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1914-18 (Sea Warfare) The ships destroy us above And ensnare us beneath. We arise, we lie down, and we move In the belly of Death. The ships have a thousand eyes To mark where we come . . . But the mirth of a seaport dies When our blow gets home.

i’d rather have an agogô for a heart a djembe for a heart gramophone for a heart bison bone for a heart dandelion spore for a heart sweet cream butter for a heart i’d rather have a mason jar for a heart an ashtray for a heart a plate of liver for a heart lawnmower for a heart jezebel for a heart instead of this flesh & blood which mars my sheets instead of this archive that clogs my toilet instead of this flea-bitten attic full of raccoons instead of this envelope that arrives already open instead of this light bulb that rattles on the inside instead of this tv box that draws attention on trash day instead of this wart that only responds to rain instead of this colander that never catches the grit i’d rather have a heart born of the lust between a sonnet & a blues song a coleridge-wild weed hoochie coochie heart a we real cool heart aboard the impossible spawn of slave ships an undying, maroon eternally brown in the black hills heart i’d rather have a heart that beats that beats that beats that beats that beats

Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight. The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost, yourself  in memory perhaps, might well set foot up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight. • Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.

Rough music in the lane, the love child lapped in blood and safe at her breast, the pain echoed in wood on wood, steel on steel, as they come, the women in their blacks, to hound her from house and home, bands of bitches and claques of crones with their pots and pans, their hooks and ladles and bowls, to beat outside in the street, to stand at her window and howl, while the child takes a taste of green milk and “the dead of night” is all she has of her own and the music goes on and on.

Believe it or not, the old woman said, and I tried to picture it: a girl, the polished white ribs of a roast tied to her boots with twine, the twine coated with candle wax so she could glide uninterrupted across the ice— my mother, skating on bones.

