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When the eye When the edgeless screen receiving light from the edgeless universe When the eye first When the edgeless screen facing outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe When the eye first saw that it Hungry for more light resistlessly began to fold back upon itself      TWIST As if a dog sniffing Ignorant of origins familiar with hunger As if a dog sniffing a dead dog Before nervous like itself but now weird inert cold nerveless Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself When the eye first saw that it must die      When the eye first Brooding on our origins you ask When and I say Then • wound-dresser      let us call the creature driven again and again to dress with fresh bandages and a pail of disinfectant suppurations that cannot heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal wound-dresser what wound is dressed the wound of being • Understand that it can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. It alone knows you. It does not wish you well. Understand that when your mother, in her only pregnancy, gave birth to twins painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of one child was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers invisibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power. Painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of the other child was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers visibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power. Envying the other, of course each twin tried to punish and become the other. Understand that when the beast within you succeeds again in paralyzing into unending incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try to make its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its rectitude. It knows that it alone knows you. It alone remembers your mother’s mother’s grasping immigrant bewildered stroke-filled slide-to-the-grave you wiped from your adolescent American feet. Your hick purer-than-thou overreaching veiling mediocrity. Understand that you can delude others but not what you more and more now call the beast within you. Understand the cloak that maimed each gave each power. Understand that there is a beast within you that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand that it will use the conventions of the visible world to turn your tongue to stone. It alone knows you. It does not wish you well.These are instructions for the wrangler. II Three Fates. One fate, with three faces. Clotho      Lachesis      Atropos Thread spun by one from all those forever unspun. Thread touched by one and in touching twisted into something forever unlike all others spun. Thread touched by one and in touching withered to nothing. Atropos      Lachesis      Clotho Three, who gave us in recompense for death the first alphabet, to engrave in stone what is most evanescent, the mind.According to Hesiod, daughters of Night. • Unless teeth devour it it rots: now is its season. My teeth have sunk into firm-skinned pears so succulent time stopped. When my wife, dead now ten years, pulls her dress over her petticoats and hair, the air crackles, her hair rising tangles in ecstasy. We are electric ghosts. • You hear the strange cricket in the oven sing, and ask what it sings. This is what it sings. Because Benvenuto in my native tongue means welcome, write here lies an artist who did not recoil from residence on earth — but, truly named, welcomed it. But I mis-spoke: not wife. Servant: model: mother of my child, also now dead. • In prison, immured in the black pit where the Pope once fed Benedetto da Foiano less and less each day until God’s will, not the Pope’s own hand, killed him, — where outside my door each day the castellan repeated that darkness will teach me I am a counterfeit bat, and he a real one, — blackness, silence so unremitted I knew I had survived another day only by the malignant welcome singsong of his triumphant voice, — Benvenuto is a counterfeit bat, and I a real one, — where God had not found me worthy of seeing the sun even in a dream, I asked the God of Nature what unexpiated act the suffocation of my senses, such suffering, served to expiate. (This was my first prison.) • For the two murders I had committed, — their just, free but necessary cause revenge, however imperfect the justice — two successive Popes recognized the necessity and pardoned me.Absolved me. Because my fame as a maker in gold and silver preceded me, though I was hardly more than an apprentice, when Pope Clement came into possession of the second largest diamond in the world he summoned me from Florence to Rome — called me into his presence to serve him. To crown the resplendent glittering vestment covering his surplice, he wanted a golden clasp big and round as a small plate, with God the Father in half-relief above the diamond and cherubs, arms raised, below.Hurry, he said, finish it quickly,so that I may enjoy its use a little while. Pope Clement, unlike the great I now serve, was an excellent, subtle connoisseur; he approved my design. Each week he summoned me into the presence two or three times, eager to inspect my progress. Then Cecchino, my brother, two years younger than I and still beardless, died — was killed, as he tried to avenge the unjust killing of a comrade by the ruthless guard of