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(after Ehrich Weiss) I Geography matters. It is the plan, the arrangement of things that confuses our enemies, the difference between what they expect and what they get; as simple as bobbing for apples becomes difficult, deception is an achievement in ordering the obvious. II Let us make a song for our confusion: Call it “Red Skies over Gary” or “Red Skies in the Sunset” or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.” Red Skies over Gary, you are my sunset, my only home. Let us make ourselves invisible, not make songs, or even disappear suddenly from the sidewalks of Calumet. III Cobalt and carborundum are refinements of the art. So it’s true, you held the razor in your teeth, or was it pure magic, a miracle of place? One makes for workability, the other for hardness, and chromium bright, the stainless achievement. IV I came from Calumet to Gary, and it was early evening; south of the mills, poppy fields toxic red above the car lots, have a Coke on Texaco ’til the mercury arcs devour us and it is purple night.

One day, chasing my tail here and there, I stopped to catch my breath On some corner in New York, While people hurried past me, All determined to get somewhere, Save a few adrift like lost children. What ever became of my youth? I wanted to stop a stranger and ask. "It went into hiding," said an old woman Who'd read my mind. "Swimming with sharks," a drunk concurred, Fixing me with one bloody eye. It was summer, and then as quietly as  a bird lands, The sidewalks were dusted with snow And I was shivering without a coat. I had hopes we'd meet again, I told myself, Have a drink and recall the nights When we used to paint this town red. I thought you'd be in a straightjacket by now, You'd say to me, Making funny faces at doctors and nurses. Instead, here you are full of fleas, Dodging cars and buses To follow a pair of good-looking legs home. "And you, Judas," I summed the strength to shout, "Will you be coming to my funeral?" But he was gone already. It had gotten late in the day, Very late—and since there was nothing That could be done about it— I thought I'd better toddle along myself.

Some places you could die in, if you could just go on living there. The boy, his legs bare and small, swinging in the stroller, sockless, suede-shoed feet touching the runner. He can walk, but the woman keeps him from running into the street. He won’t obey but listens to everything we say. Head tilted, face changing with the conversation. Green leaves leap through fences. Cars wait while we cross. And each bird the boy greets with its name, “Bird,” flies away. The sky holds everything. The woman pushes her son’s son along. Her arms strong enough to hold nine strong horses prancing. She’s given her money away because someone had to bury a child. That is the worst thing. A mother burying her child. I would never do that to her, even though it means what it means. A thousand years from now when I am only a dream I will dream this dream of strolling. Perhaps I am doing so now.

“That God is colouring Newton doth shew” — William Blake Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence.  I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence  as if there could stand some solidity  most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space.  The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne. It is an angel then, weeping and yet ever attending the betrayal of the Word I mean to come to in the end.  For my sake, the blood must be somewhere in time and in its own naming of place actual, and death must be  as my own awaits me  immediate to undo from its reality the physical body, all there is of the matter of me that is mine from me.  The would-be dialecticians—Inquisitors of the New Dispensation in Poetry and Historians of Opprobrium, the Realists and Materialists—come forward to hold the party line against his ideality.  There are too many listeners.  There are too many voices in the one line.  They must enter the Ideal to do so, for he has changed his mind, as if the Eternal existed only momentarily and went out with him.  The Chairman of the Politbureau gets his number  and moves to isolate his heresy.  The number is no longer the same.  He has gone back into the exchange of numbers.  The phone continues ringing in the pattern of the message they strive to listen  to report to the Bureau of Poetic Numbers and Approved Measures. This is to say to the month of April and the rainbow dancer, I am with you.  I belong to the company without number.  I shall live one hundred years and then be gone.  Here and now  only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here.  His, the horizon.  His, the perspectives and outlines.  His, the regulation of the relevant.  I will willingly assume his numbers among my own. The rest is all Asia, the astral miasma, the Undoing we came from, my version of Who-He-Is-In-Reality, the domain of colouring invading the Responsible.

I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene, but I was still surprised when I found the painting of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes of the French Impressionists. And I was surprised to notice after a few minutes of benign staring, how that woman, stark in profile and fixed forever in her chair, began to resemble my own ancient mother who was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth. You can understand why he titled the painting "Arrangement in Gray and Black" instead of what everyone naturally calls it, but afterward, as I walked along the river bank, I imagined how it might have broken the woman's heart to be demoted from mother to a mere composition, a study in colorlessness. As the summer couples leaned into each other along the quay and the wide, low-slung boats full of spectators slid up and down the Seine between the carved stone bridges and their watery reflections, I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base. It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus" "Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink," or the other way around like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color "Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn." Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafe where I now had come to rest, it would be like painting something laughable, like a chef turning on a spit over a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducks and calling it "Study in Orange and White." But by that time, a waiter had appeared with my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water, and I sat there thinking of nothing but the women and men passing by— mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs— and about myself, a kind of composition in blue and khaki, and, now that I had poured some water into the glass, milky-green.

