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Nobody was left who’d lastly scuffed first earth’s crust. Boiling sea had thin-sheened each cubit of firmament. Mountains ceased to assert, gave into ground arounding whatever hard rock to then there over and take down. All shapes breaking hysterical particles and subs who settled devoting former whir of shape to Silence, which was enough. It stayed uniform Silent for some many months which strengthened to pull outer space noise in to neutralize but lost its grip. So this Sound hard-pressed in to sink holes and look into original force that was still shut in under black lacquer cabinetry: our future perfect world. It opened the door of dust, the space sound picked up pings distantly. Seeing to sound is what and how Bounceback. Since the dust so still and small the waves skinnied high-pitched to switch on resistance of an average mote. What would stand to receive? What was the point of pointing out resisting decay? What was there to say? Could anything be activated? Much was strained in “done” state and so sought exit through the soft Silence under rather than he stabbed by the point-cornered Silence above. So sound deranged to be needle pierce to dust piece and sunned a word heard first by the bygone (“ouch”). And the Silence startled by the sneaking sound forgot its own high ground and grumbled some rebuke. Underground glad particulates laughed at the gaff and expanded (something among it a voice) to sweep up what had been PART TWO One in Dust begun. One chased out to Perceptivity from mum. This made an in as such that could close over after outreach which comes back with something to say. Stretching comes to the zone where there is shifting from mixing its own x-space with outside sensed data. Each already edgy piece in “earshot” each piece pulled in by dust’s desire to harbor more is similar to dolphin noise. Riffs that began off flats of static, f.p. earth (future perfect), etched by rust-hinged sound. Not all dust took in. Those who did not got ultra dense. If there was a strike to one of this specie sparks would be three feet at least and atoms unleash. To them strikes relieve adhesion. They like hits from nowhere; they won’t admit they are hard in every space. But sparks in dark if an eye sees them a mouth to say how beautiful a light of such blue that lasts and deepens blue. Shaped like a pin, each spark alights to hold itself, elsewhere, down. What it lands on is to remember the spark beautiful. A spark from Hard Silence made mad. The more made makes it harder which gets hit and flies further because it is harder. PART THREE Minute care is taken so that soft expansive dust gets all over the dense. Colors change as comes collision. They want to do all they can now that they can. Hopefully they don’t know about the deep frozen people in orbit. Those on the figurative shelf until there is a proper place. More on that after the fire; for now: the Sound, the Nerve, the Building.

Wanting leads to worse than oddity. The bones creak like bamboo in wind, and strain toward a better life outside the body, the life anything has that isn’t human. Feel the chair under you? What does it want? Does lust bend it silly, like a rubber crutch? Tell a tree about the silky clasp of cunt. It won’t shift an inch. It won’t ache to touch. Let me not cruise for teens in a red sports car, or glare too long at what bubbles their clothes. Let me never hustle file clerks in a bar. Keep me from the beach when the hot wind blows. If I must go mad, let it be dignified. Lock me up where I’ll feel like wood, where wanting won’t send me flopping outside, where my bones will shut up, where I’ll be good.

I. Sirs, in our youth you love the sight of us. Older, you fall in love with what we’ve seen, Would lose yourselves by living in our lives. I’ll spin you tales, play the Arabian girl; Working close, alone in the blond arena, Flourish my cape, the cloth on the camera. For women learn to be a holy show. I’ll tell you where I’ve been, not what I am: In Rotterdam, womb where my people sprang, I find my face, my father, everywhere. New cousins I must stoop to greet, the get Of tall, whey-colored burghers, sturdy dams, As children fed on tulip bulbs and dirt, Tugged at dry dugs and sucked at winter’s rind. My cousins, dwarfed by war! Your forms rebuke The butcher and the bystander alike. To ease you I can’t shrink this big Dutch frame Got of more comfortable ancestors. But from my Southern side I pluck a phrase, “I’ll carry you.” And it means “rest in me,” To hold you as I may, in my mind’s womb. But snap the album, get the guidebook out! Rotterdam: her raw, gray waterfront, Zadkine’s memorial burning on the quay; This bronze is mortal, gaping in defeat, The form that wombed it split to let it be. It mends; he lurches up, in blood reborn, The empty heavens his eternal frame. II. Move to my room beside the Golden Horn Where minarets strike fire against the sky. The architecture: breasts and phalluses. Where are the words to say that words are lies? Yeats lied. And here Byzantium lies dead. Constantinople? Syllables in a text. Istanbul. Real. Embalmed in dancing dust. Everywhere the dark-brown past gives way To the beige of progress, that wide vacant lot. Turkey without coffee! Endlessly we sip tea From bud vases, and I lust for the guide, A sultry, serious, pedantic boy In a tight brown suit, thirsting to get out Of the triple city weighing on his mind. Oh, he was doomed, doomed like the dogs On Dog Island, in the sea, Netted and dumped and exiled, left to die, Then skinned. We heard imaginary canine howls, Like the rustlings of a thousand gauzy girls, Film-eyed cattle, perishing of ennui In abandoned harems where he guided me. Meanwhile the Faithful, prostrate and intoning, Stare into the light as blind as death, Knowing for sure their end is instant Heaven. We Infidels concede them Paradise, Having seen heaven-as-harem, a eunuch God In charge: the virgin slowly fattening to blubber. Love, become feminized, tickles like a feather. The saints of Art? Sophia, that vast barn Holds no small Savior waiting to get born. The formal scribble on the assaulted walls— Five hundred years of crossing out His name! Some famous, glittering pebbles mark the place As God’s most grandiose sarcophagus. Decay, decay. And the mind, a fetus, dies. III. Return me to the airfield near Shanghai Where I am very young: shy, apprehensive, Seated like Sheba on a baggage mountain Waiting for the first adventure to begin. The train will glide through fields of rice and men, Bodies like thongs, and glorious genitals, Not alien as Chinese, but Adam-strange. Rejoiced by her first look at naked men, Her soul swims out the window of the train! She goes where newborn daughters clog the creeks; Bank-porticoes are strewn with starving rags. Here the old dragon, China, thrashes, dying. But the ancient, virile music of the race Is rising, drenched in gongs and howls of dogs Islanded, the sighs of walled-up women Dreaming of peasants in their prisoning fields… But we break out of the harem of history! No longer that young foreigner on the train, I listen like a bird, although I ruminate Like a cow, in my pale Holland body, riven By love and children. These eyes are what they see. Come die with me in the mosques of Rotterdam.

