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Here lies Jonson with the rest Of the poets; but the best. Reader, would’st thou more have known? Ask his story, not this stone. That will speak what this can’t tell Of his glory. So farewell.

TO THE LORD FAIRFAX See how the archèd earth does here Rise in a perfect hemisphere! The stiffest compass could not strike A line more circular and like; Nor softest pencil draw a brow So equal as this hill does bow. It seems as for a model laid, And that the world by it was made. Here learn, ye mountains more unjust, Which to abrupter greatness thrust, That do with your hook-shouldered height The earth deform and heaven fright, For whose excrescence, ill-designed, Nature must a new centre find, Learn here those humble steps to tread, Which to securer glory lead. See what a soft access and wide Lies open to its grassy side; Nor with the rugged path deters The feet of breathless travellers. See then how courteous it ascends, And all the way it rises bends; Nor for itself the height does gain, But only strives to raise the plain. Yet thus it all the field commands, And in unenvied greatness stands, Discerning further than the cliff Of heaven-daring Tenerife. How glad the weary seamen haste When they salute it from the mast! By night the Northern Star their way Directs, and this no less by day. Upon its crest this mountain grave A plump of agèd trees does wave. No hostile hand durst ere invade With impious steel the sacred shade. For something always did appear Of the great Master’s terror there: And men could hear his armour still Rattling through all the grove and hill. Fear of the Master, and respect Of the great Nymph, did it protect, Vera the Nymph that him inspired, To whom he often here retired, And on these oaks engraved her name; Such wounds alone these woods became: But ere he well the barks could part ’Twas writ already in their heart. For they (’tis credible) have sense, As we, of love and reverence, And underneath the coarser rind The genius of the house do bind. Hence they successes seem to know, And in their Lord’s advancement grow; But in no memory were seen, As under this, so straight and green; Yet now no further strive to shoot, Contented if they fix their root. Nor to the wind’s uncertain gust, Their prudent heads too far intrust. Only sometimes a fluttering breeze Discourses with the breathing trees, Which in their modest whispers name Those acts that swelled the cheek of fame. ‘Much other groves’, say they, ‘than these And other hills him once did please. Through groves of pikes he thundered then, And mountains raised of dying men. For all the civic garlands due To him, our branches are but few. Nor are our trunks enow to bear The trophies of one fertile year.’ ’Tis true, ye trees, nor ever spoke More certain oracles in oak. But peace, (if you his favour prize): That courage its own praises flies. Therefore to your obscurer seats From his own brightness he retreats: Nor he the hills without the groves, Nor height, but with retirement, loves.

XLV. Upon the Vine-tree. What is the Vine, more than another Tree, Nay most, than it, more tall, more comly be? What Work-man thence will take a Beam or Pin, To make ought which may be delighted in? It's Excellency in it's Fruit doth lie. A fruitless Vine! It is not worth a Fly. Comparison. What are Professors more than other men? Nothing at all. Nay, there's not one in ten, Either for Wealth, or Wit, that may compare, In many things, with some that Carnal are. Good are they, if they mortifie their Sin; But without that they are not worth a Pin.

We were sitting there, and I made a joke about how it doesn’t dovetail: time, one minute running out faster than the one in front it catches up to. That way, I said, there can be no waste. Waste is virtually eliminated. To come back for a few hours to the present subject, a painting, looking like it was seen, half turning around, slightly apprehensive, but it has to pay attention to what’s up ahead: a vision. Therefore poetry dissolves in brilliant moisture and reads us to us. A faint notion. Too many words, but precious.

Stoned by no Rosetta, merchants allowed through the fence learn to misspeak “black speak,” in Edgar’s harbor village, at HipHop Fish & Chicken on Route number 4 × 10. “Baby Girl” becomes XX. “My Man” assumes all XY. For salt & pepper curls, & baby stroller crowds, their broadcast is the same: “Baby Girl, your diabetes is ready.” “Main Man, your stroke order is up.” They know their audience: french fried lives, french fried luck, french fried us. They know corner markets of cornered markets, seldom scale the wall. Their shit is always hot. Their shit is always cheap. Their shit is always landmark of poison in pens, along with: windows wearing boards, hubcaps leaning curbs, the sound of “bitch,” the sound of “mother- fucker,” the sound of “niggah” sounding off, projectile vomiting from children’s lips — our hush puppy young, made beasts behind these bars. Some days you will see them, dirt bike knights, riding Edmondson Avenue, armor-less. They are wheelies, jousting against traffic, wheelies, jousting against stop- lights, gas tanks bleeding out on stretchers, as sirens serenade, metal flies hover. There are skeletons of chickens scattered on the ground. There are meeting bones of children fractured in the street, cordoned off. This is urban warming. This is underwear in exhibition, pants saddened to sag, hanging off ass cracks, like wet clothes on a line. This is the ecology of locks, since our country is locks, since our color is locks, since this block is locked. When your order is up, you will eat anything tossed inside the cage.

My childhood was not an anxious place, though I lay in my bed, awake, thumbing my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun imploded would Russian astronauts be OK, they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs, they that chased their own tail around this water bowl we call Earth. When I was a child, in elementary school we practiced a type of protection called Duck and Cover, where we huddled under desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. They were communists, had the bomb, and were evil Reagan told us from the small grave of a TV screen. In the sixties, Nixon said the same thing, and the Panthers countered with "the Viet Cong never called me nigger" With their picks like unclenched fists, with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb, they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014, and America is still scared of the Russians and black people; now the American Dream is to be debt free, which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.

A battle lost in the cornfields and in the sky a victory. Birds, the sun and birds again. By night, what will be left of me? By night, only a row of lamps, a wall of yellow clay that shines, and down the garden, through the trees, like candles in a row, the panes; there I dwelt once and dwell no longer— I can't live where I once lived, though the roof there used to cover me. Lord, you covered me long ago.

