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There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath. I think that Yeats was right, That lust and love are one. The body of this night May beggar me to death, But we are not undone Who love with all our breath. I know that Proust was wrong, His wheeze: love, to survive, Needs jealousy, and death And lust, to make it strong Or goose it back alive. Proust took away my breath. The later Yeats was right To think of sex and death And nothing else. Why wait Till we are turning old? My thoughts are hot and cold. I do not waste my breath.

[Grand Forks, North Dakota] A boy just like you took me out to see them, the five hundred B-52’s on alert on the runway, fully loaded fully manned pointed in all the directions, running every minute of every day. They sound like a sickness of the inner ear, where the heard foams up into the noise of listening, where the listening arrives without being extinguished. The huge hum soaks up into the dusk. The minutes spring open. Six is too many. From where we watch, from where even watching is an anachronism, from the 23rd of March from an open meadow, the concertina wire in its double helix designed to tighten round a body if it turns is the last path the sun can find to take out, each barb flaring gold like a braille being read, then off with its knowledge and the sun is gone.... That’s when the lights on all the extremities, like an outline, like a dress, become loud in the story, and a dark I have not seen before sinks in to hold them one by one. Strange plot made to hold so many inexhaustible screams. Have you ever heard in a crowd mutterings of blame that will not modulate that will not rise? He tells me, your stand-in, they stair-step up. He touches me to have me look more deeply in to where for just a moment longer color still lives: the belly white so that it looks like sky, the top some kind of brown, some soil—How does it look from up there now this meadow we lie on our bellies in, this field Iconography tells me stands for sadness because the wind can move through it uninterrupted? What is it the wind would have wanted to find and didn’t leafing down through this endless admiration unbroken because we’re too low for it to find us? Are you still there for me now in that dark we stood in for hours letting it sweep as far as it could down over us unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he wants to tell me, his whisper more like a scream over this eternity of engines never not running, is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live inseparable, how they stay together for life, how the wings are given a life of seven feet of play, how they drop practice bombs called shapes over Nevada, how the measures for counterattack in air have changed and we now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing of false signals. The meadow, the meadow hums, love, with the planes, as if every last blade of grass were wholly possessed by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time I saw you, we stood facing each other as dusk came on. I leaned against the refrigerator, you leaned against the door. The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished, the tree went out, the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them. The light itself took a long time, bits in puddles stuck like the useless splinters of memory, the chips of history, hopes, laws handed down.Here, hold these he says, these grasses these torn pods, he says, smiling over the noise another noise,take these he says, my hands wrong for the purpose, here, not-visible-from-the-sky, prepare yourself with these, boy and bouquet of thistleweed and wort and william and timothy. We stood there. Your face went out a long time before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said.Nor I, you, whatever you still were replied. When I asked you to hold me you refused. When I asked you to cross the six feet of room to hold me you refused. Until I couldn’t rise out of the patience either any longer to make us take possession. Until we were what we must have wanted to be: shapes the shapelessness was taking back. Why should I lean out? Why should I move? When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb, they throw his head out into the river. Unbodied it sings all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean, head floating in current downriver singing, until the sound of the cataracts grows, until the sound of the open ocean grows and the voice.

amid the growing craze for automatons The voice within the device that moves      is not (as if nothing human could be quite that moving) My precious edgling:though some believe the answers be given by a man concealed, these are speaking machines. They were risking their lives. Usually a woman or a child, who woke up inside the oracle, who swallowed the burning oil, and who forces the idols to speak? Though when the bishop Theophilus broke open the statues at Alexandria, he found them hollow it does not necessarily follow that The penalty for trickery was death. Such is the wealth of belief. Behind a finely painted sheet of shell a voice unlatched surrounds the world.

