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One day I wake I walk     forward         carrying a narrative carrying an end a hole    ten years deep and sleep has made for it           a lid fragile thin plastic wrap                          a skin graft         a patch inside the hole is dark and full of stars is dark and full of scars this body grows a garden of badly barely healed feelings I mean skin I mean go ahead touch me now for I am wild

Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s glass teeth knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed. Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some, we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery. Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads, those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins? Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect only puritans and the frequently punished can hear. It’s what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons and sheer underskirts incite violation.

One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin. JOHN D. MACDONALD You would not recognize me. Mine is the face which blooms in The dank mirrors of washrooms As you grope for the light switch. My eyes have the expression Of the cold eyes of statues Watching their pigeons return From the feed you have scattered, And I stand on my corner With the same marble patience. If I move at all, it is At the same pace precisely As the shade of the awning Under which I stand waiting And with whose blackness it seems I am already blended. I speak seldom, and always In a murmur as quiet As that of crowds which surround The victims of accidents. Shall I confess who I am? My name is all names and none. I am the used-car salesman, The tourist from Syracuse, The hired assassin, waiting. I will stand here forever Like one who has missed his bus— Familiar, anonymous— On my usual corner, The corner at which you turn To approach that place where now You must not hope to arrive.

In Tunis we try to discuss divorce And dying but give up to lounge With rug merchants under a plum tree. From its corner the lamb’s severed head Watches the flies drink from its eyes And its fat disappear into the fire. The light rinses the edge of your sandal, The two wasps that ornament the blur Of screened window. My grandmother Would have loved a night like this. In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart With its china rolling through Cook Street’s Stony yard one summer when I was always Thirsty, and she moved like a figure On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart, Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut My hair with the straight razor. I was a week out of the hospital. Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed With stitches of surgical thread. The scalpel came so close it gave My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died. Years later I can still see the skin Flutter on the inside of my left breast And my heart limps like a great uncle Who, because he was a Jew and lame, Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes. He became a friend asking a favor Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.

Turn, turn again, Ape’s blood in each vein! The people that pass Seem castles of glass, The old and the good Giraffes of the blue wood, The soldier, the nurse, Wooden-face and a curse, Are shadowed with plumage Like birds, by the gloomage. Blond hair like a clown’s The music floats—drowns The creaking of ropes, The breaking of hopes, The wheezing, the old, Like harmoniums scold; Go to Babylon, Rome, The brain-cells called home, The grave, new Jerusalem— Wrinkled Methusalem! From our floating hair Derived the first fair And queer inspiration Of music, the nation Of bright-plumed trees And harpy-shrill breeze . . . *  *  *  * Turn, turn again, Ape’s blood in each vein!

SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow. FALL, SIERRA NEVADA This morning the hermit thrush was absent at breakfast, His place was taken by a family of chickadees; At noon a flock of humming birds passed south, Whirling in the wind up over the saddle between Ritter and Banner, following the migration lane Of the Sierra crest southward to Guatemala. All day cloud shadows have moved over the face of the mountain, The shadow of a golden eagle weaving between them Over the face of the glacier. At sunset the half-moon rides on the bent back of the Scorpion, The Great Bear kneels on the mountain. Ten degrees below the moon Venus sets in the haze arising from the Great Valley. Jupiter, in opposition to the sun, rises in the alpenglow Between the burnt peaks. The ventriloquial belling Of an owl mingles with the bells of the waterfall. Now there is distant thunder on the east wind. The east face of the mountain above me Is lit with far off lightnings and the sky Above the pass blazes momentarily like an aurora. It is storming in the White Mountains, On the arid fourteen-thousand-foot peaks; Rain is falling on the narrow gray ranges And dark sedge meadows and white salt flats of Nevada. Just before moonset a small dense cumulus cloud, Gleaming like a grape cluster of metal, Moves over the Sierra crest and grows down the westward slope. Frost, the color and quality of the cloud, Lies over all the marsh below my campsite. The wiry clumps of dwarfed whitebark pines Are smoky and indistinct in the moonlight, Only their shadows are really visible. The lake is immobile and holds the stars And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver. In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice Spread their wonderful mathematics in silence. All night the eyes of deer shine for an instant As they cross the radius of my firelight. In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway, All the tracks will point down to the lower canyon. “Thus,” says Tyndall, “the concerns of this little place Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth’s axis, The chain of dependence which runs through creation, And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests Of marmots and of men.”

