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I. Did he think that disguise would fool me? Gathering about His balding head those filthy rags, poor-mouthing His way beside my fire, then gazing into the looking glass Of my bride’s-mind to summon up the legend I’d seen last at the ashwood threshold twenty years ago, The husband who’d upped and sailed away on a black, Oar-swept ship of war to a place he called. . . I call Destroy. “Your son will vouch for me,” he claimed, “I saw your king On foreign soil. He wore a wine-dark, woolen cape Fastened by a brooch inlaid with gold, a brooch on which A great hound clenched and throttled to death a dappled fawn.” He knew, of course, I’d given Odysseus that very cape, Had dyed its wool that royal red, had buckled its folds With that same brooch. And so, I suppose, I passed his test. The salt tears soaked my cheek. A fact he took in silently Beneath his rags, though how could I not have recognized him With his poet’s words, his poet’s unfazed self-concern So skillfully playing my emotions? The truth is, However much I loved that man in the wine-dark cape, However much I’d longed for him, I’d have settled For the man with thinning hair, the beggar-king of Ithaca. II. Having slept alone year after year in the upper story Of our high-roofed home, having awakened nightly In that rooted, rightly far-famed bed he’d built by hand Around the bole of a thickset olive tree, I soon Discovered there are two known gates through which All dreams must come to pass. The first is made Of ivory, cleanly carved, the second of polished horn; Through ivory our dreams are will-o’-the-wisps, scant Tracings on the air, through horn they’re star-signs We’d be wise to chart our futures by. It was through horn It came that night he questioned me beside the fire, The contest of twelve axes, one for each month Of the year I’d lived through twenty times for him, Housebound to the labor of my hardwood loom. The thwarted suitors watched agog, he watched them watch, Though no one saw (how could they?) how the hand That strung his bow recalled my own hand spooling out New wool, that drew on strength enough to strike An arrow through a dozen axe-helve socket rings Recalled the heart it took each night to climb back Into the vaulted tomb of our empty, tree-housed bed. III. Waiting at the doorway while I was brushing back my hair, Odysseus stood and stared across the unraked terrace Gardens trashed from last night’s welcome home. One guttering pine-pitch torch still burned, its pool Of light apotheosized to a ringing lyre—the singer’s Who had begged him calm his bloodlust, spare One pauper soul among that heavy haul of slaughtered men. He’d been every inch the hero then, spattered with gore, His forehead glistening, dripping red. But this morning, He looked to me just as he had looked before: his thin Shirt clung like onion skin to his boxer’s ropy Shoulders, his young man’s muscled chest and arms; And as before, those faraway, slightly moonstruck eyes Seemed focused on a flyspeck at the world’s end. It struck me then that, even as he stood there, steeped In the memory of all this place brought home to him, He labored at the anchor of whatever in me Refused that death his heart most longed to master. And as before, I could see it coming, his going away, Those maddened gulls scavenging after the trim black ship My harbored longings had driven out of reach.

Everything has gender in Arabic. History is male. Fiction is female. Dream is male. Wish is female. Feminine words are followed by a circle with two dots over. They call it the tied circle, knotted with wishes which come true only when forgotten or replaced by the wishes of others. In the town of tied wishes, people feel great anticipation because a stranger will arrive today in her feminine sign. Someone says he saw her two dots glittering, refuting another’s vision of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness. So scary, he says,how the moon hides in her red circle

Life in unbridled collapse, Let tuneful praise ascend Not a single line out of step with my band, aboard the riverboat when the sun shown red and especially dark upon my room I was shown to 3464 once Jack Lon dons I was told. The black forest alcohols filled my mind, my one & only skull with rock crystal (The Butchers Field) Its grass & the stream cut my rooms in 3. I write & I laugh to think again upon the stream, its demon black mask lights under- neath My servants stay fine & lower their eyes I proclaim the empire, my coat of arms & cigarettes to be held across façades of cathedrals, crimson the flight. More than one death from a square bottled ink The MARVEL brand I enjoy reading signs through the fog— -HOTEL HUNTINGTON- Then that evening and all of Fox Plaza  was the same white A permanent stripe on my blue bike I raise my hood I think there are other lost men in surrounding blocks alike in their thinking “There is no other man to enjoy such fog besides me.”          to wander tracks in clear star cut ground I am sorry I said he was already high We got so high together and I forgot to say I had invested a lot in my first walkthrough the greatest Marco Polo single file best roulette There’s a bad moon on the rise and I’ve got quite a stash rubbings from the calligram graves, I have explained their hollows and brick a cross where it is written in script YOUNG BLOOD STRAIGHT EDGE Impossibly accurate                 the fifth wristwatch diamond on the 12 I have reached the cave    it has been shot up. & I am punished to this day ruby under black letterpress My name goes first.

