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5 THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS Combed thru the piers the wind Moves in the clever city Not in the doors but the hinges Finds the secret of motion As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices,   murmurs Flaws In the wind Fear        fear At the lumber mastheads And fetched a message out of the sea again Say angel                say powers Obscurely   ‘things And the self’ Prosody Sings In the stones to entrust To a poetry of statement At close quarters A living mind ‘and that one’s own’ what then             what spirit Of the bent seas Archangel of the tide brimming in the moon-streak comes in whose absence earth crumbles 6 Silver as The needle’s eye Of the horizon in the noise Of their entrance row on row the waves Move landward        conviction’s Net of branches In the horde of events the sacred swarm avalanche Masked in the sunset Needle after needle more numerous than planets Or the liquid waves In the tide rips We believe       we believe Beyond the cable car streets And the picture window Lives the glittering crumbling night Of obstructions and the stark structures That carry wires over the mountain One writes in the presence of something Moving close to fear I dare pity no one Let the rafters pity The air in the room Under the rafters Pity In the continual sound Are chords Not yet struck Which will be struck Nevertheless yes 7 O withering seas Of the doorstep and local winds unveil The face of art Carpenter, plunge and drip in the sea Art’s face We know that face More blinding than the sea    a haunted house    a limited Consensus unwinding Its powers Toward the thread’s end In the record of great blows   shocks Ravishment   devastation   the wood splintered The keyboard gone in the rank grass swept her hand Over the strings and the thing rang out Over the rocks and the ocean Not my poem   Mr Steinway’s Poem   Not mine   A ‘marvelous’ object Is not the marvel of things twisting the new Mouth   forcing the new Tongue   But it rang 8 THE TASTE Old ships are preserved For their queer silence of obedient seas Their cutwaters floating in the still water With their cozy black iron work And Swedish seamen dead    the cabins Hold the spaces of their deaths And the hammered nails of necessity Carried thru the oceans Where the moon rises grandly In the grandeur of cause We have a taste for bedrock Beneath this spectacle To gawk at Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid Has covered them, a black splintering Under the eyes of young wives People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind At every summit Our overcoats trip us Running for the bus Our arms stretched out In a wind from what were sand dunes 9 THE IMPOSSIBLE POEM Climbing the peak of Tamalpais the loose Gravel underfoot And the city shining with the tremendous wrinkles In the hills and the winding of the bay Behind it, it faces the bent ocean Streetcars Rocked thru the city and the winds Combed their clumsy sides In clumsy times Sierras withering Behind the storefronts And sanity the roadside weed Dreams of sports and sportsmanship In the lucid towns paralyzed Under the truck tires Shall we relinquish Sanity to redeem Fragments and fragmentary Histories in the towns and the temperate streets Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn The courageous and precarious children 10 BUT SO AS BY FIRE The darkness of trees Guards this life Of the thin ground That covers the rock ledge Among the lanes and magic Of the Eastern woods The beauty of silence And broken boughs And the homes of small animals The green leaves Of young plants Above the dark green moss In the sweet smell of rot The pools and the trickle of freshwater First life,   rotting life Hidden starry life it is not yet A mirror Like our lives We have gone As far as is possible Whose lives reflect light Like mirrors One had not thought To be afraid Not of shadow but of light Summon one’s powers

A silver watch you've worn for years is suddenly gone, leaving a pale white stripe blazing on your wrist. A calendar, marked with appointments you’ve meant to keep, disappears, leaving a faded spot on the wall where it hung. You search the house, yard, trash cans for weeks, but never find it. One night the glass in your windows vanishes, leaving you sitting in a gust of wind. You think how a leg is suddenly lost beneath a subway train, or taxi’s wheel, some slippery afternoon. The child you've raised for years, combing each lock, tailoring each smile, each tear, each valuable thought, suddenly changes to a harlequin, joins the circus passing in the street, never to be seen again. One morning you wash your face, look into the mirror, find the water has eroded your features, worn them smooth as a rock in a brook. A blank oval peers back at you, too mouthless to cry out.

When my dad first started to die All my mom could remember Was the time he kicked her out After they first started dating So that he could go play golf It is the sort of thing we all remember When we feel death upon us I remember he died twice And once in my dream I just had to see him all nursed and swaddled as if he were sleeping But he wasn’t sleeping I stood in the white light of the nursing home bathroom With the sun spilling everywhere on me And tried to talk to him, but never, he’d never listen People don’t always listen to you when they are dead But that’s not sad I get tired And I don’t listen to one Goddamn thing you are saying But that is because most of the time you bore me And when I am finally asleep it is really nice just to dream I have seen a lot of things in this life But one thing I saw most readily Was that despite his eternal heartbreak And girlish silliness Mike’s face was kind of sweet, a sweet wind He is going to think it is weird that I put him in this poem But I don’t think it is weird that I put him in this poem

After Kristen Sze-Tu the likelihood of forgetting the dress she wore when she was young the road to Likas Bay pictures fell down in the earthquake we could keep them we could throw them all away everything I never asked my grandmother I can understand but I can’t speak no one has played that piano since New Zealand is so far away from here let me translate for you the poem on the wall

Magic Wayne with flowers; Wanye West; Box-of-Tricks Wayne; Wayne sad on Facebook, proving he loves his daughter; the sporty Wayne — loves himself skinny; Bald Wayne, head like a rocking chair; Amy Waynehouse; