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You are as even tempered as a frying pan In a sudden downpour A campsite in disarray A long time coming Laughter from two yards over The neighborhood a claim on space Involving multiple parties It must be Father’s Day Judging by the heightened attentions of daughters and sons Thus a man enjoys solitude, stillness, pink petals of the carrier rose And in a certain light The sonic continuum of tires against the road The sensation of being carried along toward the end of a sentence After the disappearance of the period Air to breathe, water to drink The suggestion box is empty Obsolete equipment piles up in nooks and crannies This is all wrong, that’s messed up We go on in and make ourselves comfortable The movie has just begun It’s Nick and Nora Charles and their little dog Asta They’re visiting Nick’s parents in the suburbs He’s on the wagon and trying to keep a low profile But of course she brags about him to the local paper And soon he’s embroiled in detective work despite himself There is crime everywhere, even here in the suburbs It must be human nature Desperate characters on the loose “Yoke yourself to your strongest conviction” Was a piece of advice derived from the Y in JOY But Pam doesn’t buy that And I say it sounds too slavish Remember the Groucho line “These are my principles If you don’t like them I have others” When the pen runs out of ink You simply replace the cartridge And continue writing To the sound of jet planes overhead It’s time to revive the typewriter For the benefit of kids Now entering the ranks of the scribe force Sliding the paper under the roller Striking the surface with heavy metal blows History curls right into the future A Möbius strip That brings bygone media around and back With all the drama, character, sound, light and destiny Alive in an imagination of living

White ash, you wait for me as I will wait for someone. What but skin feels the wind, what darkness makes distinctions? Breaking down dusk and dawn, housewreckers on horse scaffolds syncopate their hammers. Brick dust drifts like smoke, tents of habitation withdrawn, hinges of habit undone.

To live and not be Thine Own, Like Springtime is when birds are flown; Or liberty in prison bars, Or evening skies without the stars; Like diamonds that are lusterless, Or rest when there’s no weariness; Like lovely flower that have no scent, Or music when the sound is spent.

We kept only the keys, letters, and photos — everything else stayed behind when we left the house. That can happen when a nation changes overnight, when those you know turn into a gate of feathers — and the thing about feathers is, they know what's been missed. For years I watch my neighbor's house from others' windows— different countries, various homes, some of brick, some of stone. Some never imagine what a home can mean when an unfinished tune traps the ceiling. I pretend never to have seen a body midair, a father's hands planted on the ground— after all what we don't admit to never happened. But I couldn't change that day in Murcia, when water brought light to the door: I am seven it is the day before our departure, the day my father gives me a notebook, and I tell him, this is where I'll keep my country.

The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes; in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap. For all that, he won’t swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence in one chorus— —approach, development, climax, discard— and sound magnanimous. The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff— belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go— And that thing is his mood: a feeling violent and ordinary that runs in among standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.

The thing written is a sexual thing, may bite, tell a truth some have died for, even the most casual initialing is a touch of love and what love goes for. A sometime thing, it smiles or has an ugly grin, on the page or wall may be holy and a sin. Writing wants, must have, must know, is flesh, blood, and bone, proof we are not made to be alone. Beneath a dove and rainbow some bank their fire, wrap their erogenous zones in barbed wire. Writing may dance in ink flamenco, kneel before the cross, right wrongs, fall in love at first sight, honor the naked languages it holds tight, kidnap, suck or be sucked for hire, may look and look or sneak a look, it has eyes, can read, is remarkable. From the tower of sexual babble, when dreams were the beginning of writing, the angel of dreams descended, stair by stair, the stone watchtower became the first stone book. Writing never speaks word, may ache to talk, and yet each letter of any alphabet is a fragment of desire, like half and quarter notes on a staff, or a hawk, may swoop down, fly higher and higher to catch a word, and then another word. The sexual thing may be all love or malice, eunuchs writing in the Forbidden Palace where poets dressed in rags, or silk and lace. The thing written touches, kisses, cuddles, may be democratic, autocratic, medieval in the 21st century, feudal, imperial, animal, sexually digital, a Serf, a King, a Queen, la chose écrite est une chose sexuelle. I had a woman beautiful as the letter l . There is the passion of letters, each may mean another thing, be defaced, after a while. Writing leans forward, there is a certain optimism in the written word, a sexual sunrise that is not daybreak. Words, words, a carnival of wordplay on St. Nobody’s Day. Reader, look, there is an S, a snake on the cross of the letter T. The letter of love is still the open-legged V. How can I dot the i with humanity?

A man stood in the laurel tree Adjusting his hands and feet to the boughs. He said, “Today I was breaking stones On a mountain road in Asia, When suddenly I had a vision Of mankind, like grass and flowers, The same over all the earth. We forgave each other; we gave ourselves Wholly over to words. And straightway I was released And sprang through an open gate.” I said, “Into a meadow?” He said, “I am impervious to irony. I thank you for the word ... I am standing in a sunlit meadow. Know that everything your senses reject Springs up in the spiritual world.” I said, “Our scientists have another opinion. They say, you are merely phenomena.” He said, “Over here they will be angels Singing, Holy holy be His Name! And also, it works in reverse. Things which to us in the pure state are mysterious, Are your simplest articles of household use— A chair, a dish, and meaner even than these, The very latest inventions. Machines are the animals of the Americans— Tell me about machines.” I said, “I have suspected The Mixmaster knows more than I do, The air conditioner is the better poet. My right front tire is as bald as Odysseus— How much it must have suffered! Then, as things have a third substance Which is obscure to both our senses, Let there be a perpetual coming and going Between your house and mine.”

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue. We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen to their emotional language, and because we loved graceful profiles the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck. Even what was beyond us was recast in our image; we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.

Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing. This was America, after all, where everyone’s at liberty To remake her person, her place, or her poetry, And I lived in a town a long way from everything— Where discussions of “diversity” Centered mainly on sexuality. My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents, Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents, Two of whom stayed Chinese to their final days, Two of whom were all but defined by their expertise On the food of the country I was trying to excise. It canceled out the expensive center Of an intense undergraduate curriculum And excluded the only foreign language I could talk in. It wiped out my parents’ earliest years And converted them to 1950s Georgians Who’d always attended church and school, like anyone. My father had never paused at two water fountains And asked a white man which he should drink from, And never told his children what the answer had been. My mother had never arranged a migration, Solo at seventeen, from Taipei to wherever, But had simply appeared in Gainesville out of ether, And nothing about their original languages Had brought them together. Their children Had never needed to explain to anyone Why distinctness and mystery were not advantages When they were not optional, and never wondered If particular features had caused particular failures. For months I couldn’t write anything decent Because banned information kept trying to enter Like bungled idioms in the speech of a foreigner. I was my own totalitarian government, An HMO that wouldn’t pay for a specialist, And I was the dissident or patient who perished. The hope was to transcend the profanity of being Through the dissolution of description and story, Which I thought might turn out to be secondary To a semi-mystical state of unseeing, But everywhere I went there was circumstance, All of it strangely tainted by my very presence.

on the top shelf of the closet is the hat my father wears on special occasions it rests next to the large jar he saves pennies in his head is always bare when i see him walking in the street i once sat in his bedroom watching him search between sweaters and suits looking for something missing a tie perhaps then he stopped and slowly walked to the closet took the hat from the shelf i sat on the bed studying his back waiting for him to turn and tell me who died