jazz is underwater vodou atlantis mute aborted ultrasound fetal fish in flood haiti's first cousin forcibly kissed by a hurricane called katrina. hot winds come one fat tuesday. old levee leak explodes. fixing funds gone to homeland security. soldiers stationed in iraq. said, jazz is underwater days like laissez-faire manna does not fall saviors do not save hunger prays to rage for resilience, improvisational genius implodes, anarchy duets with despair. bassist fingers loot—nimble like a deft pianist. said, vodou atlantis mute. the fragile eardrums of instant orphans get inundated with someone else's mama's soprano saxophone screams. (meanwhile televised tenor voices report monotonous drone to drown out) the deafening beat of funeral marchers can't swim. bloated trumpet carcasses, a singer swallows human sewage. her last note, a curse on america. aborted ultrasound. cacophonous warnings scatter brains. pedestrians hear calls to evacuate, escape, and think, how fast can on-foot run? the poor, the weary just drown. abandoned elders just drown. people in wheelchairs just drown. the sick in bed cannot leave. their doctors stay behind too. new emergencies engulf the e.r. swamped hospitals ain't hostels, ain't shelters. resources slim like hope. nurses stay behind too. their loyal partners will not leave. ill-fated rejects just drown. said, fetal fish in flood. outside, a breaking willow weeps like a father on his rooftop, murmuring his wife's last words: clutch tight to our babies and let me die, she had pleaded, you can't hold on to us all, let me die. she, too, like jazz, is underwater. her love, her certainty, will haunt him. their children's survival, a scar. sanity also loses its grip, guilt-weight like cold, wet clothes. eighty percent of new orleans submerged. debris lingers, disease looms. said, days like laissez-faire. manna does not fall. shock battles suicide thoughts. some thirsty throats cope, manage dirges in cajun, in zydeco. out-of-state kin can't get through. refugees (refugees?) remember ruined homes. a preacher remembers the book of revelations. still saviors wait to save. and the living wade with the countless dead while a wealthy president flies overhead up where brown people look up where brown people look like spoiled jambalaya, stewing from a distance in their down-there distress, said, he's free— high up—far up— vacation fresh—eagle up, up and away from the place where our protest sound started, still sings. american music gurgling cyclone litanies man cannot prevent, the man cannot hear.

In the southern Adriatic, where the blue begins, We came to rest awhile and play On sun-drenched islands known as Tremiti, Where the breeze blows fresh And pine trees shiver and the salt sea Washes the likes of you and me, In the southern Adriatic, in the wind-blown spray. In the bluest water, just where it begins, We came to play awhile, came to rest On rocky shores of barren coves, As the swells arrived and water splashed And reflected sunlight jumped and shimmered Among the cliffs and overhangs and grottoes, In the Adriatic, where that sort of thing begins. In the clear blue water that the swells bring by Out of the sunny Adriatic Sea, We came to rest and play and bathe ourselves, As the pine trees swayed on the bluffs above And wind dispersed the salt sea spray, In the sunny Adriatic, where a way of life begins. We came seeking an immersion, to find ourselves In waters clear enough to fathom A bottom profoundly blue, to see it seemed All the way to Greece or any other site That water washed as well or sun could so ignite, Came to see ourselves in a world of dreams, That words might furnish what place implies, That place might finish what a word begins. We came seeking clearest water, sunniest sky, Came, you and I, to see what would be seen Immersed in waters consummately blue, In sunlit swells that carried their dark secret, Tiny hosts known as meduse, whose fragile arms Glanced and stung and burned all day And raised the blush that blossomed on our skins, Aggravated by the sun and spray, By our own attempts to hold each other, As we swam out of ourselves and were swept away, In the southern Adriatic, where the blue begins.

