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Sometimes it feels like it is over and it's not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it's over. It's dark often at these times. Urban though, so a certain version of light too. It's hard to predict if it will start on time or how late. I'm often a little late and it has started. Last night, I could tell from the copters overhead that I was late. As I walked up, the blocks around it were emptying out. Parents pulled their children home. The night herons settled into trees. That's the outer ring. As I got closer, all that was left were the blinking lights of the motor- cycles blocking the intersections and the men and few women in uniforms that mill about the corner, helmets in their hands. They talked among themselves. Ignored me mainly. One told me how to get around. I did not clarify that I was walking towards. You can hear it sometimes. It often has a soundtrack. Sometimes it has drums and brass. Sometimes just joy. When I am late I am trying to guess its path. Last night, several times I got close to it only to be turned back by a line of cops. They let the media through but turned me back. Then it turned the corner and there it was. At that moment, I melted my body into it and it embraced me. Rosy fingered dusk and all that. Come here, it sang, listen. And then I was borne along by the waves all night and the whirlpool, the fig tree, and I was the bat, hanging on patiently. Aarav came up and hugged me. Someone grabbed me from behind and I thought it is Artem but later realized it was Berat. So much mask. I grabbed Charlotte's hand and held it for a while when things felt dicey. It felt dicey as they cornered us from two sides and we went down the tight side street, up the hill. Charlotte's hand. It's like that. Moving from isolation to the depths of friends. At first we didn't mask up. We were poets. Then slowly one by one we did. As we got turnt. As I got turnt I mean. Sometimes I still don't mask up. It often feels hubristic. I keep a bandana in my pocket. It isn't super effective. It falls down a lot. Last night, I tied it around my neck as we walked up the side street hill. I pulled it over my face as I walked past the line of cops. I noticed Emma there, throwing eggs. I ducked. Two balloons filled with paint flew by. Visors suddenly yellow. She said to me, how is your heart? And I at first worried her question. Then I realized she meant my heart and how it was turnt. It is good, I said, I am opening it; I am expanding it. And I meant it. I love you I texted Felix. Lub u!!!!!! I texted Haruto. Texting Isabella and Jackson, I love you guys. I miss you. I texted love you some forty-three times in the last few years. I texted <3 some thirty-three times. Lub u, eighteen times. Miss you, thirty-eight. She said your feed is all riots, plants, picnics, and poets. It was an accusation. She was noticing that I had got turnt. And I said, my son, my son is in my feed too. I didn't bother to argue the riot with her. Still, oh that moment. Turnt moment: I was at the poetry reading and Mia didn't go. She was supposed to read too but she didn't. She said she wanted to see what happens. Then she texts I love you and I know then that Trader Joe's has been looted. All the wines out in the street. Such sweet elixir, FOMO. Then the rest of that night. We quickly say good-byes after the reading, refuse the offer of going to drinks, careen from the reading to our home. One of us on twit- ter the entire time. Texting too. While we are driving, one of us at home runs out into the streets, towards the gas. I drive up and two of us get out of the car and I stay in the car and drive the few blocks home. My son has fallen asleep in the back. I am coughing in the car from the gas. He sleeps through it. I take him out and carry him up to bed. More texts. I love you, I text. Come by and get me when you are done. Later that night, I go out again. Miguel stays home with Minjoon. I go to a fight party; Marxist v. Nihilist. No one knows which is which. Mohamed, my fighting teacher, fights. I miss it. I love you I text. She texts back I'm high on being slugged; my eyes are swollen; I lost; I'm turnt. Standing outside, a woman gets kicked out of the club. The bouncer tosses her out and into us. She is fucked up. And this feels awful to her. Her arms wildly swinging indicate this awful feeling. It feels awful to us. Another woman tries to help her and she slugs her. She misses and the woman who she has tried to slug takes her, calms her down. I hear her saying I love you, I love you over and over. Later I will learn that she spent the entire night talking the woman down. It's like that. When turnt, sometimes one needs to be held. Still later, I stand on the street, outside my house and watch the t-mobile get looted. A man tries to stop another man who has his hammer at the ready in front of the window. The man who is attempting to stop the hammer gets hit in the face with the butt of the hammer. I decide to go to bed. It is 3 am. I text Nathan and say I love you and I'll leave the key in the box for you. The march continues on, Nathan continues on, turns left a block away and then when Nathan texts me back I know the Whole Foods is looted and they are all drinking champagne, dancing. All of them will get a cold later. Riot champagne becomes a term among us that winter. I wasn't there but I was there too. My germs were there. I too had that cold. Is this poem too heroic? I am sorry. I worry it is. Or I know it is. We are turnt to mere vandals at moments. I'll admit it. Every computer in that shop. Every phone in that one. Every car in that car lot. I don't want it to be heroic but last night I turned the corner and Nor was there with her bike and when I saw her I said I love you and we walked down the street as each window was cracked. They got turnt. Eventually we disperse. I jog for a few minutes away and out of the kettle. We joke, circle back to watch a car burn. Oliver walks by. He is hurrying towards the dispersal. I love you we say to him as he heads off. The car burns. The fire truck arrives. As I stand there watching it, it is as if everyone I ever texted I love you to walks by. I love you we call out to each other. A group of women walk by the car and stop to take photographs. So much joy they have. They are laughing with such triumph. Selfies and all. Turnt. This poem is true. I have texted I love you and its variations over and over. Sometimes I barely knew you. But the names are not true. This is not a coterie poem. Is it a milieu poem? Can it be a movement poem? I took all the names of this poem and never wrote them in. There is no electronic record of them. I found a list of the most popular baby names for various countries in 2015, the year in which I am writing this poem. I made a list, one male and one female from each list. Then I alphabetized it. And I put those names in this poem one by one. I got to O. But Olivia, Saanvi, Santiago, Seoyeon, Sofia, Yui, and Zeynep, I love you too.

