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You left me – Sire – two Legacies – A Legacy of Love A Heavenly Father would suffice Had He the offer of – You left me Boundaries of Pain – Capacious as the Sea – Between Eternity and Time – Your Consciousness – and me –

Dirt on my chin and I wonder: am I already in the ground? Like a toy turned real, I cannot shed the sense that I have died. The German word for Heaven’s the same as the German word for sky. On hearing a cruel prince was in danger, I prayed for him to thrive, not for his own sake, but for the concubines, sure to end up buried along. To my real face, a man once crowed i ruined you , and though he did, the joke’s on him: he ruined me only for this world, and this world is not long for itself. The Earth, that ever-loving but distrustful kin, keeps leaving us just a little pocket money when it dies, never the land —

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked- out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth. You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see. You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut. How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud, you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all. But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her. You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down. You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.

Three years, Huang Gongwang worked on his famous handscroll, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.

If you can command these elements to silence … origin : No soul could have spoken of the universe’s origin since no one could have existed to witness it. Origin is ellipsis. We believe the universe began, because we exist and because we can hear the sounds of its origin. Activating radio telescopes, gazing at the far corners of existence so dark and distant that the mewling universe can still be heard and seen cooling in cosmic antiquity, we hear. We hear the origin’s cold weak light journey to us. From our center, we can see nothing beyond the cosmic background radiation’s feeble crackle. Beyond this dark margin, we can hear no more origin. We have run out of the sound of the past. We have used up all our past we may know. Beyond this past, there is only the silence that marks the edge of the infinite. When we deploy a fantasy such as “The West,” what we often mean is specifically that transatlantic network of capitalism that formed our experience of modernity, the economic system that catalyzed the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the British and American orders. The West in this sense possessed its own Big Bang, its own founding from sublime trauma: the expropriation of land from those who lived in the New World and the expropriation of body and labor from those who lived on the African west coast, and the plunder that laid waste to peoples and nations of three continents. And here are also sublime silences. The silent images of the Aztecs’ death, which José Rabasa shows were painted by an artist asked to document their own world’s demise by the Spanish. The silence of the encomienda, blazing silence of Diego de Landa, crackling light of Maya codices and icons arsoned and non-silence of confessions, screams elicited from those he hoisted into air by their wrists and he pelted hot wax at them and he lashed their bodies with whips and they grew non-silent and then silent. And so a continent bared for those moaning boats that stole across ocean stole people across continent crammed in dark belly of ships, these captured people of many tongues who could not speak to each other and who we struck in the lungs with death by drowning people who we abducted to our country people we commanded not to read or write or speak. Such events suggest other silences: first, the silence against appropriation (How can one speak of a suffering that is not one’s own, a suffering whose responsibility one might also own?) and second, the silence of sublime inadequacy (How can one write poetry after the killing of three continents?). One can lodge many answers to these questions, the first of them being moratorium : When early evening came, the Stars descended into the parking lot of the 7-11 where they held congress and declared embargo on speaking of the dead. And dawn came and what we had said about him became sky-silent. dark matter : Because my father had died into an object, I fled my work, my friends, my art, New York. I fled my life so I could also become object. Youmna followed, but these memories are fictional (performance) and so we will drape her with a white cloth. Having fled my life, I am sitting on my bed, operating this memory indoors, underground, in basements, in locked bedrooms, in any indoor container that might further package me away from the fact and still did they pursue, still did they strike the darting arrows of the Death Star, that black radiance of leeches that flung itself down from the hot surfaces of the griefsun. The famishing lines tracked me inside, tracked me around corners, lassoing me into the air. “Where does this black