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Bones are easier to find than flowers in the desert, so I paint these: Fine white skulls of cows and horses. When I lie flat under the stars in the back of the car, coyotes howling in the scrub pines, easy to feel how those bones are so much like mine: Here is my pelvis, like the pelvis I found today bleached by the sun and the sand. Same hole where the hip would go, same white curve of bone beneath my flesh same cradle of life, silent and still in me.

It hangs from heaven to earth. There are trees in it, cities, rivers, small pigs and moons. In one corner the snow falling over a charging cavalry, in another women are planting rice. You can also see: a chicken carried off by a fox, a naked couple on their wedding night, a column of smoke, an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk. What is behind it? —Space, plenty of empty space. And who is talking now? —A man asleep under his hat. What happens when he wakes up? —He’ll go into a barbershop. They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair, To make him look like everyone else.

I   Recto Over the seaworthy cavalry arches a rocketry wickerwork: involute laceries lacerate indigo altitudes, making a skywritten filigree into which, lazily, LCTs sinuate, adjutants next to them eversharp- eyed, among delicate battleship umbrages twinkling an anger as measured as organdy. Normandy knitted the eyelets and yarn of these warriors’ armoring— ringbolt and dungaree, cable and axletree, tanktrack and ammobelt linking and opening garlands and islands of seafoam and sergeantry. Opulent fretwork: on turquoise and emerald, red instants accenting neatly a dearth of red. Gunstations issue it; vaportrails ease into smoke from it— yellow and ochre and umber and sable and out. Or that man at the edge of the tapestry holding his inches of niggardly ground and his trumpery order of red and his equipage angled and dated. He. II   Verso Wasting no energy, Time, the old registrar, evenly adds to his scrolls, rolling up in them rampage and echo and hush—in each influx of surf, in each tumble of raincloud at evening, action of seaswell and undertow rounding an introvert edge to the surge until, manhandled over, all surfaces, tapestries, entities veer from the eye like those rings of lost yesteryears pooled in the oak of your memory. Item: one Normandy Exercise. Muscle it over, an underside rises: a raggedy elegant mess of an abstract: a rip-out of kidstuff and switchboards, where amputee radio elements, unattached nervefibre conduits, openmouthed ureters, tag ends of hamstring and outrigging ripped from their unions and nexuses jumble with undeterred speakingtubes twittering orders as random and angry as ddt’d hornets. Step over a moment: peer in through this nutshell of eyeball and man your gun.

—for Pilar Coover Me, when I think of you I see Alley cats in your kitchen, God weeping at your openings, Individual acts of imagination, never Culligan men under Floorboards slipping hallucinogens into your water. Let me say I have imagined you Undressing guests before mirrors To let their dragonfly bodies Escape from human shells.

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours. All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains. After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall, we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident, the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order. Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers, setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking. I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous. The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant. When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles. Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs, a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside. In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls, it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles, the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls. When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails, work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip, the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages. Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us. However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood: we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday. Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions. I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest, the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so. I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool. I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks. But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves. Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

the target is a record of the past history of the target or forever hold your or told you so complacent mention repeats numerous trills in memory sugar and spice in the bag suppressed supposedly on an axis allow for the idea to rest

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets under the trees, catching the rain of  olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness of   the one covering the bad roof of  a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color inside the winter’s weeks. Another one took the shape of   the pile of   bricks underneath. Another flew off the back of a truck, black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air. I have seen the ones under bridges, the forms they make of sleep. I could go on this way until the end of the page, even though what I have in my mind isn’t the thing itself, but the category of   belief that sees the thing as a shelter for what is beneath it. There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over a wave. You cannot put a tarp over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken oil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind that sits in a corner and shreds receipts and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread, whose only recourse is language so approximate it hardly means what it means: He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember her name. He is old. He is ashamed.

Tarrargon, are you a wild boar? My friend, lemon zest, has not been that Thyme, Cognac,falooda glass noodle These things prowl the night without cape Gooseberries or bacalao Tarragon, are you a wild boar? Each time I eat you, I stop breathing Little owl, where is your happiness? Wake up + make people believe In you, gastrique + steaklette Is that chive embarrassed? To be with the savoy cabbage? Tarragon, are you a wild boar? I was born female, hyper-focused Let me trim your skirt, halibut It’s dragging salt against my oregano Buttered by butter in no butter Tarragon, are you a wild boar? It’s too bad the caper isn’t wearing A cape when the Peruvian potatoes Are sitting on a bed of coals while Floating down a river coconut On the verge of falling off A truffle, which is a Shadow floating inside of a shadow

