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Shouldn’t it ache, this slit into the sweet and salt mix of  waters comprising the mussel, its labial meats winged open: yellow- fleshed, black and gray around the tough adductor? It hurts to imagine it, regardless of the harvester’s denials, swiveling his knife to make the incision: one dull cyst nicked from the oyster’s mantle — its thread of red gland no bigger than a seed of  trout roe — pressed inside the tendered flesh. Both hosts eased open with a knife (as if anything could be said to be eased with a knife): so that one pearl after another can be harvested, polished, added to others until a single rope is strung on silk. Linked by what you think is pain. Nothing could be so roughly handled and yet feel so little, your pity turned into part of this production: you with your small, four-chambered heart, shyness, hungers, envy: what could be so precious you’d cleave another to keep it close? Imagine the weeks it takes to wind nacre over the red seed placed at the other heart’s mantle. The mussel become what no one wants to: vessel, caisson, wounded into making us the thing we want to call beautiful.

What etiquette holds us back from more intimate speech, especially now, at the end of the world? Can’t we begin a conversation here in the vestibule, then gradually move it inside? What holds us back from saying things outright? We’ve killed the earth. Yet we speak of other things. Our words should cauterize all wounds to the truth.

My father came down not killed from among others, killers or killed, for whom he'd worn a uniform, and he lived a long afterward, a steady man on the flattest of plains. I called after him many times, surprised when I heard the catch in my own voice. He didn't know how to find the solace of listening to someone else speak of what he'd seen and survived. He himself closed his own mouth against his own words. In the wrong sequence, his spirit, then his mind, and last his body crossed over that infamous, peat-inky, metaphorical water that has no far shore. I think he was carried like a leaf in currents so gentle that a duckling, had it been alive, could have braved them, but too strong for a leaf. And saturated with minerals that steadily replaced organic cells, the water turned my father, an ex-soldier, to leaf-delicate stone inscribed with the axioms of countless veins.

His army jacket bore the white rectangle of one who has torn off his name.  He sat mute at the round table where the trip-wire veterans ate breakfast.  They were foxhole buddies who went stateside without leaving the war. They had the look of men who held their breath and now their tongues.  What is to say beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower and lower as the war went on, spines curving toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged with ammo belts enough to make fine lace of enemy flesh and blood.  Now these who survived, who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front, lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires strung through tin cans.  Better an alarm than the constant nightmare of something moving on its belly to make your skin crawl with the sensory memory of foxhole living.

Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet. It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar Palaces and also lines of care At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks, The color once known as “ashes of roses.” How many snakes and lizards shed their skins For time to be passing on like this, Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now, Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand As a change is voiced, sharp As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed Past us into a basin called infinity. There was no charge for anything, the gates Had been left open intentionally. Don’t follow, you can have whatever it is. And in some room someone examines his youth, Finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch. O keep me with you, unless the outdoors Embraces both of us, unites us, unless The birdcatchers put away their twigs, The fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets And others become part of the immense crowd Around this bonfire, a situation That has come to mean us to us, and the crying In the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.

The Busy-Man's Picture BUSINESS, thou Plague and Pleasure of my Life, Thou charming Mistress, thou vexatious Wife; Thou Enemy, thou Friend, to Joy, to Grief, Thou bring’st me all, and bring’st me no Relief, Thou bitter, sweet, thou pleasing, teazing Thing, Thou Bee, that with thy Honey wears a Sting; Some Respite, prithee do, yet do not give, I cannot with thee, nor without thee live.

I grew up in a big house where weakness and expressions of joy deserved punishment. And I was raised on the via politica with the grease of yesterday’s glories, a thick grease collected under arctic skies. I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke. That’s when we saw each other clearly. Or rather, what remained of us. Damaged like lottery numbers scratched away with a blade. How different we were! Those with round faces were righteous; those with narrow faces were cautious. One listened secretly to Puccini, another to silence, the music’s music. The oldest one declaimed monologues inside a ten-by-ten-foot cell he had built for himself. And the mysterious one simply had diabetes. But how similar we were in severe circumstances! Alarmed like a flock of magpies that the smallest stone sends into the sky toward the mouth of the abyss. Then it became obvious there wasn’t enough space for everyone. We separated. Some went on living in via verbum, telling of what they knew, what they witnessed, and so, through their narrative, creating their own grease. The others crossed over the ocean. And those in particular who went farthest away never speak of their annoying history of wretched survival, burying it in the darkest crevices on their being. Unfortunately, as with perfume, its scent lingers there for much, much longer.

