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of the furious Who take Today and jerk it out of joint have made new underpinnings and a Head. Blacktime is time for chimeful poemhood but they decree a jagged chiming now. If there are flowers flowers must come out to the road. Rowdy!— knowing where wheels and people are, knowing where whips and screams are, knowing where deaths are, where the kind kills are. As for that other kind of kindness, if there is milk it must be mindful. The milkofhumankindness must be mindful as wily wines. Must be fine fury. Must be mega, must be main. Taking Today (to jerk it out of joint) the hardheroic maim the leechlike-as-usual who use, adhere to, carp, and harm. And they await, across the Changes and the spiraling dead, our Black revival, our Black vinegar, our hands, and our hot blood.

sleeps into heaven with his lamps on, finishing explan- atory negotiations for a while.Desert the enemy. Star formations, sandstone understanding, rock time in gen- eral, whatever. Latching onto ecstasy, words that change on waking, clover as a syrup of spring mind. Working off a deficit of sleep or cash, you know who your friends are. Singled out in traffic, lurching into light, having lunch. You’re a little one with sand in your eyes, with green on your horn, with milk on your chin. With flow- ering ears and hearsay.

You carve and sculpt, the deft chisel in a soft shapely hand. I beat my head against the marble to knock it into shape, my hands work for a living. I am still a long way from myself, but I want to become Me! There is someone deep in my blood who cries out for homemade Olympuses and worlds for humans. My mother is such a poor wretch, you’d laugh if you saw her, we live in a tight annex, built onto the end of the village. My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me. I don’t need sleep, food just enough to keep from starving. An implacable struggle and the world bristling with sword points. Each one hungers for my heart. Each one, I, unarmed, must melt in my blood.

There was a young lady of Lynn, Who was so uncommonly thin That when she essayed To drink lemonade She slipped through the straw and fell in.

Come, little infant, love me now, While thine unsuspected years Clear thine agèd father’s brow From cold jealousy and fears. Pretty, surely, ’twere to see By young love old time beguiled, While our sportings are as free As the nurse’s with the child. Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for love. Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, does prize, As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice. Now then love me: time may take Thee before thy time away: Of this need we’ll virtue make, And learn love before we may. So we win of doubtful fate; And if good she to us meant, We that good shall antedate, Or, if ill, that ill prevent. Thus as kingdoms, frustrating Other titles to their crown, In the cradle crown their king, So all foreign claims to drown, So, to make all rivals vain, Now I crown thee with my love: Crown me with thy love again, And we both shall monarchs prove.

I seemed always standing before a door to which I had no key, although I knew it hid behind it a gift for me. Until one day I closed my eyes a moment, stretched then looked once more. And not surprised, I did not mind it when the hinges creaked and, smiling, Death held out his hands to me.

You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly makes you laugh like mules. Chances dance off your wrists, each day ready, sprites in your bones and spite not yet swollen, not yet set. You gather handful after miracle handful, seeing straight, reaching the lighthouse in record time, pockets brim with scimitar things. Now is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm. Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick twins, carried on your backs, each vow new to touch and each mistake a broken biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines without levers, easy in bowel and lung. One cartwheel over the quicksand curve of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

Naked before the glass she said, “I see my body as no man has, Nor any shall unless I wed And naked in a stranger’s house Stand timid beside his bed. There is no pity in the flesh.” “Or else I shall grow old,” she said, “Alone, and change my likeliness For a vile, slack shape, a head Shriveled with thinking wickedness Against the day I must be dead And eaten by my crabbed wish.” “One or the other way,” she said, “How shall I know the difference, When wrinkles come, to spinster or bride? Whether to marry or burn is bless- ed best, O stranger to my bed, There is no pity in the flesh.”

The sky has been dark for many years. My skin has become as damp and pale as rice paper and feels the way mother’s used to before the drying sun parched it out there in the fields. Lately, when I touch my eyelids, my hands react as if I had just touched something hot enough to burn. My skin, aspirin colored, tingles with migraine. Mother has been massaging the left side of my face especially in the evenings when the pain flares up. This morning her breathing was graveled, her voice gruff with affection when I wheeled her into the bath. She was in a good humor, making jokes about her great breasts, floating in the milky water like two walruses, flaccid and whiskered around the nipples. I scrubbed them with a sour taste in my mouth, thinking: six children and an old man have sucked from these brown nipples. I was almost tender when I came to the blue bruises that freckle her body, places where she has been injecting insulin for thirty years. I soaped her slowly, she sighed deeply, her eyes closed. It seems it has always been like this: the two of us in this sunless room, the splashing of the bathwater. In the afternoons when she has rested, she prepares our ritual of tea and rice, garnished with a shred of gingered fish, a slice of pickled turnip, a token for my white body. We eat in the familiar silence. She knows I am not to be trusted, even now planning my escape. As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze.

The youngest living thing in L. A. was my baby. The oldest living thing was the wind. The wind grew well in that city in the desert. As did my garden of well-tended cement. As did my baby, whom I held like a heavy statuette. I named him Mill at his birth  . . .As the wheel goeth by drift ofwater . . . And he grew and the wind blew and we lived in that desert and . . . no rain. No rain, no river. No sound of water. But for— The fountain water. The official fountain. Which flowed. Every day. Every day the baby slept. The baby breathed. The fountain flowed. It flowed imperceptibly. As if its water were fast asleep. We stood on the fountain’s shore: woman + newborn. We made one totem. I named the baby Easter Island. We played I Spy. I saw: coins at the fountain’s bottom. Eyes. Copper cataracts, winking through the water at us. I held the baby close. I held the baby stiffly. I brought the baby to see nobody. I saw: statues in the fountain’s water. Statues in tall grasses on the shore of a sea. I turned to tell somebody. The city had disappeared into complete silence. There was only: the baby. We were watching the water wrinkle in the wind. In the distance, maids were ironing. Overhead: jets drew ciphers in the blue with their chalk. The drift of the maker is dark. Beware that by the drifts thou perish not. The statues, the statues in the strange fountain were looking at us. They were weeping and turning, turning and weeping. They might have seen the city shimmering in the sun and wind, and known . . . It was a city with no one in it. If a door somewhere on the street opened, it would always be . . . no one. It would be a bad draft that had blossomed. I longed for meadows white with drifts of snow. I named the baby Drift. In the winter I had planned to bring him north. To a barn’s eaves, to hear icicles drip. To prepare him to grow up in the path of the next great glacial drift. City whose sky was white jet streaks. Whose houses were apparitions of asbestos flakes. Whose homeless sipped wind from tins. Whose only water was the strange fountain. Angel, my angel, my sweetheart, wake up. See the foam on the wave, seethe tornado, the hurricane. We stood on the fountain’s shore. The wind blew particulates of rug powder, of lemon-scented floor polish. The maids of the city were cleaning so completely. And mutely. There may have been other names I gave the baby. Zeno sweet Zeno Little fellow little fellow Vertigo I said to the baby, We will stand here until there is snow on the mountain. I may have meant to say fountain. We peered all day into the strange fountain. I said to myself, That is just your face stiffening around your cheeks. That is just grass growing at your feet. I held the baby all the time, and he never ever cried.