sun come from?” Julia Kristeva asked. “Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?” And this is when Youmna lifted the sheet that had been cast over my body. “Why did you cover yourself like this, like an object at the morgue? What were you thinking?” I said, “I thought what I had covered was the world.” the unsayable : One of the traditional paradoxes of the dead is how they do not emit information. Because the dead do not emit light, which cannot escape the event horizon of the deceased, they can only be detected by the symptoms they leave on the surrounding matter, the haloed matter burning at their corona, the white marks scarring the X-rays. A person can survive within the dead once it has gravitationally collapsed. This happens for only a second from the observer’s eye, but, because of gravitational time dilation, grief 
occurs a nearly infinitely long time for the person who chooses to live inside the dead. tlacuilo, graphic novelist at the world’s end : In those California days after my dad died, I felt the life began to seep out of me into the ground and so I brought my sneakers to the cobbler for resoling, which strangely enough did not mitigate my newfound grief. Sometimes I would find myself gazing out the window at the garden my mom cultivated behind her house, often while performing an Edwardian pose of wan melancholy, and as I approached, the glass would immediately darken as though saturated with an egglike blue shadow. (I later realized this shadow was caused by my head blocking the lamplight and decided to simply lean back.) I found myself stricken with headaches for some reason when I neglected to eat for days. I began laying my head on the carpet as though listening for footsteps, which I did often in those days, perhaps I believed the sun would itself walk inside and incite me, when I saw a woman in my mother’s backyard. I did not recognize her. She crouched on the ground holding what I thought was a knife. 
I thought I saw her carving the earth into sections. As I came closer, 
I saw that what she grasped in her hand was a quill, though she held it with such authority that she looked as though she held the earth by its handle. All the cracks that scrawled between the grass—I saw that these were not cracks. They were sketches. And what a strange thing, looking back on it, how I never wondered what this woman was doing in my mother’s backyard. She glanced up at me as I approached and said, “Everyone I know is dead. I am also dead, but someone must stay behind and document my death. I am the only archivist, so I remain suspended between death and history.” I realized what was occurring and asked, selfishly, “So it’s possible to talk to someone who is dead?” “You do it all the time. It’s like what Youmna told you to write into your eulogy.” “Yeah, okay.” I paused. “But he never remembers to talk back to me.” She took out two cubes, possibly carved from bone, and threw them at my feet. “What’s that for?” I kneeled closer to her. “Is this fortune telling?” “It’s your stats and hit points.” I laughed. “You’re sending me into a dungeon?” “No,” she said. “You are going on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage to hell.” initiation : To prepare for your descent (for there was no question of which direction you would eventually end up), you began your initiation into three domains of sorcery: the silent vows of grief; the generative magics obtained through meditation upon the colonial archive; and apprenticeship into all manner of low-level 
magics, including wonder-making, liberating demons, clairvoyance of the past, fierce activities, special jumping abilities, control over the three worlds, abridgment of one’s own lifespan through nicotine inhalation, research methods, the augmentation of merit and pleasure by generating poetry using your body, red optic blasts, melancholy of the spleen, a frequent customer stamp card for Woorijip Korean deli. Your first prophesied guru was the Tlacuilo, the woman historian who had ventured to the underworld by standing witness at the end of the Mexica and the cosmogony of the New World. She had painted omens of the future that now served you as diagrams of the past: the two-headed man who presented his body to Moctezuma, the comet whose banner waved across the sky and heralded the origin of the next kingdom, and the pale ghosts in steel skins who came as gods and guests, the ghosts who at the Festival of  Toxcatl came to kill us. One of them sawed off a man’s head, another speared the eye of a warrior who was betrothed to your sister. The Tlacuilo led you to the black lake that Mexico City had become. You did not know if you were in a fantasy or the past. You were in a fantasy and the past. Small skiffs wobbled by, as did wounded bodies that dyed the waters red. Surrounded by corpses levitating upon the waters, she taught you the first sorcery, that of death’s erasure. She cut off the hole of your mouth so you could say nothing, nothing commensurate with death, nothing can be commensurate to that dark infinity, and so you lost no breaths and so you followed her from the shores (sores) and the waterline