The streamers choking the main arteries Of downtown. The brass band led by a child From the home for the handicapped. The old men Showing their hair (what’s left of it), The buttons of their shirts Popping in time To the salsa flooding out Of their portable headphones, And mothers letting their babies Be held by strangers. And the bus drivers Taping over their fare boxes And willing to give directions. Is there any reason to mention All the drinks are on the house? Thick, adolescent boys Dismantle their BB guns. Here is the world (what’s left of it), In brilliant motion, The oil slick at the curb Danced into a thousand Splintered steps. The bag ladies toss off their Garments To reveal wings. “This dance you do,” drawls the cop, “What do you call it?” We call it scalding the air. We call it dying with your Shoes on. And across the street The bodies of tramps Stumble In a sober language. And across the street Shy young girls step behind Their nameless boyfriends, Twirling their skirts. And under an archway A delivery boy discovers His body has learned to speak, And what does this street look like If not a runway, A polished wood floor? From the air, Insects drawn by the sweat Alight, when possible, On the blur Of torsos. It is the ride Of their tiny lives. The wind that burns their wings, The heaving, oblivious flesh, Mountains stuffed with panic, An ocean That can’t make up its mind. They drop away With the scorched taste Of vertigo. And under a swinging light bulb Some children Invent a game With the shadow the bulb makes, And the beat of their hearts. They call it dust in the mouth. They call it horse with no rider. They call it school with empty books. In the next room Their mother throws her dress away to chance. It drops to the floor Like a brush sighs across a drum head, And when she takes her lover, What are they thinking of If not a ballroom filled with mirrors, A world where no one has the right To stumble? In a parking lot An old man says this: “I am a ghost dance. I remember the way my hair felt, Damp with sweat and wind. When the wind kisses the leaves, I am dancing. When the subway hits the third rail, I am dancing. When the barrel goes over Niagara Falls, I am dancing. Music rings my bones like metal. O, Jazz has come from heaven,” he says, And at the z he jumps, arcing his back like a heron’s neck, And stands suddenly revealed As a balance demon, A home for Stetson hats. We have all caught the itch: The neon artist Wiring up his legs, The tourist couple Recording the twist on their Instamatic camera, And in a factory, A janitor asks his broom For a waltz, And he grasps it like a woman He’d have to live another Life to meet, And he spins around the dust bin And machines and thinks: Is everybody happy? And he spins out the side door, Avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, Grinning as if he’d just received The deepest kiss in the world.

I am Queen and I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country. Duty is a slapped mouth, sewn shut with cat-gut. To my dear, loyal subjects who are assembled to show their good humour and excessive loyalty. Apes, hyenas, jackdaws: how they screech and caw. How proud I felt to be the Queen of such a Nation, the Crown being placed on my head, so gently. But such a weight! Monstrous as a beached whale. It was, I remember, a most beautiful, impressive moment. My robes draped on the chair beautifully. White body full of blood, bruises that bleed. Nothing was done without his loving advice and help, darling Albert was the other part of me. FIlled withlife after life after life after life after life. The only ray of comfort I get for a moment is in the firm conviction and certainty. I remember the chloroform. So blissfully empty of voices. of his nearness, his undying love and of our eternal reunion. Impatiently I wait and I do my damn duty.

Lepisosteus osseus Despite it all, something stirs at the sight Of the cool, enameled body, The unreflecting eye, And the long jaw like a chisel With its single, violent purpose. It hangs dead still at the water's surface And seems lifeless, until A flickering gesture Carves fish after fish From any school that swims too close And creates in the world a new absence, As if this might be the shaper As well as the defacer Of the damaged masterpiece Whose headless body hails the bodies Of the many Egyptians excised at Cyprus.