Toward what island-home am I moving, not wanting to marry, not wanting too much of that emptiness at evening, as when I walked through a field at dusk and felt wide in the night. And it was again the evening that drew me back to the field where I was most alone, compassed by stems and ruts, no light of the fixed stars, no flashing in the eyes, only heather pared by dry air, shedding a small feathered radiance when I looked away, an expanse whose deep sleep seemed an unending warren I had been given, to carry out such tasks— that I might find nothing dead. And it was again the evening that drew me back to the field where I could sense no boundary— the smell of dry earth, cool arch of my neck, the darkness entirely within myself. And when I shut my eyes there was no one. Only weeds in drifts of stillness, only stalks and gliding sky. Come, black anchor, let us not be harmed. The deer leafing in the dark. The old man at the table, unable to remember. The children whose hunger is just hunger, and never desire.

The old chronological towers are ash, are prisms of disfigurement, symbolic of a world cancelled by consumptive inmelodias. As for alchemical transition, we face the raising of new sea walls, of banished and re-engendered electorates, trying to cope with new intensities of weather, as the anomalous hypnotically increases with the power of inverse subjective. The body is now weighed on a broken axial cart, its blood conjoined as it rises within a nuclear darkness of ravens. So as Piscean chronology now shatters, dawn becomes an unclaimed resurrection, a tumultuous eikon of skin no longer formed around its old dendritic artifacts. The calendar of draconian enfeeblement with its integers of the past 20 centuries, erased, its linear Babels darkened by the extreme necessity for a new perpendicular burst, transmuting in demeanour, with history consumed in a roll of flaming aural dice, with its wizardry of tools subsumed in arcane vibration, turned into a power of splendiferous scorpions. The psychic wounds of the past eclipsed in this new millenium by the power of smelted dragon's blood. And so, I speak of a new being of symbols, of lucid catacombs and spirals, its language being spun in fabulous iguana iridium. Now, with the decayed constitutional stages exploded by telepathy, by invulnerable oneiric intuitives, the mental axis transmutes, like a reddened swan, with a new cosmic skeletal reprieve, afloat amongst the forces of the primeval lightning field, taking on the dharma of the great sustained emotion of eternity.

I What shall I do with this absurdity — O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible — No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly, Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back And had the livelong summer day to spend. It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack, Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend Until imagination, ear and eye, Can be content with argument and deal In abstract things; or be derided by A sort of battered kettle at the heel. II I pace upon the battlements and stare On the foundations of a house, or where

“ The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious.” A mile out in the marshes, under a sky Which seems to be always going away In a hurry, on that Venetian land threaded With hidden canals, you will find the city Which seconds ours (so cemeteries, too, Reflect a town from hillsides out of town), Where Being most Becomingly ends up Becoming some more. From cardboard tenements, Windowed with cellophane, or simply tenting In paper bags, the angry mackerel eyes Glare at you out of stove-in, sunken heads Far from the sea; the lobster, also, lifts An empty claw in his most minatory Of gestures; oyster, crab, and mussel shells Lie here in heaps, savage as money hurled Away at the gate of hell. If you want results, These are results. Objects of value or virtue, However, are also to be picked up here, Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat, Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels No one will skid on, apple cores that caused Neither the fall of man nor a theory Of gravitation. People do throw out The family pearls by accident, sometimes, Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques To prowl this place by night, with flashlights, on The off-chance of somebody’s having left Derelict chairs which will turn out to be by Hepplewhite, a perfect set of six Going to show, I guess, that in any sty Someone’s heaven may open and shower down Riches responsive to the right dream; though It is a small chance, certainly, that sends The ghostly dealer, heavy with fly-netting Over his head, across these hills in darkness, Stumbling in cut-glass goblets, lacquered cups, And other products of his dreamy midden Penciled with light and guarded by the flies. For there are flies, of course. A dynamo Composed, by thousands, of our ancient black Retainers, hums here day and night, steady As someone telling beads, the hum becoming A high whine at any disturbance; then, Settled again, they shine under the sun Like oil-drops, or are invisible as night, By night. All this continually smoulders, Crackles, and smokes with mostly invisible fires Which, working deep, rarely flash out and flare, And never finish. Nothing finishes; The flies, feeling the heat, keep on the move. Among the flies, the purefying fires, The hunters by night, acquainted with the art Of our necessities, and the new deposits That each day wastes with treasure, you may say There should be ratios. You may sum up The results, if you want results. But I will add That wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies, Assemble in some numbers here, their wings Shining with light, their flight enviably free, Their music marvelous, though sad, and strange.