the Bargello. Thus was stolen from him the chance to incise his presence into the hard, careless surface of the world. The fool who killed him in what justice must call self-defense later proved his nature by boasting of it. His boasting enraged, maddened me. In this great grief the Pope rebuked me:You act as if grief can change death. Sleepless, eatless, by day I worked at the Pope’s absorbing golden button — and by night, hypnotized as a jealous lover, I watched and followed the fatuous creature who murdered my brother. At last, overcoming my repugnance to an enterprise not-quite-praiseworthy, I decided to end my torment. My dagger entered the juncture of the nape-bone and the neck so deep into the bone with all my strength I could not pull it out. I ran to the palace of Duke Alessandro — for those who pursued me knew me. The Pope’s natural son, later he became Duke of Florence, before his murder by his own cousin Lorenzino, whose too-familiar intimacies and pretensions to power he not only indulged but openly mocked. Alessandro told me to stay indoors for eight days. For eight days I stayed indoors, working at the jewel the Pope had set his heart on. For eight days the Pope failed to summon me. Then his chamberlain, saying that all was well if I minded my work and kept silent, ushered me into the presence. The Pope cast so menacing a glance toward me I trembled. Examining my work, his countenance cleared, saying that I had accomplished a vast amount in a short time. Then he said,Now that you are cured,Benvenuto — change your life. I promised that I would.  Soon after this, I opened a fine shop, my first; and finished the jewel. • As the knife descended (forgive me, O God of Nature, but thus you have arranged it, —) to my fevered mind each moment was infinite, and mine. • Late one night, in farewell, Michelangelo turning to me said,Benvenuto, you deliver yourself into their hands. • Here I leapt   Here I leapt   Here I leapt   Here I leapt the shrilling cricket in the shrilling summer evening sings; as did my father in the sweet years he served the pleasure of the lords of Florence as a piper, in the Consort of Pipers. Imagine my father, no longer young, married, still childless, an engineer who designs bridges and battlements for the Duke, but whose first love is music — the flute. He joined the Duke’s Consort of Pipers. Now his nights often are spent not bending over charts and plans but dazzled at the court of Lorenzo, called The Magnificent— the same Lorenzo who once plucked Michelangelo, still a boy, from among the horde of the merely-talented bending to copy the masters in the ducal palace. Lorenzo, with his father’s consent, adopted the boy; fed him at his own table. Imagine, tonight, the brief concert is over — the Consort of Pipers (respectable, honorable amateurs: small merchants, a banker, a scholar) mingle, slightly awed, with an ambassador, a Cardinal . . . Suddenly Lorenzo is at my father’s ear:He stood not six inches from me. Not six inches from my father’s ear Lorenzo in a low voice as he begins to move through the crowd followed by his son Piero (as now my father must struggle to follow) tells my father he has painfully and increasingly remarked that the flute has led my father to neglect his fine engineering talent and therefore my father will understand why Piero and the Duke must dismiss him from the Consort of Pipers. Lorenzo, entering the private apartments, was gone. In later years, my father repeated to his children:He stood not six inches from me. It is a lie. It is a lie that the Medici and you and I stand on the same earth. What the sane eye saw, was a lie: — two things alone cross the illimitable distance between the great and the rest of us, who serve them: — a knife; and art. • The emblem of Florence is the lion; therefore lions, caged but restless and living, centuries ago began to announce to the Piazza della Signoria this is the fearsome seat of the free government of the Republic of Florence. Duke Cosimo, hating the noise and smell, had them moved behind the palace. For years, I had known the old man who fed and tended the lions, — one day he humbly asked me if I could make a ring unlike all others for his daughter’s wedding. I said yes, of course; but, as payment for its rarity, I wanted him to drug the strongest lion asleep, so that I could examine, for my art, his body. He said he knew no art of drugging; such poison could kill the creature; a week later, in fury he said yes. The animal was numbed but not sleeping; he tried to raise his great head, as I lay lengthwise against his warm body; the head fell back. My head nestling behind his, each arm, outstretched, slowly descending along each leg, at last with both hands I pulled back the fur and touched a claw. This creature whose claw waking could kill me, — . . . I wore its skin. • After the Medici were returned from eighteen years’ banishment, placed over us again not by the will of Florentines, but by a Spanish army — my father, though during the republic he regained his position as piper, ever loyal to the Medici wrote a poem celebrating his party’s victory and prophesying the imminent advent of a Medici pope. Then Julius II died; Cardinal de’ Medici, against expectation, was elected; the new pope wrote my father that he must come to Rome and serve him. My father had no will to travel. Then Jacopo Salviati, in