence: I visited a country where everything looked like home

As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sun will return before the rain has altogether stopped and through this lightest of curtains the curve of it shines with a thousand inclinations and so close is the one to the one adjacent that you cannot tell where magenta for instance begins and where the all-but-magenta has ended and yet you’d never mistake the blues for red, so these two, the girl and the goddess, with their earth-bred, grass- fed, kettle-dyed wools, devised on their looms transitions so subtle no hand could trace nor eye discern their increments, yet the stories they told were perfectly clear. The gods in their heaven, the one proposed. The gods in heat, said the other. And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown, fins and hooves, their shepherds’ crooks and pizzles. Till mingling with their darlings-for-a-day they made a progeny so motley it defied all sorting-out. It wasn’t the boasting brought Arachne all her sorrow nor even the knowing her craft so well. Once true and twice attested. It was simply the logic she’d already taught us how to read.

The well rising without sound, the spring on a hillside, the plowshare brimming through deep ground everywhere in the field— The sharp swallows in their swerve flaring and hesitating hunting for the final curve coming closer and closer— The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat counseling decision, decision: thunderous examples. I place my feet with care in such a world.

the 14-year-old girl was treated like: (a) a grown woman. (b) a grown man. the bikini-clad girl was handled by the cop like: (a) a prostitute. (b) a prostitute by her pimp. the girl was slung to the ground like: (a) a sack of garbage into a dumpster. (b) somebody had something to prove. the girl’s braids flew around her head like: (a) helicopter blades. (b) she’d been slapped. the black girl was pinned to the ground like: (a) an amateur wrestler in a professional fight. (b) swimming in a private pool is a threat to national security. the girl’s cries sounded like: (a) the shrieks of children on a playground. (b) the shrieks of children being torn from their mothers. the protesting girl was shackled like: (a) a criminal. (b) a runaway slave. liken it or not —mckinney, texas, june 2015

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door is where it leads to or from. Communication of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil fires the neurons from their swooning stall, is not a healing but adaptation to same a quickening in deleting of sensation a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows) are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed to determine that shape? Some hysteric trope of repetition, rage for accretion, dazed by its own mute replication, like the minute lines of a hand. They are its cries (writes Ponge, among others), the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue). We weep to hear it, a language forgot. I was saying I keep speaking from some chamber sound deleted, which is why I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.

I carried my fear of the world to my children, but they refused it. I carried my fear of the world on my chest, where I once carried my children, where some nights it slept as newborns sleep, where it purred but mostly growled, where it licked sweat from my clavicles. I carried my fear of the world and apprenticed myself to the fear. I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. I carried it, and it repaid me by teaching me how to carry it. I carried my fear of the world the way an animal carries a kill in its jaws but in reverse: I was the kill, the gift. Whose feet would I be left at? I carried my fear of the world as if it could protect me from the world. I carried my fear of the world and for my children modeled marveling at its beauty but keeping my hands still— keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth. I carried my fear of the world. I stroked it or I did not dare to stroke it. I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. It taught me how to keep quiet and still I carried my fear of the world and my love for the world. I carried my terrible awe. I carried my fear of the world without knowing how to set it down. I carried my fear of the world and let it nuzzle close to me, and when it nipped, when it bit down hard to taste me, part of me shined: I had been right. I carried my fear of the world and it taught me I had been right. I carried it and loved it for making me right. I carried my fear of the world and it taught me how to carry it. I carried my fear of the world to my children and laid it down at their feet, a kill, a gift. Or I was laid at their feet.

Twelve dollars sixty cents, & the fact that there is no blood no storm can’t wash into dirt, that the time for these words is already ended, that for all the rain that has been here before so have I. & there is less water in the world than a famous woman once said, & I know that, & that the stars in the river also are real I also know, for they disappear also & refuse also to be touched. & I have touched bare things, & it works— it can be the sole unbraided moment in a life— but even so, what better days look like to me is still the tiny gore of heartbreak, & long walks with small shoes that can’t be taken off, & schools in a city I love that put molded cages over their clocks, because that works too to remind us we are not ready. & the worst of all is anything that stays as it is when touched. At lunchtime a woman famous for her ability to praise the ineffable says she can’t believe anyone returns to where they came from. But of course they do. In fact some do nothing else. & what is it they leave behind? Perhaps not the meaning of time, but the time of meaning, & the fact that whatever happens, tomorrow will change it.

About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall signals that nature is finished with the organism and we just begin to conceive the use of women (having been all this time more enamored of the fountain than the cistern), we retire to nursing homes, whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors, or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi, where the suicidal waves of angry natives give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly, or the crow’s-nest of this windless office block where the cook is already boiling the last sail. And sitting on the bench like a snowfall of beard expectorated by a cloudy hat, we consider the byproducts of life, such as (to name only the least offensive to the nose) the body itself when it has finally reached that eminence from which all is visible and from which it nonetheless feels the need to move on to a homestead of its dreams like an abandoned chicken coop on the sandy streamside under the tulip poplars, and to words, which result from an instinct for what is impossible: to soften the blow for others, including ourselves.

The sea bit, As they said it would, And the hill slid, As they said it would, And the poor dead Nodded agog The poor head. O topmost lofty Tower of Troy, The poem apparently Speaks with joy Of terrible things. Where is the pleasure The poetry brings? Tell if you can, What does it make? A city of man That will not shake, Or if it shake, Shake with the splendor Of the poem’s pleasure.