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The first Technicolor feature in Hollywood, a retelling of Madame Butterfly ,
 starring Anna May Wong green means go, so run — now — green the color of the siren sea, whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul

During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought. Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,— Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain, For I’ve received orders for to sail for the Deadman, But hope with the grand fleet to see you again. I have hove my ship to, with main-top-sail aback, boys; I have hove my ship to, for to strike soundings clear— The black scud a’flying; but, by God’s blessing, dam’ me, Right up the Channel for the Deadman I’ll steer. I have worried through the waters that are call d the Doldrums, And growled at Sargasso that clogs while ye grope— Blast my eyes, but the light-ship is hid by the mist, lads:— Flying Dutchman —odds bobbs—off the Cape of Good Hope! But what’s this I feel that is fanning my cheek, Matt? The white goney’s wing?—how she rolls!—’t is the Cape! Give my kit to the mess, Jock, for kin none is mine, none; And tell Holy Joe to avast with the crape. Dead reckoning, says Joe , it won’t do to go by; But they doused all the glims, Matt, in sky t’ other night. Dead reckoning is good for to sail for the Deadman; And Tom Deadlight he thinks it may reckon near right. The signal!—it streams for the grand fleet to anchor. The captains—the trumpets—the hullabaloo! Stand by for blue-blazes, and mind your shank-painters, For the Lord High Admiral, he’s squinting at you! But give me my tot , Matt, before I roll over; Jock, let’s have your flipper, it’s good for to feel; And don’t sew me up without baccy in mouth, boys, And don’t blubber like lubbers when I turn up my keel.

To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . . I woke this morning before your dream had shredded And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold, Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones, Petals the color of a wedding band. You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold. Perhaps I made those flowers in my head, For I have counted snowflakes in July Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium, And I have stepped into your dream at night, A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight. I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver. Love, the stars have fallen into the garden And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand. It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets. This morning the garden is littered with dry petals As yellow as the page of an old book. I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.

My deaf cousin had a hand in designing the Tomahawk Missile. The blueprints open on his desk for what was to become a show-and-tell-style reunion. I hadn’t laid eyes on this exuberant man since chance threw us together at a party given by his best friend whose brother was your

Tomato pies are what we called them, those days, before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother’s restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey. My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America. Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean, sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after cops delivered him home just hours before. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942, tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents. With anchovies, large, 50 cents. A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm). How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would stand outside all the way down Warren Street, waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war.

At the end of the bridge is a state of prison. Then it goes back into my throat drying my throat. Miracle of Sicilian weeping. Bleeds in one of his many dreams. He announced that he was about to give a free ‘poetry suicide’—a free ‘poultry recital.’ Everyone be- lieved him. _______ At the end of the bridge is a state of prison. A voyage will hide itself in your heart, bleeding from the left eye, the organ of sight. A voyage will hide itself in someone unfamiliar like a heap of salt. Mingled with the ordinary blueness would be waves of foreheads shaped like cups. She thought he could hear her. To dance is to live. _______ Calm and order of an autumn sky. At the end of a bridge is the state of prison, voyage of eye and throat full of the fear of night. Then all of winter will enter like a red block, or like the calm and order of an autumn sky. 139. Change of form. 139a. Change of colour. 122. Pitfalls. 136. Covers with a lid. _______ It doesn’t matter what you say but how you say it. By pronouncing the words they become different. It comes from above (pointing to his head). Then it goes all sorts of ways down. Then it goes back into my throat drying my throat. Tonight it’s a certainty that the President will resign (‘a virtual certainty’). After the party they drove back to her house where she sucked him off while he spoke to someone on the tele- phone about the possibility of a job. _______ Plato’s warning against telling stories,mython tina diēgeisthai

The buried temple empties through its bowels, Sepulchral sewer spewing mud and rubies, Abominably some idol of Anubis, Its muzzle all aflame with savage howls. Or if the recent gas the wick befouls That bears so many insults, it illumines In haggard outline an immortal pubis Flying along the streetlights on its prowls. What wreaths dried out in cities without prayer Of night could bless like that which settles down Vainly against the marble of Baudelaire In the fluttering veil that girds her absence round, A tutelary poison, his own Wraith, We breathe in always though it bring us death.

In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor, pulled off   his shoes, granted audience to us, his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet. He smiled, our brother, at the story he told of   deliverance at the hand of   Master Tombo, lord and creator, whose round energy lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk our butter our eggs: see Him there, in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case? In that elder by the yogurt shelves? I believed his happiness and coveted a tidy universe. He picked his feet while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s mango aura made the cold blown air touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body and felt my silly bones collapse again. I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save this faint believer and the indifferent world that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle lavender respired from the flower stall and Security spoke kind words to our prophet. Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash of speech and flowers and winds and the tides and crave plain rotund stories to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god, spilled blood made corn grow, the blood gods shed watered needy ground and became People who worshipped the corn. Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one inarticulate incoherent moment to the next. Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh. Orion turns, burning, unchanged again. Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees. My poor belief   lives in the only and all of   the slur of   what these are, and what these are streams toward loss in moments we live through. As children we were lost in our opaque acts but fresh and full in time. I remember how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy broke another’s face, how we all stood in hard gray summer rain so it would run down the tips of noses to our tongues.

for: max and alyssa malyyssax worelish tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady, go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns, then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum, on to northampton to see the smith college art museum & greenhouse where we'll see a green heron it would be nice to be able to walk today so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn where we're able to buy riccotta cheese which means twice-baked, with which we're able to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm war what is it good for? absolutely nothing

I Tomorrow I will start to be happy. The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar. Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne. Today will end the worst phase of my life. I will put my shapeless days behind me, fencing off the past, as a golden rind of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land. It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today. Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday. II Australia, how wise you are to get the day over and done with first, out of the way. You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while we are dithering about which main course to choose. How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt: the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices are revealed to you before our bidding has begun. Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill. When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light. III Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018. A date without character or tone. 2018. A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature. Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed. Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely, vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual end-of-season sales; everything slashed: your last chance to salvage something of its style.