power because married to a Medici, took from my father his place at the Duke’s new court; took from him his profit, his hope, his will. Thus began that slow extinguishment of hope, the self ’s obsequies for the self at which effacement I felt not only a helpless witness, but cause, author. He said I was his heart. I had asked to be his heart before I knew what I was asking. Against his mania to make me a musician at fifteen I put myself to the goldsmith’s trade; without money or position, he now could not oppose this. Help the boy — for his father is poor rang in my ears as I began to sell the first trinkets I had made. Later, to escape the plague then raging, he made me quickly leave Florence; when I returned, he, my sister, her husband and child, were dead. These events, many occurring before my birth, I see because my father described them often and with outrage. To be a child is to see things and not know them; then you know them. • Despite the malicious stars, decisive at my birth: despite their sufficient instrument,the hand within me that moves against me: in the utter darkness of my first prison God granted me vision: surrounded by my stinks, an Angel, his beauty austere, not wanton, graciously showed me a room in half-light crowded with the dead: postures blunted as if all promise of change was lost, the dead walked up and down and back and forth: as if the promise of change fleeing had stolen the light. Then, on the wall, there was a square of light. Careless of blindness I turned my eyes to the full sun. I did not care to look on anything again but this. The sun withering and quickening without distinction then bulged out: the boss expanded: the calm body of the dead Christ formed itself from the same substance as the sun. Still on the cross, he was the same substance as the sun. • The bait the Duke laid was Perseus. Perseus standing before the Piazza della Signoria. My statue’s audience and theater, Michelangelo’s David; Donatello’s Judith With the Head of Holofernes. . . Here the school of Florence, swaggering, says to the world:Eat. Only Bandinelli’s odious Hercules and Cacus reminds one that when one walks streets on earth one steps in shit. Duke Cosimo desired, he said, a statue of Perseus triumphant, after intricate trials able at last to raise high Medusa’s mutilated head — he imagined, perhaps, decapitation of the fickle rabble of republican Florence . . . I conceived the hero’s gesture as more generous: — Kill the thing that looked upon makes us stone. Soon enough, on my great bronze bust of the great Duke, I placed — staring out from his chest — Medusa, her head not yet cut, living. • Remember,Benvenuto,you cannot bring your great gifts to light by your strength alone You show your greatness only through the opportunities we give you Hold your tongue     I will drown you in gold • As we stared down at the vast square, at David, at J udith— then at Hercules and Cacus approved and placed there by Cosimo himself — from high on the fortress lookout of the palace, against whose severe façade so many human promises had been so cunningly or indifferently crushed, I told the Duke that I cannot make his statue. My brief return from France was designed only to provide for the future of my sister and six nieces, now without husband or father. The King of France alone had saved me from the Pope’s dungeon — not any lord of Italy! At this, the Duke looked at me sharply, but said nothing. All Rome knew that though I had disproved the theft that was pretext for my arrest, Pope Paul still kept me imprisoned, out of spite — vengeance of his malignant son Pier Luigi, now assassinated by his own retainers. One night at dinner, the King’s emissary gave the Pope gossip so delicious that out of merriment, and about to vomit from indulgence, he agreed to free me. I owed King Francis my art, my service. The same stipend he once paid Leonardo, he now paid me; along with a house in Paris. This house was, in truth, a castle . . . I omitted, of course, quarrels with the King’s mistress, demon who taunted me for the slowness of my work, out of her petty hatred of art itself; omitted her insistence to the King that I am insolent and by example teach insolence to others. Omitted that I overheard the King joke with her lieutenant: — Kill him, if you can find me his equal in art. Before the school of Florence I had only been able, young, to show myself as goldsmith and jeweler; not yet as sculptor. Duke Cosimo then announced that all the King of France had given me, he would surpass: boasting, he beckoned me to follow him past the public common galleries, into the private apartments . . . Dutiful abashed puppet, I followed; I knew I would remain and make his statue. • In the mirror of art,you who are familiar with the rituals of decorum and bloodshed before which you are silence and submission while within stone the mind writhes contemplate,as if a refrain were wisdom,the glistening intrication of bronze and will and circumstance in the mirror of art. • Bandinelli for months insinuated in the Duke’s ear Perseus never would be finished: — I lacked the art, he said, to move from the small wax model the Duke rightly praised, to lifesize bronze whose secrets tormented even Donatello. So eighteen months after work began, Duke Cosimo grew tired, and withdrew his subsidy. Lattanzo Gorini, spider-handed and