For Pat Gourneau, my grandfather The heron makes a cross flying low over the marsh. Its heart is an old compass pointing off in four directions. It drags the world along, the world it becomes. My face surfaces in the green beveled glass above the washstand. My handprint in thick black powder on the bedroom shade. Home I could drink like thin fire that gathers like lead in my veins, heart’s armor, the coffee stains. In the dust of the double hollyhock, Theresa, one frail flame eating wind. One slim candle that snaps in the dry grass. Ascending tall ladders that walk to the edge of dusk. Riding a blue cricket through the tumult of the falling dawn. At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof, sharpening its talons on the shingles. Grandpa leans back between spoonfuls of canned soup and repeats to himself a word that belongs to a world no one else can remember. The day has not come when from sloughs, the great salamander lumbers through snow, salt, and fire to be with him, throws the hatchet of its head through the door of the three-room house and eats the blue roses that are peeling off the walls. Uncle Ray, drunk for three days behind the jagged window of a new government box, drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota, crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch is the small hook and eye. of religion. Twenty nuns fall through clouds to park their butts on the metal hasp. Surely that would be considered miraculous almost anyplace, but here in the Turtle Mountains it is no more than common fact. Raymond wakes, but he can’t shrug them off. He is looking up dark tunnels of their sleeves, and into their frozen armpits, or is it heaven? He counts the points of their hairs like stars. One by one they blink out, and Theresa comes forth clothed in the lovely hair she has been washing all day. She smells like a hayfield, drifting pollen of birch trees. Her hair steals across her shoulders like a postcard sunset. All the boys tonight, goaded from below, will approach her in The Blazer, The Tomahawk, The White Roach Bar where everyone gets up to cut the rug, wagging everything they got, as the one bass drum of The Holy Greaseballs lights a depth charge through the smoke. Grandpa leans closer to the bingo. The small fortune his heart pumps for is hidden in the stained, dancing numbers. The Ping-Pong balls rise through colored lights, brief as sparrows God is in the sleight of the woman’s hand. He walks from Saint Ann’s, limp and crazy as the loon that calls its children across the lake in its broke, knowing laughter. Hitchhiking home from the Mission, if he sings, it is a loud, rasping wail that saws through the spine of Ira Comes Last, at the wheel. Drawn up through the neck ropes, drawn out of his stomach by the spirit of the stones that line the road and speak to him only in their old agreement. Ira knows the old man is nuts. Lets him out at the road that leads up over stars and the skulls of white cranes. And through the soft explosions of cattail and the scattering of seeds on still water, walks Grandpa, all the time that there is in his hands that have grown to be the twisted doubles of the burrows of mole and badger, that have come to be the absence of birds in a nest. Hands of earth, of this clay I’m also made from.

Shed a tear for Twickham Tweer who ate uncommon meals, who often peeled bananas and then only ate the peels, who emptied jars of marmalade and only ate the jars, and only ate the wrappers off of chocolate candy bars. When Twickham cooked a chicken he would only eat the bones, he discarded scoops of ice cream though he always ate the cones, he’d boil a small potato but he’d only eat the skin, and pass up canned asparagus to gobble down the tin. He sometimes dined on apple cores and bags of peanut shells, on cottage cheese containers, cellophane from caramels, but Twickham Tweer passed on last year, that odd and novel man, when he fried an egg one morning and then ate the frying pan.