slowly became the horizon line of the sky and you could breathe. White fish flew by, gliding without effort. You looked one in the eye and it sucked its cow lips silently at you. She said that this was Atlantis or one of many Atlantises and you saw yourself walking beside her on a road towards an underwater city that you could see only as a speck in the far distance. You tripped on the body of a dead man, seemingly Chinese, his body weighed down with rock-filled bags. The Tlacuilo, who by this time walked far in front of you, came back and told you this man’s name but asked you to stay silent. She led you about a mile further down the road towards the first station set aside for pilgrims such as yourself. Here she transmitted another teaching. There will also be other ages after this one, she said. Other suns will rise and fall. I will instruct you towards the attainment of a new title: The Cowerer from the Sun. She taught you how to crawl on the seabed, a weeping hog crawling on hands and knees. My final teaching is this: Go in fear of the sun. Having said this, she set her own body down in a fetal position and waited for the seaweed to smother her. liberating the sun demon spell : Moneyed sun of vampiric Western powers Lift up enclosures, colonies, and bowers The civilizing light of the Atlantic state’s sun Radiance of iPhones and global financialization I shun you in this wrathful manifestation Glutton sun, I call your name of power Call you out from enclosure, colony, and bower Sun I name you: Radioactive Liquid Ocean of interests and incentives Shipping lanes for slave and spice and coolie Inescapable moisture of air and the body Marinating us all complicit quandary spell : If we are all complicit in the sun’s radiance or if the sun is too sublime to be rolled from its central solar spot, then what is the objective of being revolting to that star? middle fantasy flight of passage : You served as sentry incompetent, standing watch standing for pre-American seabeds for centuries, so slow did you live below the waters, you saw the ocean as simply a second more infinite air. The water’s lip became that line that separates sky from celestial space. One day you spied a person flying, prone. He wafted down and you saw a man starved to skull sick and struggling in the sky, descending through the red gulps of sharks. You saw him fall five fathoms, an ariel who found his free wings stripped and him imagined into caliban. Shining anglerfish for flashlight, you saw that he died silently before he touched down upon the seabed. Of course he had not flown. He had drowned. Your mouth stricken. You could say nothing. You could think nothing commensurate with these absolutes. Poor souls, they perished. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth Engraving by Gustave Doré for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. influence : If influence spoken by Spenser portends the star’s fateful persuasion, flowing and fluctuating, does influenza mean the disease of fate? the stars : Migrant to death’s second nation, Dante / emerges into the purging state and gazes up / at a supernal cross: four stars joyous, / isomorphs to the four cardinal virtues. “Dante is no bookkeeper of the literal ... [The] constellations are best taken as allegorical.” Although one of the largest star radii observed belongs to the glowering red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, that terrible and sublime throne whose dominion could swallow our own sun nine billion times, poor yellow pebble celestial, and whose own death slain by nova during that final day shall illumine our infinite interior caverns of night — we might also regard Canis Majoris’s gigantism as hypothetical: though massive, this hypergiant is a thousand times more diffuse than air. The size of this terrorful star depends on what words we wield to define its stellar radius (e.g., whether by density or optical-depth). You can shrink the most sublime of stars using only your language.Vaporware star, luminosity leached of borders, you are all fictions. human song : Perhaps it is the case that you never get over things. You decide you will no longer engage with them. You answer with 
silence until you are reminded once again of the wound and requested 
to be human. poem written after slingshotting around the sun to the future when you too are a father : Perfect baby perched on high chair, washed and newly diapered, photogenic but on Facebook unshared, I wonder the purpose of the personal in death or politics, the former displacing one’s personality into a mute purgatory perpetual, the latter being a plural affair, more systemic and dispersed than private feelings — but do these secret fruits grow and burrow inside your grief, growing riper until they burst into black sweetness? Is the point not the immolation of the person but their muteness, their non-divulgence? You point to the window. You show your child the snow outside. The snow’s white war against the world. The snow that has so superbly coated only the tops of branches with erasure. Sometimes it is through the hidden underside that we find ourselves most bare.