The upkeep of the castle is The downfall of the cottages Where fishermen and peasants live Or used to live. The young men leave In homemade boats in which they drown, In makeshift planes that burn and crash, Or die of boredom on the train That starts each month for Cold Cash, Only to find when they arrive That that’s not where the castle is. The women left live in the sticks, And when they do the weekly wash Or mend the nets to catch the fish, They sing this song: “We work for weeks For nothing. Now the men have gone, We’d like to be where money talks, For all the rest is gibberish.” They pack their bags and take the train And travel through a strange terrain, But not to where the castle is. When there’s no one left but children And the very old, the young And lame survivors play a game Invariable in its details In which they take the daily trash Down to the dump and sing a song About ash heaps and burials Whose burden always is the same: “If we were old, if we were young, We’d find out where the caste is.” At Cold Cash, where the castle is, Or where it is supposed to be, Nobody ever dies, it seems; They just go on—from first to last A series of monotonies— And they play bridge, mah-jongg, and gin The while they sing their tribal song, Which has no verse but a refrain: “We’re here. And if we’re here, of course, This must be where the castle is.” But even kings get sick and bank Accounts go bad and miracles Occur, though sometimes in reverse; Elaborate discrepancies Narrow down from bad to worse; Abysses open in a wink Below the shining pinnacles— “We do not know the place,” they sing, “That once we thought the castle was. Do you know where the castle is?” They travel near, they travel far To seek out where the castle is, And come upon the cottages, Which lie in smoking ruins, and there’s No man alive, no woman now To point the way, and though they sift Through the debris and pan the clay, Searching for the smallest clues, They haven’t found out to this day Just where the castle was, or is.

where the fish had withdrawn her house emerged contours each jagged water crossed morning with required hours shadows empty the chimneys Europe stood between

The night Max wore his wolf suit made him infamous, bred the child star never sent to bed. Middle school, Max started drinking.Not in my house, his mother begged,No, no, no, wild thing. Max reminded her who bought this condo, who paid for her meds. Freshman year, Max raved. Roared his terrible roar, rolled, and almost wound up in a warehouse dead. Where, oh where, do the wild things go? To rehab in high school. To college on residual book sales. Max kept his head down. Laughed at drunken frat boys.Bro, let the wild rumpus start.

For John Guare I used to live in a mother now I live in a sunflower Blinded by the silverware Blinded by the refrigerator I sit on a sidewalk in the sunflower and its yellow downpour The light of  the world beads up on one perfect green leaf It scribbles its name on every living thing then erases it so what’s left is more of a whisper than a mother Here it’s spring Over and over and over again • I used to live in a cloud now I live in a crow It’s tiny and crippled in there but I can find my way to the bathroom in the dark if   I need to All the windows in the crow are left open and let the clouds in Back in They float past my bed and have nothing to say Hello it’s nice to meet you! From a telephone pole tongues slide out singing welcome home Welcome home they sing • I used to live in a tree now I live in a king He waves his arms in front of   him and endless migrations of   birds disappear into his coat I like to sit up inside his crown eating sandwiches and watching tv Hills shake in the distance when he shuffles his feet Floods when he snaps his fingers I bow inside his brow and the afternoon stretches out Orders more sandwiches And sells the slaves and sets the slaves free and sells the slaves

Where, Lord, will I find you: your place is high and obscured. And where won’t I find you: your glory fills the world. You dwell deep within— you’ve fixed the ends of creation. You stand, a tower for the near, refuge to those far off. You’ve lain above the Ark, here, yet live in the highest heavens. Exalted among your hosts, although beyond their hymns— no heavenly sphere could ever contain you, let alone a chamber within. In being borne above them on an exalted throne, you are closer to them than their breath and skin. Their mouths bear witness for them, that you alone gave them form. Your kingdom’s burden is theirs; who wouldn’t fear you? And who could fail to search for you— who sends down food when it is due? I sought your nearness. With all my heart I called you. And in my going out to meet you, I found you coming toward me, as in the wonders of your might and holy works I saw you. Who would say he hasn’t seen your glory as the heavens’ hordes declare their awe of you without a sound being heard? But could the Lord, in truth, dwell in men on earth? How would men you made from the dust and clay fathom your presence there, enthroned upon their praise? The creatures hovering over the world praise your wonders— your throne borne high above their heads, as you bear all forever.