No one in neuroscience thinks time is not important. Criticisms arise with how time management is achieved. - Dr. Patricia Churchland, philosopher/brain scientist 1. When handling the past in the present tense, chronology is of the utmost importance. Suppose I say I’m eight years old and all the rooms of my father’s house are larger than life. Then I say Two days after my first divorce, the only landscape I know is simplified, bone-smooth. The past remains practically undisturbed. But suppose I reverse the order in which the episodes are recreated, and time goes on a rampage, and I find myself coming and going. Journeys on land have a spherical tendency because this is always at some level the nature of the ter- rain. The anthill crumbles in the rain and the ants returning with more provisions walk past the leveled mound; having noticed noth- ing, they keep looking for home. Though each mouth carries its crumb of substance, tradition and evolution will see to it that it isn’t eaten until the journey has been completed. It’s not unusual for the ants to walk repeatedly over the ruins. A squirrel chases itself so fast around the trunk of a palm tree that it appears to be standing still, like propeller blades in midflight. (I used to know the cause of this illusion.) I say Someone’s at the door, somebody please get the door although I haven’t lived there in years.Somebody please get the door. I want nothing more than my share of the past. 2. True. There are degrees of isolation. Sixteen days after a shopping center collapses like a punctured lung in Seoul, South Korea, a nine- teen-year-old girl is found alive in an elevator shaft. Her only nour- ishment throughout the ordeal is an apple that a monk gives her in a dream. The doctors are skeptical and attribute her survival, instead, to “her false perception of time.” The brain—with its network of rivers and tributaries, the flow rigorously controlled—is taxed by a sudden drought. Or an apple passes from one hand to another. In both versions, extraordinary measures achieve a modicum of nor- malcy, shaken again when a boy—age thirteen, his circadian rhythms still fighting the syncopation of jet lag—walks out the window on the thirtieth floor of a Swedish building. They’re calling it “a sleep- walking accident,” as if sleep were a cognitive state. If that were the case, our sheep and our prayers would keep us up all night, count- ing and repenting, and there would be degrees of salvation. I can tell you that none of this is true, but much of it is, and you will not for- give me when you discover that I’ve led you to believe otherwise. The truth, in one form or another, has ways of finding you. Blame it on your false perception of the facts. Time the sniper has lapses in which its eyes tire and its focus falters and it aims at itself. So the window opens; the girl shakes the rubble from her dress; a monk, gathering apples in his robe, almost catches the falling boy. 3. They say that when the Who performed at Leeds University on Valentine’s Day 1970, Pete Townshend played against his own echo during some of those riveting excursions he launched into through- out the band’s quarter-hour-long offering of "My Generation." I lis- ten to it differently now. I wait for the echo they tell me is there, preceding each note, and it’s as if I were experiencing the music a pri- ori. I listen to the chords or whole riffs bouncing off the walls versus sound in real time. Doing so, I miss the actual song, which is also delayed because this is, after all, a recording. Once, the concept of real time was redundant. Before the first gramophone. Before we learned to manipulate the speed of things to come. And long before that, the idea of a spirit that takes over for the temporary body was already popular. Perhaps our first attempt to deny the unavoidable. One new religion offers immortality. For a price. Unlike traditional religions in which death is a prerequisite, this one teaches the body to bypass the soul, that middle man who always gets in the way, and the here-and-now becomes a here-and-always. It’s all up here, one of its members says to me, pointing his index finger at his temple, as if mimicking a gun. I may actually want to die before I get old, I think, the radio as loud as it’ll go, one chord after another bouncing off the walls so many years ago at Leeds, the road much longer than I’d expected, the signal grow- ing weaker and one station giving way to another. From feedback to static to a preacher who invites me or commands me or dares me to lay my hands on the radio. Both hands, he says. I raise my legs, raise my whole body (although it’s not levitation or anything nearly as glam- orous) to steady the steering wheel. 4. In The Book of Ironies they forgot to write that a superstitious woman will end up marrying an atheist. Curiously, in all the cases I know, it’s the man who doesn’t believe. The woman is always open at the very least to the possibility of that “something out there.” At times her superstitions are proof of God’s constant tinkering with the cogs and wheels of the soul. There are atheists with proof of a finite world, atheists in need of a finite world, reformed atheists whose image of God has become so pure over the years that it has gone from inevitable to unnecessary to simply impossible. One believer argues that only the next life makes this one tolerable and lends it purpose, that only the idea of being part of something cir- cular can keep us from going mad, because true madness is linear and the points at either end are clearly defined. This is an uncom- fortable thought for her. I wonder if her belief is, more than any- thing, a way to keep at bay this linear derangement. The atheist lying beside her is beginning to sink into sleep when she speaks: she has carefully chosen this moment, thinking he’s vulnerable enough to say what she wants to hear. He sits on the edge of the bed and won- ders for a moment what it would be like to take that leap forward; or backward, which is something she doesn’t mention: believers of her kind tend to discount any previous incarnations, as if eternity began here. Being here, he says to himself as he has said to her so many times,is the point. Then he tries to think his way back to sleep: wedding band, crown, zero, smoke ring, lasso, hula hoop.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man— So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd To his great heart none other than a God! I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.' Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men, who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love, Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now, Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, And bosom beating with a heart renew'd. Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom, Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful In silence, then before thine answer given Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek. Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, And make me tremble lest a saying learnt, In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true? 'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.' Ay me! ay me! with what another heart In days far-off, and with what other eyes I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd— The lucid outline forming round thee; saw The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm With kisses balmier than half-opening buds Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: How can my nature longer mix with thine? Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave: Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I earth in earth forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined. Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yellow blossoms under a barn-door window. A barn door without the barn.

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it; One hope is too like despair For prudence to smother, And pity from thee more dear Than that from another. I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?

Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well Would passion arm me for the enterprise; But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies; No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell; I am no happy shepherd of the dell Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes. Yet must I dote upon thee—call thee sweet, Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses When steep’d in dew rich to intoxication. Ah! I will taste that dew, for me ‘tis meet, And when the moon her pallid face discloses, I’ll gather some by spells, and incantation.