But inside her, there is always velvet, velvet with its give and yield, the kind you find at a pet store, a bin full of long ears and noses busy snuffing up nerves among the cedar chips and their eyes opening wide as if rabbits couldn't know what softness brings, as if they'd never know the smell of something long stored away now brought into light, and now too her mother with a camera pointing at her, red child on the lap of the Easter rabbit, softness of the body hiding inside the costume, eyes glinting from the wide holes in the mask, not a single sobbing breath of wind down the trail of mesquite and broom foot-printing the hills of some rancher's land. The bird dog lifts his ears to the sound of velvet, the girl listens to the drawn cries of a crow, her father walks with the silence of the shotgun, waiting for the pointer to find scent, the rabbit at the end of it blinking, its wide eyes shrinking from the scuffle of their feet like velvet settling, laid over lines, drying across the ceiling of an uncle's garage where they talk inside the smell of salted skin. At least three dollars for each good pelt he says, and they scream like children when, sleeves rolled over his forearms, he brings the club down on their heads, saving their feet for cheap key chains, for luck that softness doesn't seem to have inside of cages, chicken wire, tubes of water, and sometimes boys who try kicking the cage around to see what happens to velvet tumbling. And, in the after quiet, she bites the hands reaching toward her, so they stone her, they open her belly and pull some things out, open the pink albino eye and groan at the fluid inside. Then they bury the carcass without thinking first of washing their sticky hands in the sink before eating dinner, before setting the table, in the still softness of her beige room, she sits on the carpet picking at the velveteen of Bunny's stuffed neck, the rabbit's eyes dull with scratches, eyes left behind on her bed at night when she stands in the hall, hearing her father breathe in his room in the darkness, on the futon, kicking off the sheets. Awake from a fluid dream of a woman's eyes staring from behind a gag, her white skin settling in fat pools around her, naked, bald. And a man's voice said,this is your rabbit, so she woke to this dream inside her, with his teeth wrapped in her hair, and his hands inside her thighs where he fingered her coldly. But it has always been like this—wild, insidious, and commanding because she gives to it, fascinated by it and caught by it, as velvet only listens and is quiet.

The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred carefully counted insects, three almost new snakes, coiled in a cube, exactly fifty fish creatures in tanks, the necessary files, twenty bars of food, ten brief cures, special locks, fourteen white rats, fourteen black rats, a pouch of dirt, were all stuffed aboard before the thing blasted from the desert. And the missile that launched a missile launched out into a marvelous scientific balloon that rolled and bobbed about in the mists of Venus; suddenly sank like a sweet fat grape, oozing past gravity to snuggle down upon the triumphant shape of space. The two men signaled Earth, telling their Continent V ENUS IS G REEN . And parades assembled, the loud earth tellers spent all fifteen minutes on it, even shortened their weather forecast. But rival nations, angry and oily, fired up their best atom blast and the last Earth war was done. The place became crater on each side, sank down to its first skull, shedding forests, oceans, dried bones and neons, as it fell through time like a forgotten pitted stone. These two men walked hopefully out onto their hot empty planet with machines, rats, tanks, boxes, insects and the one odd set of three almost new snakes, to make the tests they were meant to do. But on the seventh month the cages grew small, too small to interview, too tight to bear. The rats were gray and heavy things where they ran against wire and the snakes built eggs on eggs and even the fish began to bump in water as they spawned on every side of each other’s swim. And the men grew listless; they opened the pouch of dirt, undid each locked bin and let every creature loose to live on Venus, or anyhow hide under rocks. Bees swarmed the air, letting a warm pollen slide from their wings and onto the grass. The fish flapped to a small pool and the rats untangled their hairs and humped over the vestibule of the cramped balloon. Trees sprang from lichen, the rock became a park, where, even at star-time, things brushed; even in the planet’s new dark crotch, that air snag where snakes coupled and rats rubbed in disrepair, it grew quick and noisy with a kind of wonder in the lonely air. Old and withered, two Ph.D.’s from Earth hobbled slowly back to their empty balloon, crying alone for sense, for the troubling lack of something they ought to do, while countless fish slapped and the waters grew, green came taller and the happy rats sped through integrated forests, barking like dogs at the top of the sky. But the two men, that last morning of death, before the first of light, watched the land of Venus, its sweetless shore, and thought, “This is the end. This is the last of a man like me.” Until they saw, over the mists of Venus, two fish creatures stop on spangled legs and crawl from the belly of the sea. And from the planet park they heard the new fruit drop.

After Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” triptych right panel But all dark notes are dismantled there from the middle ear downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin. Can you claim anything is yours? The burning salt hour throws its black broken-glass frame skyward. Left behind the mum orchestra, body parts in peril and animals dizzy for lust past all lost astronomy and wipeout, this naked edible overjoy, a kind of suicide in syllables, fifth panic, fourth stall’s birds-fermata, this half ocean’s susurrus is coming over us in the picture. Can you akin? Can you hear it, pinned to the unseasonable underearth, an option for music and water constantly changing shape, an answer in dissonance? To hear desire is to wake yourself inside, upturned, long enough to know tomorrow is exile. Chaos, body harp, and painted butt music, crowd-crawl, rose crowned to the chest, rabbit call and playing cards    ...    listen, I’m hell-humming in your direction, giddy, I am too taken to leave it alone, the will locked in as if it is already inside of me now: to fall. Let’s be clear, my darling, in the reeling crave, spilled gut-platter of enclosed bones, in the final flesh-clean drop, it sounds like fire rising with the cliff’s updraft.