I I wonder do you feel to-day As I have felt since, hand in hand, We sat down on the grass, to stray In spirit better through the land, This morn of Rome and May? II For me, I touched a thought, I know, Has tantalized me many times, (Like turns of thread the spiders throw Mocking across our path) for rhymes To catch at and let go. III Help me to hold it! First it left The yellowing fennel, run to seed There, branching from the brickwork's cleft, Some old tomb's ruin: yonder weed Took up the floating weft, IV Where one small orange cup amassed Five beetles,—blind and green they grope Among the honey-meal: and last, Everywhere on the grassy slope I traced it. Hold it fast! V The champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery grasses everywhere! Silence and passion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air— Rome's ghost since her decease. VI Such life here, through such lengths of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting nature have her way While heaven looks from its towers! VII How say you? Let us, O my dove, Let us be unashamed of soul, As earth lies bare to heaven above! How is it under our control To love or not to love? VIII I would that you were all to me, You that are just so much, no more. Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free! Where does the fault lie? What the core O' the wound, since wound must be? IX I would I could adopt your will, See with your eyes, and set my heart Beating by yours, and drink my fill At your soul's springs,—your part my part In life, for good and ill. X No. I yearn upward, touch you close, Then stand away. I kiss your cheek, Catch your soul's warmth,—I pluck the rose And love it more than tongue can speak— Then the good minute goes. XI Already how am I so far Out of that minute? Must I go Still like the thistle-ball, no bar, Onward, whenever light winds blow, Fixed by no friendly star? XII Just when I seemed about to learn! Where is the thread now? Off again! The old trick! Only I discern— Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.

Some girls        on the other side of this planet will never know        the loveliness of   walking      in a crepe silk sari.      Instead, they will spend        their days                          on their backs for a parade               of   men           who could be       their uncles in another life.         These girls memorize each slight wobble                  of   fan blade as it cuts through the stale       tea air and auto-rickshaw exhaust,        thick as egg curry. Men         shove greasy rupees        at the door for one hour         in a room with a twelve-year-old.                One hour —               One hour — One hour.            And if   she cries afterward, her older sister       will cover it up.         Will rim the waterline             of   her eyes                 with kohl pencil until it looks like                        two silk moths have stopped      to rest       on her exquisite     face.

Not rain, but fine mist falls from my lemon tree, a balm of droplets in green shadow. Six years now my mother gone to earth. This dew, light as footsteps of the dead. She often walked out here, craned her neck, considered the fruit, hundreds of globes in their leathery hides, figuring on custard and pudding, meringue and hollandaise. But her plans didn't work out. The tree goes on unceasingly—lemons fall and fold into earth and begin again— me, I come here as a salve against heat, come to languish, to let the soft bursts— essence of citrus, summer's distillate— drift into my face and settle. Water and gold brew in the quiet deeps at the far end of the season. Leaves swallow the body of light and the breath of water brims over. My hands cup each other the way hers did.

National Pigeon Association, England, 1940 Notch. Web. And then, down the shaft, lesser wing coverts and marginal coverts, and soft, greater underwing coverts — although never as great as greater under-primary coverts, gray-coated and down-plumped, trailing what might reveal a pattern just over the down that might support a secrecy. Launched from double-decker buses, or attic windows, or the dark roofs at Bletchley Park, the lesser pigeons, always first to find the fray, sport black metallic canisters strapped to matted lapel feathers. And tucked inside, like Russian dolls, a cipher’s hollow chambers — down and down, a Fibonacci spiral, a paper nautilus of words and codes and keys that shift with each decipherment. The bard is in the wand— read space as shape, read a as i— the key takes subterfuge, that doubling, double agency when tomfoolery is crossed with rage. But these are simply carriers, word-burdened, instinct- tossed, searching for the perch within a blasted atmosphere. Find forms, the message says, and everything will fall in line. The bird is in the wind

A star screen shimmers under the moon over the urban center flashing on it red and green I’ll have a suspension, mustard, topicality, glue Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty Whipped gouache just about covers the situation In the Musée Unless there’s a fallen nest on display empty of an egg once belonging to a song bird, species unknown, which had sung See style, see working late, see mismatched socks, see polyphony It is the fate of logic infinitely to undo closure but that’s just to say that it’s the fate of logic infinitely to be logical So like a man goes into a shop and there’s like this other man in there whom he thinks he recognizes and he says like do I know you The fallen grass in winter sprawls its spring Regulations state that the pier can accommodate no more than one troupe of acrobats, thirty fishermen, or fifty tourists Yo The child never gives up her secret, which—don’t tell—is that she has a secret, and her secret has a penis We will lose another day from the inner picture—days are not ineradicable there What is it that one is autobiographical about

To begin with, I am faced with mountains to circumambulate, since I can't cut through them I enter the folds of a human adventure On every door there hangs a figurehead and this one comes to face me as the door swings shut I will proceed with good will—the best of wills—anxiously Bird of daughters, bird flying from the forks, the blurbs, the serials, the time I saw a golden tadpole, eating apple jam; I saw a sudden whirlpool, sucking down a ham The boughs groan with fruit, an apple falls—false alarm It’s a non-sequitur—that Sense data sinks The muscles give out mid-word and a thief stutters while accusing me (his uncle) of theft Lune comes along mounted on a beast called That who is neither more nor less than a horse as obedient to Lune as the tides are to the moon Shot of men hurrying toward each other at an intersection with open umbrellas none willing to give way to the others, shot of placid camels kneeling near a chained dog, shot of sugar maples temporarily obscured by falling snow Tomorrow morning, unless things vastly improve, I’ll go in person to the front of the caravan and take it over the mountain I thought I saw an earthworm, stirring in the dirt, then I saw it was a sadist, wielding a quirt

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.