gnat-voiced, refusing to hand over payment said,Why do you not finish? Then Bandinelli hissed Sodomite! at me — after my enumeration, to the court’s amusement, of the sins against art and sense committed by his Hercules and Cacus, recital designed to kill either him or his authority . . . The Duke, at the ugly word, frowned and turned away. I replied that the sculptor of Hercules and Cacus must be a madman to think that I presumed to understand the art that Jove in heaven used on Ganymede, art nobly practiced here on earth by so many emperors and kings. My saucy speech ended:My poor wick does not dare to burn so high! Duke and court broke into laughter. Thus was born my resolve to murder Bandinelli. • I’d hurl the creature to hell. In despair at what must follow — the Duke’s rage, abandonment of my never-to-be-born Perseus — I cast myself away for lost: with a hundred crowns and a swift horse, I resolved first to bid farewell to my natural son, put to wet-nurse in Fiesole; then to descend to San Domenico, where Bandinelli returned each evening.Then,after blood,France. Reaching Fiesole, I saw the boy was in good health; his wet-nurse was my old familiar, old gossip, now married to one of my workmen. The boy clung to me: wonderful in a two-year-old, in grief he flailed his arms when at last in the thick half-dusk I began to disengage myself. Entering the square of San Domenico on one side, I saw my prey arriving on the other. Enraged that he still drew breath, when I reached him I saw he was unarmed. He rode a small sorry mule. A wheezing donkey carried a ten-year-old boy at his side. In my sudden presence, his face went white. I nodded my head and rode past. • I had a vision of Bandinelli surrounded by the heaped-up works of his hand. Not one thing that he had made did I want to have made. From somewhere within his body like a thread he spun the piles surrounding him. Then he tried to pull away, to release the thread; I saw the thread was a leash. He tried and tried to cut it. At this, in my vision I said out-loud: — My art is my revenge. • When I returned to Florence from Fiesole, after three days news was brought to me that my little boy was smothered by his wet-nurse turning over on him as they both slept. His panic, as I left; his arms raised, in panic. • from the great unchosen narration you will soon be released Benvenuto Cellini dirtied by blood and earth but now you have again taught yourself to disappear moving wax from arm to thigh you have again taught yourself to disappear here where each soul is its orbit spinning sweetly around the center of itself at the edge of its eye the great design of virtue here your Medusa and your Perseus are twins his triumphant body still furious with purpose but his face abstracted absorbed in contemplation as she is abstracted absorbed though blood still spurts from her neck defeated by a mirror as in concentration you move wax from thigh to arm under your hand it grows • The idyll began when the Duke reached me a goldsmith’s hammer, with which I struck the goldsmith’s chisel he held; and so the little statues were disengaged from earth and rust. Bronze antiquities, newly found near Arezzo, they lacked either head or hands or feet. Impatient for my presence, the Duke insisted that I join him each evening at his new pastime, playing artisan — leaving orders for my free admittance to his rooms, day or night. His four boys, when the Duke’s eyes were turned, hovered around me, teasing. One night I begged them to hold their peace. The boldest replied,That we can’t do! I said what one cannot do is required of no one. So have your will! Faced with their sons’ delight in this new principle, the Duke and Duchess smiling accused me of a taste for chaos . . . At last the four figures wrought for the four facets of the pedestal beneath Perseus were finished. I brought them one evening to the Duke, arranging them on his worktable in a row: — figures,postures from scenes that the eye cannot entirely decipher,story haunting the eye with its resonance, unseen ground that explains nothing. . . The Duke appeared, then immediately retreated; reappearing, in his right hand he held a pear slip.This is for your garden,the garden of your house. I began,Do you mean, but he cut me off saying,Yes,Benvenuto:garden and house now are yours. Thus I received what earlier was only lent me. I thanked him and his Duchess; then both took seats before my figures. For two hours talk was of their beauty, — the Duchess insisted they were too exquisite to be wasted down there in the piazza; I must place them in her apartments. No argument from intention or design unconvinced her. So I waited till the next day — entering the private chambers at the hour the Duke and Duchess each afternoon went riding, I carried the statues down and soldered them with lead into their niches. Returning, how angry the Duchess became! The Duke abandoned his workshop. I went there no more. • The old inertia of earth that hates the new (as from a rim I watched) rose from the ground, legion: — truceless ministers of the great unerasable ZERO, eager to annihilate lineament and light, waited, pent, against the horizon: — some great force (massive,stubborn,multiform as earth,fury whose single name is LEGION, — ) wanted my Perseus not to exist: — and I must defeat them. Then my trembling assistants woke me. They said all my work was