Wheal Emma and Brookwood are abandoned copper mines whose remains are located near Buckfastleigh, within the Dartmoor National Park, an area with a long history of widespread industrial activity. From this one locality, in the second half of the nineteenth century, more than thirty thousand tons of copper ore were raised, processed, and shipped for smelting. In 1859, in order to stabilize and increase the power supply, Wheal Emma Leat (a fifteen-mile-long channel) was cut across moorland and around woodland valleys to transport water from the River Swincombe and to feed the mines by supplementing the Mardle, a tributary of the Dart. Some of this now empty moorland waterway can be walked today on Dartmoor. I am grateful to Kevin and Donna Cox, owners of the Brook Manor estate, for showing my collaborator, Ignacio Acosta , and me over the remains of mine workings on their land. Widening the plug doorway on the bob wall left no surface evidence. The Mardle has a floodplain fair and wide. Material would have been trammed directly, although blacked ochreous water flows freely from the collapsed portal. Humphrey kept Kevin back when we went into the near horizontal dark adit stooped at the panic shaft. In Brook Wood at the combe head is a small killas quarry predating all three setts. Rent was paid to the Brook Wood adventurers. Three areas of dumping partially covered this crumbled masonry within woodland of varying density just south of the tarmac road. Yet a leat is depicted on the 1886 OS map channeled entirely in a raised wooden aqueduct. Wheal Emma Leat, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta. Engine House, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta. Then buildings fall into decay where ivy and tree growth have taken hold. The silted channel follows the contour round hills and combes using the best-fit method to Wheal Emma sett. Whereas conifer scrub and dense patches of rhododendron are seen quite late in the sequence. All 99 stations were used and having passed over the wheel water may have been diverted. The long wheelhouse sides are not straight but slightly kinked to provide for a dished 60-ft wheel over an arched tailrace exit at floor level. In this same evening were those people engaged to feast on roast beef and strong ale nearby. Within the valley of the holy brook the mines are situated near Buckfastleigh, crushed ores are hauled for the South Wales copper smelters, Alfred Jenkin their agent in Cornwall. Over and over had they been in the heaven of expectation finding the ore ground pitched eastward; those who gambled their lives in swift currents and dark treacherous pools. Granting two properties as one sett at a royalty of 1/24 together with fine machinery, wheels, a beam engine, and water privileges. One hundred and twenty- five workers being then separated only by a small transverse valley. The flat rods moved off so quietly that those not looking were unconscious of their being in motion. Steam was employed only at limited scale. Emma, 116 fathoms below adit, pumping backed-up water for life itself: men cutting lode in fume- and dust-ridden air or crushing with hand tools, spalling, cobbing, came our tramroad to harbor direct in Totnes and thence by sea to Neath — no more windlass or horse-whim turning. What you see here is the dressing floor. Their Phoenician purple dye — their copper with fifteen percent Cornish tin. Remember when a solid solution of metal elements was defined by ecstatic bonding. Water poured over its surface producing hydrogen gas. The new material is stable and ready for use but scaled-up production could fuel cannibal drones. Tailrace, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta. Green Pool, 2017, by Ignacio Acosta. We love the color and the stillness. Nothing would live in this water now at the base of a spoil heap two stories high. Worm casts and broadly scattered pits are laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. This is the green pool: a water soak away made from glass epoxy. They are brown and green like uneven flat loaves and the museum label reads tortas de cobre . Moss grows on anything like black flame retardant mechanically supports and electrically connects — the fenced-off shaft protecting the river from what leaches out between sea-borne traders. At these horizons the levels were extended over 330 fathoms. Small groups of self-employed miners and their families continued to migrate. Here was alluvial gold mixed with sand and gravel, producing more than 14 heads of stamps were capable of crushing. Composed of quartz, peach, and gossan with black and yellow copper letting down a stream of mineralized water. For in much of this section the leat had been cut from solid rock. A stone-lined sluice is just visible. 4,000 shares on the cost book system, streamworks in eluvial ground, 5 shillings each deposit. Nothing but a washing strake such as we use, commodified and priced both minerals since the Bronze Age in West Devon, in Cornwall beneath a layer of black sand. An adit is also brought home to the spot from below: narrow tailings in steep profile cast every shovel full as it rises into a tye. £40,000 worth of copper ore from above the 50-fathom level. Water breaks up the soil, exposing mere threads of land, linear strips cut into channels called races dug across the ground to be worked, removing the overburden.