She couldn't help but sting my finger, clinging a moment before I flung her to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick evening light plays on my roses. She curls into herself, stinger twitching, gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks, and my pain subsided in a moment. In the cold, she hardly had her wits to buzz. No warning from either of us: she sleeping in the richness of those petals, then the hand, my hand, cupping the bloom in devastating force, crushing the petals for the scent. And she mortally threatened, wholly unaware that I do this daily, alone with the gold last light, in what seems to me an act of love.

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way? hid away in the heat like wrath conceald in Love’s face, or the seed, Eris in Eros, key and lock of what I was?      I could not speak the releasing word.      For into a dark matter he came and askt me to say what I could not say.      “I ..” All the flame in me stopt against my tongue. My heart was a stone, a dumb unmanageable thing in me, a darkness that stood athwart his need for the enlightening, the “I love you” that has only this one quick in time, this one start when its moment is true. Such is the sickness of many a good thing that now into my life from long ago this refusing to say I love you has bound the weeping, the yielding, the yearning to be taken again, into a knot, a waiting, a string so taut it taunts the song, it resists the touch. It grows dark to draw down the lover’s hand from its lightness to what’s underground.

The host's girlfriend is barely seen. She's busy giving away wild animals to reluctant guests. I agree to take a snake-dog, maybe an electric eel, but when I feel its sharp teeth in my shoulder, I start to worry about the future welfare of our fragile cat, the precarious order of our rented home, and remember I am supposed to be looking for someone.... A half-wolf, half-elephant cracks through the walls of the peeling wallpapered bedroom where my former student in a fuschia robe and curlers sits by a lighted make-up mirror. The shadows off elongated fake eyelashes are as dark as the branches of an evening tree. The hovering body of a fiery sparrow is almost transparent, like flute music or an idea. I turn my back and finally, I spot her my friend, the host. She's sipping rum punch from a martini glass; her whole body appears to be smiling, glowing, and I don't know what to think. I know she doesn't drink, hasn't in decades, and I wonder what's suddenly changed, but then I remember the cancer won, my friend isn't actually here, there is no party, there was never a house.

for Max Ritvo I Three weeks until summer and then—what? Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine, fin de siècle, fin slicing the water of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver, then receding as if we hadn’t seen it, sultan of so long, see you tomorrow. Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal who swims too close—too close for what? The needle swerves. Our element chooses us. Water fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus, hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters. II If I could make it stop I would. Was it the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time? The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon, glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces. In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays, why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s paw lamps scavenged from the winter beach, its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales of an enormous Trojan fish … teeth chattering, its metronome time bomb tsk tsk— when is giving up not giving in? III ( child’s pose ) When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get smaller, or did the world get larger? In the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue roses, white stained red—adolescence is to overdo it, but really? Thirty stories up, our birds’-eye view is the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head, wings beating, too tiny and too big to see, your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones daring the air, marionette running on the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’ freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change. Let me go from here to anywhere. IV That’s it for now. And so we turn the page your poems standing in for you, or—that’s not it, what’s left of you, mediating between what you’d call mind and body and I, by now biting my lip, call grief, the lines netting the enormous air like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch “as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts and catch on air.”Pace. Your trousers worn to mouse fur dragging on the stoop, your hip prongs barely holding them aloft, the past a phaeton, its sunlit reins bucking at before and after, but there is no after. V Or is there? For once, when you rock back on the chair I don’t say don’t do that, forelegs lifting, hooves pawing the air— Every departure’s an elopement, the shy cat fiddling while Rome sizzles, spoon mirror flipping us upside down. Son of Helios, rainbow fairy lights blazing, when one light goes out they all go out. At the top of the dune, the thorny crowns of buried trees, their teeter-totter branches a candelabra for the spiders’ silvery halo of threads. What a terrible business it is, saying what you mean. Speak, sky, the horizon scored by talons.

Today you find yourself guilty as the rim you split an egg against You press charges You spell out your name like the letters are medals for good conduct in a bad war The night moves in with you into your room until even your sleep is not your own Through the window the grass tells you to give up and you are trying but on the other hand things keep you: the moon, the cars, cars You undress yourself more deeply down like this is the way to get to the future You let the darkness medically examine you So much can’t be put back together To burn the house down to burn the house up It’s the same problem in any direction You’re matter You turn on the light