spoiled. Perseus was spoiled. He lay buried in earth wreathed in fragile earthenware veins from the furnace above, veins through which he still waited to be filled with burning metal. The metal was curdled. As I slept, sick, the bronze had been allowed to cake, to curdle. Feverish, made sick by my exertions for days, for months, I slept; while those charged with evenly feeding the furnace that I had so well prepared, LARKED — I thought,Unwitting ministers of the gorgon Medusa herself. The furnace choked with caking, curdling metal that no art known to man could uncurdle, must be utterly dismantled — all who made it agreed this must destroy the fragile, thirsty mould of Perseus beneath. But Perseus was not more strong than Medusa, but more clever: — if he ever was to exist as idea, he must first exist as matter: — all my old inborn daring returned, furious to reverse the unjust triumphs of the world’s mere arrangements of power, that seemingly on earth cannot be reversed. First, I surveyed my forces: — seven guilty workmen, timid, sullen, resentful; a groom; two maids; a cook. I harassed these skeptical troops into battle: — two hands were sent to fetch from the butcher Capretta a load of young oak, — in bronze furnaces the only woods you use are slow-burning alder, willow, pine: now I needed oak and its fierce heat. As the oak was fed log by log into the fire, how the cake began to stir, to glow and sparkle. Now from the increased combustion of the furnace, a conflagration shot up from the roof: two windows burst into flame: I saw the violent storm filling the sky fan the flames. All the while with pokers and iron rods we stirred and stirred the channels— the metal, bubbling, refused to flow. I sent for all my pewter plates, dishes, porringers — the cook and maids brought some two hundred. Piece by piece, I had them thrown into the turgid mass. As I watched the metal for movement, the cap of the furnace exploded — bronze welling over on all sides. I had the plugs pulled, the mouths of the mould opened; in perfect liquefaction the veins of Perseus filled . . . Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay sheath had been with great care removed, I found what was dead brought to life again. • Now, my second prison. It began soon after Perseus was unveiled to acclaim — great acclaim. Perhaps I grew too glorious. Perseus, whose birth consumed nine years, found stuck to his pedestal sonnets celebrating the master’s hand that made him . . . On the day of unveiling, Duke Cosimo stationed himself at a window just above the entrance to the palace; there, half-hidden, he listened for hours to the crowd’s wonder. He sent his attendant Sforza to say my reward soon would astonish me. Ten days passed. At last Sforza appeared and asked what price I placed on my statue. I was indeed astonished:It is not my custom, I replied,to set a price for my work,as if he were a merchant and I a mere tradesman. Then, at risk of the Duke’s severe displeasure, I was warned I must set a price: infuriated, I said ten thousand golden crowns. Cities and great palaces are built with ten thousand golden crowns, the Duke two days later flung at me in anger. Many men can build cities and palaces, I replied,but not one can make a second Perseus. Bandinelli, consulted by the Duke, reluctantly concluded that the statue was worth sixteen thousand. The Duke replied that for two farthings Perseus could go to the scrap heap; that would resolve our differences. At last, the settlement was thirty-five hundred, one hundred a month. Soon after, charges were brought against me, for sodomy — I escaped Florence as far as Scarperia, but there the Duke’s soldiers caught me and in chains brought me back. I confessed. If I had not, I could have been made to serve as a slave in the Duke’s galleys for life. The Duke listened behind a screen as I was made publicly to confess, in full court . . . Punishment was four years imprisonment. Without the Duke’s concurrence, of course, no charges could have been lodged, no public humiliation arranged to silence the insolent.The first Cosimo,founder of Medici power,all his life protected Donatello—whose affections and bliss were found in Ganymede. After imprisonment one month, Cosimo finally commuted my sentence to house arrest. There his magnanimity allowed me to complete my Christ of the whitest marble set upon a cross of the blackest. Now, my Christ sits still packed in a crate in the Duke’s new chapel; my bust of the Duke is exiled to Elba, there to frighten in open air slaves peering out from his passing galleys. Now, after the Duchess and two of their sons died of fever within two months, Cosimo grows stranger: he murdered Sforza by running him through with a spear: — he does not own his mind; or will. When I ask release from his service, he says that he cannot, that he soon will have need of me for great projects; no commissions come. Catherine de’ Medici, regent of the young French king, petitioned that I be allowed to enter her service. He said I had no will now to work. In prison I wrote my sonnet addressed to Fortune: —Fortune,you sow! You turned from me because Ganymede also is my joy. . . O God of Nature, author of my nature, where does your son Jesus forbid it? When I was five, one night my father woke me. He pulled me to the basement, making me stare into the oak fire and see what he just had seen. There a little lizard was sporting at the core of the intensest flames. My father boxed me on the ears, then kissed me — saying that I must remember this night: — My dear little boy,the lizard you see is a salamander,a creature that lives at the heart of fire.You and I are blessed:no other soul now living has been allowed to see it. • I am too old to fight to leave Florence: — here, young, this goldsmith and jeweler began to imagine that severity, that chastity of style certain remnants of the ancient world left my hand hungry to emulate: — equilibrium of ferocious, contradictory forces: equilibrium whose balance or poise is their tension, and does not efface them, — as if the surface of each thing arranged within the frame, the surface of each body the eye must circle gives up to the eye its vibration, its nature. Two or three times, perhaps,—you say where, — I have achieved it. • See, in my great bronze bust of the great Duke, embedded in the right epaulette like a trophy an open-mouthed face part lion part man part goat, with an iron bar jammed in its lower jaw rising resistlessly across its mouth. See, in Vasari’s clumsy portrait of me, as I float above the right shoulder of the Duke, the same face.” • As if your hand fumbling to reach inside reached inside As if light falling on the surface fell on what made the surface As if there were no scarcity of sun on the sun III I covered my arm with orchid juice. With my hatchet I split a mangrove stick from a tree, and sharpened it. I covered the killing stick with orchid juice. We were camping at Marunga Island looking for oysters. This woman I was about to kill at last separated herself from the others to hunt lilies. She walked into the swamp, then got cold, and lay down on sandy ground. After I hit her between the eyes with my hatchet she kicked, but couldn’t raise up. With my thumb over the end of the killing stick I jabbed her Mount of Venus until her skin pushed back up to her navel. Her large intestine protruded as though it were red calico. With my thumb over the end of the killing stick each time she inhaled I pushed my arm in a little. When she exhaled, I stopped. Little by little I got my hand inside her. Finally I touched her heart. Once you reach what is inside it is outside. I pushed the killing stick into her heart. The spirit that belonged to that dead woman went into my heart then. I felt it go in. I pulled my arm out. I covered my arm with orchid juice. Next I broke a nest of green ants off a tree, and watched the live ants bite her skin until her skin moved by itself downward from her navel and covered her bones. Then I took some dry mud and put my sweat and her blood in the dry mud and warmed it over a fire. Six or eight times I put the blood and sweat and mud inside her uterus until there was no trace of her wound or what I had done. I was careful none of her pubic hair was left inside her vagina for her husband to feel. Her large intestine stuck out several feet. When I shook some green ants on it, a little went in. I shook some more. All of it went in. When I whirled the killing stick with her heart’s blood over her head, her head moved. When I whirled it some more, she moved more. The third time I whirled the killing stick she gasped for breath. She blew some breath out of her mouth, and was all right. I said,You go eat some lilies. She got up. I said,You will live two days.One day you will be happy.The next,sick. She ate some lilies. She walked around, then came back and slept. When laughing and talking women woke her she gathered her lilies and returned to camp. The next day she walked around and played, talked and made fun, gathering with others oysters and lilies. She brought into camp what she gathered. That night she lay down and died. Even the gods cannot end death. In this universe anybody can kill anybody with a stick. What the gods gave me is their gift, the power to bury within each creature the hour it ceases. Everyone knows I have powers but not such power. If they knew I would be so famous they would kill me. I tell you because your tongue is stone. If the gods ever give you words, one night in sleep you will wake to find me above you. • After sex & metaphysics, — . . . what? What you have made. • Infinite the forms,finite tonight as I find again in the mirror the familiar appeaseless eater’s face Ignorant of cause or source or end in silence he repeats Eater,become food All life exists at the expense of other life Because you have eaten and eat as eat you must Eater,become food unlike the burning stars burning merely to be Then I ask him how to become food In silence he repeats that others have other fates,but that I must fashion out of the corruptible body a new body good to eat a thousand years Then I tell the eater’s face that within me is no sustenance,on my famished plate centuries have been served me and still I am famished He smirks,and in silence repeats that all life exists at the expense of other life You must fashion out of the corruptible body a new body good to eat a thousand years Because you have eaten and eat as eat you must ignorant of cause or source or end • drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite, within       I am awake repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread forced by being to watch the birth of suns • This is the end of the third hour of the night.

