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It’s true we have invented quark-extraction, and this allows our aiming gravity at will; it’s true also that time can now be made to flow backward or forward by the same process. It may be true as well that what is happening at the focal point, the meristem of this process, creates a future kind of space, a tiny universe that has quite different rules. In this, it seems, whatever one may choose to do or be becomes at once the case. In short, we have discovered heaven and it’s in our grasp. However, the Patent Office has not yet approved and cites less positive aspects of this invention. First, it does not generate profit, and it does make obsolete all present delivery systems for our nukes. Then, it will let private citizens do things that only a chosen few, that is, OUR sort, should be allowed— fly freely from one country to any other, spreading diseases and bankrupting transportation. Home-heating, auto-making industries will be trashed, employment shelled, depressions spread worldwide, sheer anarchy descend. For these and other reasons, no one must know of this. . . .

Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the baseball scores, storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn the pages of a thousand books to read the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide, Ouspenski; note the terms: obscurantism, factorize, fagaceous, endocarp; descend the nervous stairs to hear the broken ends of songs that float through city air. In Osnabrück and Ogden, on the Passamaquoddy Bay, in Ahmednagar, Waco (Neb.), in Santa Fé, propelled by zeros, zinc, and zephyrs, always I’m pursued by thoughts of what I am, authority, remembrance, food, the letter on the mezzanine, the unemployed, dogs’ lonely faces, pianos and decay. Plurality is all. I sympathize, but cannot grieve too long for those who wear their dialectics on their sleeves. The pattern’s one I sometimes rather like; there’s really nothing wrong with it for some. But I should add: It doesn’t wear for long, before I push the elevator bell and quickly leave.

I imagine each enunciation, each syllable pronounced—Mississippi—makes a noose cinch somewhere, rope reduced to arousal, tightening. The pull, the hard-learned feel of vertebrae supple within a neck's column, and marrow's juice sucked clean until what remains are flutes of bone, a wind section of rubble. Whenever I meet Mississippi in a dream, it is always a landfill of labored breaths or a grand mammal crippled in morass. What did you ever want of us? I ask. It beams, The same you want for me—the subtle heft of razors beneath the magnolia tongue's lash.

Zipping your skirt, you rustle past, sand hissing through a glass, with the Bedouin snap and flash of static-electric sparks disturbing fabric. This morning’s charge could rouse The Desert Fathers of Sinai

Deafness to imperatives is profundity in the wise man, children and grandchildren don’t bother him, don’t alarm him. To represent a particular outlook, to act, to travel hither and yon are all signs of a world that doesn’t see clearly. In front of my window —

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow, find our hats, and ride the train. We pass a junkyard and the bay, then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel. You lose your hat. I find it. The train sighs open at Burlingame, past dark tons of scrap and water. I carry you down the black steps. Burlingame is the size of joy: a race past bakeries, gold rings in open black cases. I don’t care who sees my crooked smile or what erases it, past the bakery, when you tire. We ride the blades again beside the crooked bay. You smile. I hold you like a hole holds light. We wear our hats and ride the knives. They cannot fix you. They try and try. Tunnel! Into the dark open we go. Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

It's the other ones, who soon enough return to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest to their own deaths—in their gaiety and everyday distraction, they're so open and unguarded . . . anything could enter them; could claim them. It's the ones who weep incessantly that are saved for now, the ones who have taken a little of it into their systems: this is how inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult, a job: it requires time to complete. And the tears?—the salt of the folk saying, that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers and keeps a bird from flying; keeps it stationed in this world.

The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body, Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests, Childhood rushes toward death, a wind in those woods, Crashing through trees, dying out, Settling like a white mist over everything.

Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind, Straight sides, carven knees, Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm Or remonstrances. Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine In a pattern of angles. The quill of the fountain falters, woods rake on the sky Their brusque tangles. The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl, The golden quails, The pheasants, closed up in their arrowy wings, Dragging their sharp tails. The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent. What is forsaken will rest. But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds Fails on her breast.

That I might chisel a statue, line on line, Out of a marble’s chaste severities! Angular, harsh; no softened curves to please; Set tears within the eyes to make them shine, And furrows on the brow, deep, stern, yet fine; Gaunt, awkward, tall; no courtier of ease; The trousers bulging at the bony knees; Long nose, large mouth . . . But ah, the light divine Of Truth, – the light that set a people free!— Burning upon it in a steady flame, As sunset fires a white peak on the sky . . . Ah, God! To leave it nameless and yet see Men looking weep and bow themselves and cry— ‘Enough, enough! We know thy statue’s name!’