for Spalding Gray The West and North winds both lover us, wanting, bitter, to bring us in close in the small hold. Tongues loll and laze, while the flap and snapping above: crazy wanderlust. The basin must cradle, keep her passengers, though the hero abandoned the ferry for the real sea. Is nothing worthy? Wallet on bench. Wallet at home. Wallet at rest. The child, even his cries, must the ship balance, makes me wild to right this unhumanly keeling. I have six arms, am the dismembered figurehead, ballast, breasts covered in blue scales. I am at rudder, at bow, at mast, at rigging, at deck, at halyard, at stern, when the hold explodes with screaming. One boy has stolen the other’s marble. The boat shifts, tilts. A wallet washes up against us. Is this what you meant when you said a family steadied you? Is this what they see when they see me and my six handless arms, shining torso and cuspid humor? The figurehead has no need for eyelids, must on-guard, vigil, dry eyed. But she dreams. Dreams. The sail, its fine apparel, its linen long-shadow: a tiny hand opening, budlike

Tonight I will remember the model With the wide, sad mouth Who used to pose for father Because I love the dangers of memory, The boarded window and door, Rooms where one bare bulb Makes shadows swell up the wall. And yet I recall only vaguely The way her hem rustled on the floor Like sand against tin Laisse-moi tranquille, epicier, It said because I want it to Say something memorable. I want her back That brilliant, farfetched woman Who drank coffee in our garden And the days father fed me Absinthe through a sugar cube So I would be asleep by noon And wake to find Ramona posing Naked with a tambourine. Tonight the whole world is a garden In which the immortal whispers Something about art And its opportunities: Memory like a bolt of silk In a tailor’s arms Can be made into anything Especially misfortune, Especially the year Ramona spent In a wrath almost Biblical And so far from the world Not even the moon could find Her study in Paris Where the doors opened to the river.

When I stop to consider my calling, remark the places a wayward temper impelled me I’ve found in light of where I wandered lost the most appalling evils could have befallen; but when I disregard the journey it’s hard to even fathom I endured so much affliction; what’s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ve seen my wariness go with them. I’ll come to my end, for I surrendered artless to someone with the science to dispel and destroy me if so inclined, else the know-how to want to; for if, with this very hand I could slaughter myself, why—not on my account but because so suited—would my enemy do otherwise? ………………………………………………………………… Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado y a ver los pasos por do me han traído, hallo, según por do anduve, perdido, que la mayor mal pudiera haber llegado; mas cuando del camino estó olvidado, a tanto mal no sé por dó he venido; sé que me acabo, y más he yo sentido ver acabar conmigo mi cuidado. Yo acabaré, que me entregué sin arte a quien sabrá perderme y acabarme si quisiere, y aún sabrá querello; que, pues mi voluntad puede matarme, la suya, que no es tanto de mi parte, pudiendo, ¿qué hará sino hacello? [Garcilaso de la Vega, 1501?-1536]

When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can sooth her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom—is to die.

When my Sorrow was born I nursed it with care, and watched over it with loving tenderness. And my Sorrow grew like all living things, strong and beautiful and full of wondrous delights. And we loved one another, my Sorrow and I, and we loved the world about us; for Sorrow had a kindly heart and mine was kindly with Sorrow. And when we conversed, my Sorrow and I, our days were winged and our nights were girdled with dreams; for Sorrow had an eloquent tongue, and mine was eloquent with Sorrow. And when we sang together, my Sorrow and I, our neighbors sat at their windows and listened; for our songs were deep as the sea and our melodies were full of strange memories. And when we walked together, my Sorrow and I, people gazed at us with gentle eyes and whispered in words of exceeding sweetness. And there were those who looked with envy upon us, for Sorrow was a noble thing and I was proud with Sorrow. But my Sorrow died, like all living things, and alone I am left to muse and ponder. And now when I speak my words fall heavily upon my ears. And when I sing my songs my neighbours come not to listen. And when I walk the streets no one looks at me. Only in my sleep I hear voices saying in pity, “See, there lies the man whose Sorrow is dead.”