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In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour, two figures emerge from their scalloped house carrying sledges that they clap, in turn, against the surface of the bell. By legend they are summer and winter, youth and age, as though the forces of plenty and of loss played equally on the human soul, extracted easily the same low bronze note spreading upward from the encumbrance of the village, past alluvial fields to the pocked highland where cattle shift their massive heads at this dissonance, this faint redundant pressure in the ears, in the air. From the village, the mountain seems a single stone, a single blank completion. Seeing the summit pierce the abstract heavens, we reconstruct the valley on the mountain— a shepherd propped against his crook, birds enthralled on a branch, the branch feathering the edge of the canvas—transposing such forms as can extend the flawed earth and embody us, intact, unaltering, among the soft surprising trees of childhood, mimosa, honey locust and willow. Wood in the midst of woods, the village houses are allied in a formal shape beside a stream, the streets concluding at the monument. Again the ravishing moment of the bell: the townspeople, curious or accustomed, stop to count the strokes, odd or even—the confectioner counting out the lavendar candies for his customer, the butcher, the greengrocer, the surgeon and the constable—as the housewife stands on the stoop, shaking her mop, and sees the dust briefly veil the air, an algebra of swirling particles.

three times the snake appeared before me & like a gun said follow when you hear fire keep your body close to the ground the snake said point blank I am here for your protection I don’t have a trigger but I have a tongue to your neck to your ear to your temple follow me down the barrel three shots to steady ready the gray-eyed snake spit warming its body along the crack you can’t go back from where you are unarmed handle the snake the way you handle a gun at your belt with a glove spirit guide the gun away from the body follow each bone as it moves up & down the back

The telephone company calls and asks what the fuss is. Betty from the telephone company, who’s not concerned with the particulars of my life. For instance if I believe in the transubstantiation of Christ or am gladdened at 7:02 in the morning to repeat an eighth time why a man wearing a hula skirt of tools slung low on his hips must a fifth time track mud across my white kitchen tile to look down at a phone jack. Up to a work order. Down at a phone jack. Up to a work order. Over at me. Down at a phone jack. Up to a work order before announcing the problem I have is not the problem I have because the problem I have cannot occur in this universe though possibly in an alternate universe which is not the responsibility or in any way the product, child, or subsidiary of AT&T. With practice I’ve come to respect this moment. One man in jeans, t-shirt and socks looking across space at a man with probes and pliers of various inclinations, nothing being said for five or ten seconds, perhaps I’m still in pajamas and he has a cleft pallet or is so tall that gigantism comes to mind but I can’t remember what causes flesh to pile that high, five or ten seconds of taking in and being taken in by eyes and a brain, during which I don’t build a shot gun from what’s at hand, oatmeal and National Geographics, or a taser from hair caught in the drain and the million volts of frustration popping through my body. Even though. Even though his face is an abstract painting called Void. Even though I’m wondering if my pajama flap is open, placing me at a postural disadvantage.Breathe I say inside my head, which is where I store thoughts for the winter.All is an illusion

The spirit is too blunt an instrument to have made this baby. Nothing so unskilful as human passions could have managed the intricate exacting particulars: the tiny blind bones with their manipulating tendons, the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae, the chain of the difficult spine. Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear, with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain. Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No, no desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body's ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and their pain.

Hair rush, low swoop— so those of us stuck here on earth know—you must be gods. Or friends of gods, granted chances to push off into sky, granted chances to hear so well your own voice bounced back to you maps the night. Each hinge in your wing’s an act of creation. Each insect you snick out of air a witness. You transform obstacles into sounds, then dodge them.

I steal your mailbox, leave gum on your sidewalk. I seduce your sister, ignore your wife. I tear one page from each of your books. I convince you that I am your friend. * When people ask about you, I shake my head. When they tell about you, I nod. * Today, I hang myself from a greased flagpole outside your picture window. Yesterday, I stole your curtains.

Little paper cuds we made by ripping the corners or edges from homework and class notes then ruminating them into balls we’d flick from our fingertips or catapult with pencils or (sometimes after lunch) launch through striped straws like deadly projectiles toward the necks of enemies and any other target where they’d stick with the tiniest splat, I hope you’re still there, stuck to unreachable ceilings like the beginnings of nests by generations of wasps too ignorant to finish them or under desktops with blunt stalactites of chewing gum, little white words we learned to shape and hold in our mouths while waiting to let them fly, our most tenacious utterance.

abdominal and/or epigastric pain, digestive issues, heart pain could the opium have gone bananas tripped a deeper horror? say the chiu chau defeat the green gang take control of the comprador colony make a chungking mansion out of every high-rise tower n tu yueh-sheng n chiang kai-shek kick mao tse-tung in his long march and blast chinese workers back to american levels of oppression fragrant harbor as chicago of the east all the girls go suzie and a thousand gross-out william holdens fantan the port reveals america’s fascist sympathies sooner land of the free goes all man in the high tower and china industrializes quicker on gangster cash enters the arms race and puts mutual assured destruction on notice what reversal would right its left then? say hannah arendt waxes total recall n chow yun-fat schwarzeneggers our cyborg asses all the way to daddy cool too cool for nuclear winter school

Complex amaryllis — two-faced, multiflorus, wrath-spathed ball of ire — grows flagrantly unfragrant. Pulp-fiery the take-no-prisoners Haemanthus. Bully! Bully! Bully the bloodflower! (Blood- thirsty suffice it to suffuse.) Transfuse the lily-livered, the raging un-aromatic, the arrogant blood-rivering spleen.

Unblacken the holy mallow, the incorrupt, the foregut inconclusion. St. Cuthbert’s cole, a stalky stand-up, the deadpan peevish. Splenetic, the marooned fascicles, the testy watchman- hockleaf-clock. Ad hoc the anti- antibodies, the ripped-open open-pollinating poultice, the self-sowing aggrievement.