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for Robert Duncan one comes to language from afar, the ear fears for its sound-barriers— but one “comes”; the language “comes” for The Beckoning Fair One plant you now, dig you later, the plaint stirs winter earth… air in a hornet’s nest over the water makes a solid, six-sided music… a few utterly quiet scenes, things are very far away—“form is emptiness” comely, comely, love trembles and the sweet-shrub

1778-1830 Between the wet trees and the sorry steeple, Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt, Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty; Beauty’s a sinking light, ah, none too faithful; But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer, Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it. Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit, Safe also on our earth, begetting ever Some one love worth the ages and the nations! Nothing falls under thine eyes eternal. Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining, Titian and Woodsworth live; the People marches.

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: "loot." WILLIAM DALRYMPLE It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening incandescent with an appetite as mighty as railroads spann’d across seas and reclines, its cheeks burnished, its ass varnished by suns setting on bronze and sugared with saltpetre, its torso a tableaux for the annals of rectitude, the theatre for roiling or robust passage, a veritable Suez Canal towards missionary victories which thrust from such bejeweled and oiled loins anointed by coin— that emission of plump plums, lump sums into the Ganges, that coiling coy virgin maiden winding her languid locks, batting her lashes to its lashes— its spine a gentle wire. Supine, its belly swells with salt and figs with meat and treaties, it corks open a profound song—itself it sings into books heavy with truths on the chair dressed with leather and raw hides kissed by ox blood smeared with beef dung lined with raw silk woven from worms plucked from boughs basted across its pious beaming eyes its spidery ghosted lids, and its byzantine glance unmoors from its Chinese porcelain and crosses the ebony table polished with lac secreted from the cloaca of the kerria lacca set with glazed cakes eaten by pinked mouths wearing crimson robes, to its guests polished and glossed and stained by the ooze drawn to color the uncolored raw linen, the wood, the human. Then its wrist cuffed by gold and cowries and studded with coral draws a whisper- thin muslin veil dyed carmine— sucked from crushed scale of cochineal boiled in ammonia and bled into curds and rouge glinting sanguineous and turbid between bug and rug snug a thug in redcoat or a turncoat carrying urns of this stuff— from estates of cocoa coconut calico— across its face while soft éclairs of chocolate bumble out from its plumed rump choked with gum and linseed flax and cassia cinnamon and pepper like so many lines of blood underwriting the mutton and not the goat so it can sell them with a name of a place like scarves or garlanded whores moored to wharves suckled by mother of pearl or teas named after Earls and they with whole scores to settle settle for homemade cures nettles ginger turmeric— a paste or to taste—and it steals and seals in letters scented with sandal sent abroad waxed and pressed with cornelian gems honed from ground it owns and makes stone from their flesh ekes ink from their sweat soaks indigo in lye fermented with time and makes color so it can bid for its own passage, the passage, O of this soul, to India!

At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he's lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole Realism™—the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious—and then WHAM, it disappears.

for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters One of the women greeted me. I love you, she said. She didn't Know me, but I believed her, And a terrible new ache Rolled over in my chest, Like in a room where the drapes Have been swept back. I love you, I love you, as she continued Down the hall past other strangers, Each feeling pierced suddenly By pillars of heavy light. I love you, throughout The performance, in every Handclap, every stomp. I love you in the rusted iron Chains someone was made To drag until love let them be Unclasped and left empty In the center of the ring. I love you in the water Where they pretended to wade, Singing that old blood-deep song That dragged us to those banks And cast us in. I love you, The angles of it scraping at Each throat, shouldering past The swirling dust motes In those beams of light That whatever we now knew We could let ourselves feel, knew To climb. O Woods—O Dogs O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run O Miraculous Many Gone— O Lord—O Lord—O Lord— Is this love the trouble you promised?

Down here we say we dare defend our rights, our state motto. I’d back Charlton Heston for any office in the land. A Christian, he speaks right up. He’s got his head on straight, and people listen. Even on the screen of a honky-tonk TV he still looks like a hero, and he wouldn’t let freaks take over our country. If it takes firepower to keep us free, I say stock up. Keep your powder dry. Everything is dangerous these days. Life sucks. We suck too. Disaster is coming. Even God’s gone spleenish. Bless the common man against the government. They lie. They grind us up. Winchesters might be our last resort. Hellfire preachers say we best prepare for a dark event, but maybe Charlie Heston could keep death off our backs and tone down Jehovah’s wrath. Sweet Jesus—and this is the gospel truth— is pissed off at our newfangled unfaith. He’s coming back, and he’s armed to the teeth.

The toddlers in their tadpole bodies, with their squirt guns and snorkels, their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales, are still too young to understand that this is as good as it gets. Soon they must leave the wading pool and stand all day at the concession stand with their hormones and snow cones, their soul patches and tribal tattoos, pretending not to notice how beautiful they are, until they simply can’t stand it and before you know it they’re lined up on lawn chairs, dozing in the noonday sun with their stretch marks and beer bellies, their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.

You yearn so much you could be a yacht. Your mind has already set sail. It takes a few days to arrive at island pace, but soon you are barefoot on the sand, the slim waves testing your feet like health professionals. You toe shells, sea glass, and odd things that have drifted for years and finally washed up here. You drop your towel and step out of your togs, ungainly, first your right foot, then the other stepping down the sand to stand in the water. There is no discernible difference in temperature. You breaststroke in the lazy blue. A guy passing in a rowboat says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” And it is. Your body afloat in salt as if cured.

yesterday I was at the Wailing Wall pretending to be a man, pretending to be a Jew it was research for my job still I tried to feel God, touched the Wall said a prayer for my sick mother the women go to one side the men to the other the rest of us float and bobble like space trash around the corner is the empty co-ed wall no one prays before the genderless stones they smell the concession the gay rabbi said Jerusalem has been conquered forty-four times I walk with the men, stolen yarmulke in my hand past the dancing bar mitzvah boys on the other side of the fence their mothers throw hard candies at them

I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness. Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands. A poem that will well up in my chest and until it arrives I will listen to my children fighting in the next room and cast my gaze down at the table at an empty glass of milk with a trace of white along its rim my throat wrapped in silver a napkin in a napkin ring waiting for late guests to arrive. . . .