it’s the being alone, i think, the emails but not voices. dominicans be funny, the way we love to touch — every greeting a cheek kiss, a shoulder clap, a loud. it gots to be my period, the bloating, the insurance commercial where the husband comes home after being deployed, the last of the gouda gone, the rejection letter, the acceptance letter, the empty inbox. a dream, these days. to work at home is a privilege, i remind myself. spend the whole fucking day flirting with screens. window, tv, computer, phone: eyes & eyes & eyes. the keys clicking, the ding of the 
microwave, the broadway soundtrack i share wine with in the evenings. these are the answers, you feel me? & the impetus. the why. of when the manicurist holds my hand, making my nails a lilliputian abstract, i close my fingers around hers, disrupting the polish, too tight i know then, too tight to hold a stranger, but she squeezes back & doesn’t let go & so finally i can.

This notebook is so old the paper is yellow. I wonder where the tree grew. Seems like you never get one thing without losing another. There's some sort of law about that to do with finite resources. Somewhere some guys have figured out to the exact ounce how much my life has cost the earth, how many people have died that I might live. Start with my parents, and theirs, and all who died because of them. It's like we drip in blood. Who can wake up then tomorrow morning, do the tasks set out before them as if it was their work and their work only? Who has the courage to look out to the east again at someone else's sun?

for Pat Silliman I Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies in wait somewhere within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The rain is not safe to drink. In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion. The rose lies unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between classes, over strong coffee, young men argue the value of a pronoun. When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The radio operator’s name is Sparks. Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a swamp. Finally we spot the wood duck on the middle lake. The dashboard of my car like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere. Sun swells in the morning sky. Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one table to the next, seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee house door, tall Styrofoam cup in one hand,Of Grammatology in the other. Outside, a dog is tied to any empty bench, bike chained to the No Parking sign.

for Pat Silliman XII A guide to the sky under full nondisclosure. Dawn in the bare birch trees, the sun, swollen, throbs over the horizon. Hotel buffet doodah. Two dogs dancing, sniffing one another’s genitalia. One can hear the electricity wired in the walls, water rushing through the pipes, the boards and joints of the old house groaning as they settle. Map of morning. Winter light. One’s experience of the transfer point air- port as that of the city itself. Dear winter, it’s 5:15 AM. Shoes for Mickey Mouse. Waste deep in the big muddy. The sound of rain around. The line (not visible) binds letters into words. People are drowning. Moon, broken in the middle. What a watch watches. Song of the single en- gine Cessna, threading the pre-dawn sky. One bird, one bird, many. Blades of grass brittle in the freeze. Spider’s corner of the bath room. One maple tree that will not return to life.

People, don't ask me again where my shoes are. The valley I walked through was frozen to me as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc talisman—I'm fine, people. Don't stare at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card— card among cards, card of my number and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of the system, in the beast's belly and up to here, people, with your pity. People, what is wrong with you? I don't care what the sign on your door says. I will go to another door. I will knock and rattle and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere, will put a pancake in my hand. You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies of the blooming stump, I bend over you, taste you, keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning of what you may one day dream an end to. The new century peeled me bone-bare like a first song inside a warbler—that bird, people, who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Keep this in mind. Do you think the fox won't find your nest? That the egg of you will endure the famine? You, you people born of moons with no mother-planets, you who are back-lit, who have no fathers in heaven, hear now the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned. From your alley. From your car up on blocks. From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple and move out into the studded green lightning. Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dogs of hell not to bust free? Or that because your youth's been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you? If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn— do not confuse me with dawn. Now people, about the shoes: the shoes have no doubt entered the sea and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis. I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least I have something to say. I lay myself down in a pencil of night—no chiseled tip yet, but the marks already forming in the lead.