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When I hurt you and cast you off, that was buccaneer work: the sky must have turned on the Bay that day and spat. We’d tarried on corners, we’d dallied on sofas, we were in progress, do you see? Yet stormcloud bruises bloomed where once we touched. The walls swam under minty fever; we failed to reach the long, low sleep of conquerors. Since I played wrong and you did too, since we were wrong, we need apologies; for your part in this sorry slip of hearts, you should walk on Golden Hill at night alone; for mine I will hang with my enemies, out on the long shore, our brigand bodies impaled on the horns of our failures, the cold day casting draughts through our brinkled bones.

Night. Or what they have of  it at altitude like this, and filtered air, what was in my lungs just an hour ago is now in yours, there’s only so much air to go around.They’re making more people

To strip away this incessant chatter, yes, but what lies underneath it? Death, of course, or our fear of death. Which is why we talk so much, bury our heads in books, turn forests into pages and pages into mirrors in which we see ourselves appear and disappear. When I look up from the story I've been reading about the Jews in Nazi Germany and the silence that closed their mouths forever, I see a girl outside the cafe smiling in at her father who smiles back but cannot hear her. She makes all kinds of gestures with her hands, mimes herself inside an invisible box and breaks down laughing. Then she gathers her breath and blows it against the window. It is not snowing outside, the leaves have hardly begun to turn, the season is merely poised for the long descent, but still the glass steams up. And in this little cloud of warmth that's come from deep inside her body, she writes a single joyful word, which vanishes almost before she finishes.

It is not the angel riding a goat, trying to make him go. It does no work with refusal or guilt, which loves only its contorted self. But fancies instead my terrier’s long pink tongue, how it teases out the bone’s marrow, tasting with all its muscle. The angel is silver, but so is the goat and the box on which they perch, a Victorian gesture in the mansion where I spent the fall. They have followed me home, their permanent shine presuming, while around me, everything withered, slowly froze, and began its turn toward white. The snow is nothing but a great emptiness, and I’m tired of trying to find a secret there. But look—one leaf skittering across the glazed surface catches its stem to stand upright, the shape of a hand waving.

The Soul has Bandaged moments - When too appalled to stir - She feels some ghastly Fright come up And stop to look at her - Salute her, with long fingers - Caress her freezing hair - Sip, Goblin, from the very lips The Lover - hovered - o'er - Unworthy, that a thought so mean Accost a Theme - so - fair - The soul has moments of escape - When bursting all the doors - She dances like a Bomb, abroad, And swings opon the Hours, As do the Bee - delirious borne - Long Dungeoned from his Rose - Touch Liberty - then know no more - But Noon, and Paradise The Soul's retaken moments - When, Felon led along, With shackles on the plumed feet, And staples, in the song, The Horror welcomes her, again, These, are not brayed of Tongue -

In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain. Does it rain in Spain? Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights. The dancers dance in long white pants It isn’t right to yence your aunts Come Uncle, let’s go home. Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart an artless fart in the home. Democracy. Democracy. Bill says democracy must go. Go democracy. Go Go Go Bill’s father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat. Now Bill says democracy must go. Go on democracy. Democracy is the shit. Relativity is the shit. Dictators are the shit. Menken is the shit. Waldo Frank is the shit. The Broom is the shit. Dada is the shit. Dempsey is the shit. This is not a complete list. They say Ezra is the shit. But Ezra is nice. Come let us build a monument to Ezra. Good a very nice monument. You did that nicely Can you do another? Let me try and do one. Let us all try and do one. Let the little girl over there on the corner try and do one. Come on little girl. Do one for Ezra. Good. You have all been successful children. Now let us clean the mess up. The Dial does a monument to Proust. We have done a monument to Ezra. A monument is a monument. After all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.

Who is quitting dogs today? Making them their sister? Who is stretched out by a lamppost sibling? Illuminated by ransom’s note? I was oblivious to pettiness until I saw its first handle: obey ignorance. Stomach decisiveness. By that, this decision . . . no decision. Let it be to gain all it can in one fetter . . . but if it be life, let it attempt a failed recognition. Let its thinker be the failure. My thinker is failure, and I want to teach it how to move in this world. Do you be or live? To any the other wants. To both these words, I fail to be. When I am, but when not . . . It is, as if alive.

It disappeared. It reappeared as chimney smoke that burnt through carcasses of swallows stilled, and that it portrayed no will was why I followed that smoke with this pair of eyes. It was that it didn’t need or require my belief that I leant upon it as a tired worker upon a gate.

To Norbert Valath To render the ocean one needs a whole year with Zoom in freezing fingers on a quarter-mile of coast. Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature and not the peacock-palette painters swear he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes. To render the ocean one needs a whole year on the quayside tracking the tide’s increasing stature, its drones and climaxes, the diminuendo when it shows sound is the one true vocabulary of nature. Nature plays bass clarinet in a Barcelona pop-up theatre. In a polo neck he solos the ocean. He tongues, he blows to render the ocean. One needs a whole year or centuries to capture even its least-most feature: like the boat-cove’s lapping, backwashed contraflows. Sound is the one true vocabulary of Nature, who’s lost in his MacBook, applying filter after filter to this day-long rock-pool’s jazz, its stadium of echoes. To render its ocean one needs a whole year: sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.

Down, unequal weight on his haunches and the rain driving his shirt sideways, his legs are as rigid as the stone and timber that props him up. Ears, half-opened lips slurred to bits; a head no longer able to troubleshoot the broken glass inside him. • Wiry treetops are blacker. The after-rain light diffused to near neon-gray. There was a boy seen by neighbors running the width of the field. One said he disappeared — as if he fell headlong into the horizon. Another said it wasn’t a boy, but a hart. Next to nothing left where Evans was found, but there was a sound box, some thing in which his soul made itself felt.