O melting rainbow that embrace this roof O persistent covenant hangs around giving us nothing, leaves its muck in the water expects us to be knocked out by its fine colors weren’t you nothing too, weren’t you sea bottom crunched down into fuel and when that eggshell roof busts through mama’s gonna buy you a rainbow ride for free an illumination, an inflammation hyperion flame headdress dream pins in the fuel balloons of Koolaid burst down to cool the sticky baby’s head plus a credit card a glock a new bible a princess dress a mermaid princess dress so you’ll be twice submerged or an erased Indian princess pajama set now go to sleep

1 It is calm. It is as though we lived in a garden that had not yet arrived at the knowledge of good and evil. But there is a man in it. 2 There will be rain falling vertically from an indifferent sky. There will stare out from behind its bars the face of the man who is not enjoying it. 3 Nothing higher than a blackberry bush. As the sun comes up fresh, what is the darkness stretching from horizon to horizon? It is the shadow here of the forked man. 4 We have eaten the blackberries and spat out the seeds, but they lie glittering like the eyes of a man. 5 After we have stopped singing, the garden is disturbed by echoes; it is the man whistling, expecting everything to come to him. 6 We wipe our beaks on the branches wasting the dawn’s jewellery to get rid of the taste of a man. 7 Neverthless, which is not the case with a man, our bills give us no trouble. 8 Who said the number was unlucky? It was a man, who, trying to pass us, had his licence endorsed thirteen times. 9 In the cool of the day the garden seems given over to blackbirds. Yet we know also that somewhere there is a man in hiding. 10 To us there are eggs and there are blackbirds. But there is the man, too, trying without feathers to incubate a solution. 11 We spread our wings, reticulating our air-space. A man stands under us and worries at his ability to do the same. 12 When night comes like a visitor from outer space we stop our ears lest we should hear tell of the man in the moon. 13 Summer is at an end. The migrants depart. When they return in spring to the garden, will there be a man among them?

don’t expect too much. Well I expect you to go into the fucking human tunnel I’m going. pink grimy glossed entabulature, welted and tattooed. Enfolded in ropy ceiling-hangings but it isn’t a room, and bumblingly sliding out, little legs of a little girl, bum on the wall/opening pink legs sticking out like a hermit crab’s, she’s coming! shudder out the little-girl legs with a little girl head mostly eyes, no ears, bug brain, aimless Send her to school It’s cold, and where should she go, she will eat her legs with her mandibles her eyes will retract inside. Stroke her riding hood Settle down, little nobody will hurtcha by breaking off your little legs, six little legs, if you come.

to mama who on the eve of my birth beat a bitch with a kool-aid spoon for taking her eldest child’s red balloon (if i wasn’t wet-fisted, all hemmed up inside cecelia, i’da jumped in) to the bazaar of milk & afterbirth that once was her body, piping hot almond dark with laughter & memories of fenced-in two-stepping late night in a brownsville park to mama’s hands, mad stallions pummeling dough for biscuits, cherry-scented butter-smeared fists or floured moons to ms cloritha, professional crier for dilroy’s funeral parlor (stuffed the dead fulla who knows, once saw some geezer’s toupee slid back like a yarmulke, a woman’s wig bangs in her ear, mourners too busy kiki-ing in the back to tell the woman’s kin her fall fell forward & dipped to the side cloritha wailing all the while, earning her fifty bucks off the books) to ms sheronda who daily bugged mama for dried black-eyed peas, swore her son looked like a jackson (the eldest sissy, what’s her face, bee bee, cee cee you know, “centipede”) to the hungry black power thief who snatched nefertiti off our wall, public enemy off the turntable, platter of mustard glazed tongue picked clean in the kitchen sink to cuban ruben cross the hall who loved tongue & chuck D, father figure by george michael (also gone from the crates), who OD’d at the tunnel (stuntin’) in mama’s leopard print dress

This is my last report: I wanted to speak of existence, the ants most of all, dressed up in their naughty flame-trousers, the exact jaws, their unknowable kindnesses, their abyss of hungers, and science, their mercilessness, their prophetic military devotions, their geometry of scent, their cocoons for the Nomenclature, I wanted to speak of the Glue Sniffers and Glue Smoothers who despise all forms unbound, loose in their amber nectars, I wanted to point to their noses, hoses and cables and networks, their tools, if I can use that word now—and scales and scanners and Glue Rectories. I wanted you to meet my broom mother who carved a hole into her womb so that I could live— At every sunset she stands under the shadow of the watchtowers elongating and denying her breath. I wanted to look under the rubble fields for once, for you (if you approved), flee into the bullet-riddled openness and fall flat, arched, askew, under the rubble sheets and let the rubble fill me with its sharp plates and ripped dust— alphabets incomplete and humid. You, listen, a little closer to the chalk dust—this child swinging her left arm, a ribbon, agitated by unnamed forces, devoured.