Tremendous orange things are happening somewhere. I lay a wooden stick for stirring on the white note on the desk. I lay a stain on the clean note. Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea. Somewhere you are lying in a white bed. The clock on your thigh is ticking. Somewhere a human form is being lifted from the ground. Somewhere, yes, and I am counting. The clean note with its numbers has changed. I will remember. You are a location, with a bed. The road ends somewhere in the flooding river at dusk. Why here, strangers. A cartwheel in the stow hold of a ship. A stranger who wheels it on the ice. Somewhere the ship has frozen. The ship has frozen in the ice. A frozen form. The ship cannot be lifted from the purple sky at dusk. Stain in the somewhere. You are lying in a white bed. Why here is the river. On the thigh. Remember what we did with clocks. Orange and purple. Lovely trees in the frozen sky. Holding somewhere and threading thighs. Strangers. I lay a stain on the white bed. Remembering what tremendous purple things we did. The mind ends every thing stirring. Somewhere the ship is being lifted from the desert. Marvelous. You will change from the river location to the sea. Somewhere, things are happening. You are lying in the white bed beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed. Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.

The lad came to the door at night, When lovers crown their vows, And whistled soft and out of sight In shadow of the boughs. ‘I shall not vex you with my face Henceforth, my love, for aye; So take me in your arms a space Before the east is grey. ‘When I from hence away am past I shall not find a bride, And you shall be the first and last I ever lay beside.’ She heard and went and knew not why; Her heart to his she laid; Light was the air beneath the sky But dark under the shade. ‘Oh do you breathe, lad, that your breast Seems not to rise and fall, And here upon my bosom prest There beats no heart at all?’ ‘Oh loud, my girl, it once would knock, You should have felt it then; But since for you I stopped the clock It never goes again.’ ‘Oh lad, what is it, lad, that drips Wet from your neck on mine? What is it falling on my lips, My lad, that tastes of brine?’ ‘Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it.’

And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him it is time he got his booster shots, but then I realize I have no power over him whatsoever. He becomes increasingly light-footed until I lose sight of him downtown between the federal building and the post office. A registered nurse is taking her coffee break. I myself needed a break, so I sat down next to her at the counter. "Don't mind me," I said, "I'm just a hungry little Gnostic in need of a sandwich." (This old line of mine had met with great success on any number of previous occasions.) I thought, a deaf, dumb, and blind nurse, sounds ideal! But then I remembered that some of the earliest Paleolithic office workers also feigned blindness when approached by nonoffice workers, so I paid my bill and disappeared down an alley where I composed myself. Amidst the piles of outcast citizenry and burning barrels of waste and rot, the plump rats darting freely, the havoc of blown newspapers, lay the little shroud of my lost friend: small and gray and threadbare, windworn by the ages of scurrying hither and thither, battered by the avalanches and private tornadoes of just being a gnome, but surely there were good times, too. And now, rejuvenated by the wind, the shroud moves forward, hesitates, dances sideways, brushes my foot as if for a kiss, and flies upward, whistling a little-known ballad about the pitiful, raw etiquette of the underworld.

quincunx of succulents subtle colors and forms succinct in dust appropriate the pot assigned, set each for spill into Other always my core dream winding a garden secret in every sense

Oh happy shades—to me unblest! Friendly to peace, but not to me! How ill the scene that offers rest, And heart that cannot rest, agree! This glassy stream, that spreading pine, Those alders quiv'ring to the breeze, Might sooth a soul less hurt than mine, And please, if any thing could please. But fix'd unalterable care Foregoes not what she feels within, Shows the same sadness ev'rywhere, And slights the season and the scene. For all that pleas'd in wood or lawn, While peace possess'd these silent bow'rs, Her animating smile withdrawn, Has lost its beauties and its pow'rs. The saint or moralist should tread This moss-grown alley, musing, slow; They seek, like me, the secret shade, But not, like me, to nourish woe! Me fruitful scenes and prospects waste Alike admonish not to roam; These tell me of enjoyments past, And those of sorrows yet to come.

Skipping out from the major international cocktail party with my becleavaged blight, a jeroboam in her tight fist, I broke open my copy of Sarcasm for Beginners, i.e., men. Never had I seen so many pairs of to-the-elbow gloves. Never did I see a puttoed ceiling groan so with thin talk as the great, the grim and the gone pressed terrible flesh, so many penguins offering tastesome wisps and skimps from doilied salvers: cherry-shaded caviar, cheese puffs, dark sugared berries, dainty octopods, gently vinegared, with not enough tentacles to count the capes and stoles, fine bespoke pashminas, silk snoods, at least one vicuña suit, tainted with gold thread. I’d seen down a Blenheim, two Lime Rickeys and was eyeing a gamine mixologist who was straining out Savoy Royales when my raddled nemesis limped over to announce she had encountered my latest screed, all four foot eleven of her tortoiseishly quivering, a nubbin of cream cheese on her whiskery lip and her good eye withering my borrowed companionette as she leaned on air. I am not a man who has not known the turmoil women offer, the gift you accept of their wit, the way you’d slip a hand into a gloveful of cockroaches, comply with a last-minute call to join a seal cull. Tanya, I pouted, I am awed and honored you opened a window in your schedule even to glance at my inconsequential outpourings. At which point she clattered out a scoffing gibe so sour you couldn’t blend it with a chemistry set from Hamley’s and, seizing my escort by her neat wrist, we tore out onto Jermyn Street, along which I performed a sort of shuffle, one eye on the book and one on m’lady’s competition-standard backside as she led us to the Ritz.

After an hour in the infusion lab, Taxol dripping into her, fighting her cancer; after sitting nauseous next to a man vomiting into a Pepsi cup, she rose, palming the wall, stooping only to pick up a pen a doctor had dropped, giving it back to the doctor who had slipped it poorly into his coat.