The Tartar swept across the plain In their furs and silk panties Snub-nose monkey men with cinders for eyes Attached to their ponies like centaurs Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians Streaming from defiles like columns of ants Arraying their host in a vasty wheel White, gray, black and chestnut steeds 10,000 each to a quadrant Turning, turning at the Jenuye’s command This terrible pinwheel Gathering speed like a Bulgar dance Faster and faster Until it explodes, columns of horsemen Peeling away in all the four directions Hard across the puszta Dust from their hooves darkening the sky They fall upon village and town Like raptors, like tigers, like wolves on the fold Mauling the zsa-zsas And leaving them senseless in puddles of goaty drool Smashing balalaikas Ripping the ears off hussars and pissing in the wounds They for whom the back of a horse Is their only country For whom a roof and four walls is like unto a grave And a city,ptuh, a city A pullulating sore that exists to be scourged Stinky dumb nomads with blood still caked On shield and cuirass And the yellow loess from the dunes of the Takla Makan And the Corridor of Kansu Between their toes and caught in their scalps Like storm clouds in the distance Fast approaching With news of the steppes, the lagoons and Bitter Lakes Edicts, torchings, infestation The smoke of chronicles Finding their way by the upper reaches Of the Selinga and the Irtysh To Issyk-Kul, the Aral, and then the Caspian Vanquishing the Bashkirs and Alans By their speed outstripping rumor Tireless mounts, short-legged and strong From whose backs arrows are expertly dispatched As fast as they can be pulled from the quiver Samarkand, Bukhara, Harat, Nishapur More violent in every destruction This race of men which had never before been seen With their roving fierceness Scarcely known to ancient documents From beyond the edge of Scythia From beyond the frozen ocean Pouring out of the Caucasus Surpassing every extreme of ferocity From the Don to the Dniester The Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes Laying waste the Ostrogoth villages Taking with them every last cookie Then dicking the help These wanton boys of nature Who shot forward like a bolt from on high Routing with great slaughter All they could come to grips with In their wild career Their beautiful shifting formations Thousands advancing at the wave of a scarf Then doubling back or making a turn With their diabolical sallies and feints Remorseless and in poor humor So they arrived at the gates of Christendom

(excerpt) England, with all thy faults, I love thee still My country! and while yet a nook is left Where English minds and manners may be found, Shall be constrain’d to love thee.  Though thy clime Be fickle, and thy year, most part, deform’d With dripping rains, or wither’d by a frost, I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies And fields without a flow’r, for warmer France With all her vines; nor for Ausonia’s groves Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bow’rs. To shake thy senate, and from heights sublime Of patriot eloquence to flash down fire Upon thy foes, was never meant my task: But I can feel thy fortunes, and partake Thy joys and sorrows with as true a heart As any thund’rer there.  And I can feel Thy follies too, and with a just disdain Frown at effeminates, whose very looks Reflect dishonour on the land I love. How, in the name of soldiership and sense, Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth And tender as a girl, all essenc’d o’er With odors, and as profligate as sweet, Who sell their laurel for a myrtle wreath, And love when they should fight; when such as these Presume to lay their hand upon the ark Of her magnificent and awful cause? Time was when it was praise and boast enough In ev’ry clime, and travel where we might, That we were born her children.  Praise enough To fill th’ ambition of a private man, That Chatham’s language was his mother tongue, And Wolfe’s great name compatriot with his own. Farewell those honors, and farewell with them The hope of such hereafter!  They have fall’n Each in his field of glory: one in arms, And one in council.  Wolfe upon the lap Of smiling victory that moment won, And Chatham, heart-sick of his country’s shame. They made us many soldiers.  Chatham still Consulting England’s happiness at home, Secur’d it by an unforgiving frown If any wrong’d her.  Wolfe, where’er he fought, Put so much of his heart into his act, That his example had a magnet’s force, And all were swift to follow whom all loved. Those suns are set.  Oh rise some other such! Or all that we have left is empty talk Of old achievements, and despair of new. . . . There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.  The shifts and turns, Th’ expedients and inventions multiform To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms Thought apt, yet coy, and difficult to win— T’ arrest the fleeting images that fill The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, And force them sit, ’till he has pencill’d off A faithful likeness of the forms he views; Then to dispose his copies with such art That each may find its most propitious light, And shine by situation, hardly less, Than by the labor and the skill it cost, Are occupations of the poet’s mind So pleasing, and that steal away the thought With such address from themes of sad import, That lost in his own musings, happy man! He feels th’ anxieties of life, denied Their wonted entertainment, all retire. Such joys has he that sings.  But ah! not such, Or seldom such, the hearers of his song. Fastidious, or else listless, or perhaps Aware of nothing arduous in a task They never undertook, they little note His dangers or escapes, and haply find There least amusement where he found the most. But is amusement all?  studious of song, And yet ambitious not to sing in vain, I would not trifle merely, though the world Be loudest in their praise who do no more. Yet what can satire, whether grave or gay? It may correct a foible, may chastise The freaks of fashion, regulate the dress, Retrench a sword-blade, or displace a patch; But where are its sublimer trophies found? What vice has it subdu’d? whose heart reclaim’d By rigour, or whom laugh’d into reform? Alas! Leviathan is not so tam’d: Laugh’d at, he laughs again; and, stricken hard, Turns to the stroke his adamantine scales, That fear no discipline of human hands. The pulpit, therefore (and I name it, fill’d With solemn awe, that bids me well beware With what intent I touch that holy thing) The pulpit (when the sat’rist has at last, Strutting and vap’ring in an empty school, Spent all his force and made no proselyte) I say the pulpit (in the sober use Of its legitimate, peculiar pow’rs) Must stand acknowledg’d, while the world shall stand, The most important and effectual guard, Support and ornament of virtue’s cause.