Lobster in the bathtub. Christmas Eve. Scrub the tub first. Hand off cleanser. Rinse well. We don’t want Comet in our lobster. He’s clicking against the porcelain. Everyone leery of going to the bathroom. Bubbles had risen when we lowered him in, now he’s limp. Stare into the water that wears a similar gooseflesh. The lobster is dispatched.

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is– I hold it towards you.

This one appeared to me in a dream, was forgotten, only to reveal itself on the shower wall this morning. It must have been the water. • That one was on the full moon last night, clear as a bell. Someone projected it there. • This one was on the ground, on crunchy pine needles. The moon projected it there. • I forgot about that one . . . How was I to know it would be significant? • Every time I see this one, I'm angry. It doesn't diminish, either, from that first time. • Oh, that one! To tell you the truth, I never actually saw it, but I could feel it as it was described to me by a blind person over the phone. • This one I spotted on the back of someone's shirt in a crowd before she disappeared. • That one evolved, and is still evolving, on that big, flat rock over there; something scraped it, scratched it, the heat cracked it, the frost coated it, tiny plants took root, sheltering insects, and it rained, and it rained, and by the time I showed up, a butterfly had just flown off. • Not this one again. It makes me so sad . . . • I was glad to receive that one as a gift. So glad, in fact, that I went and had some copies made. • Believe it or not, this one has a sound. Just listen. • Oh, boy—that one! I'll never go there again. • This one often arrives in the smoke of incense. • I tried to turn that one over— it burned my hand. • This one I tried to discard— unsuccessfully, obviously. • That one speaks to me of space, and negative space, of open and filled spaces, and the among that comes between. • Whereas this one is the opposite— you get the picture. • Oh, my goodness— I've never seen that one before! • This one, from what I gather, is an accident. • That one, however, is intended. • This one took some getting to— waiting for the thaw, for instance— but it was well worth it. • That one, well, you can have it. • Whenever this one comes my way, it's déjà vu, but I'm ready for it. • That one is owned by the dentist. • This one has been proven to be a fake, but I still like it. • Alas, I lost that one once, in childhood, and it took me until now to find it. • If you can only have one, choose this one.

might have been. Certainly these ashes might have been pleasures. Pilgrims on their way to the Holy Places remark this place. Isn’t it plain to all that these mounds were palaces? This was once a city among men, a gathering together of spirit. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting, destroyd by the angels that inhabit longing. Surely this is Great Sodom where such cries as if men were birds flying up from the swamp ring in our ears, where such fears that were once desires walk, almost spectacular, stalking the desolate circles, red eyed. This place rumord to have been a City surely was, separated from us by the hand of the Lord. The devout have laid out gardens in the desert, drawn water from springs where the light was blighted. How tenderly they must attend these friendships or all is lost. All is lost. Only the faithful hold this place green. Only the faithful hold this place green where the crown of fiery thorns descends. Men that once lusted grow listless. A spirit wrappd in a cloud, ashes more than ashes, fire more than fire, ascends. Only these new friends gather joyous here, where the world like Great Sodom lies under fear. The world like Great Sodom lies under Love and knows not the hand of the Lord that moves. This the friends teach where such cries as if men were birds fly up from the crowds gatherd and howling in the heat of the sun. In the Lord Whom the friends have named at last Love the images and loves of the friends never die. This place rumord to have been Sodom is blessd in the Lord’s eyes.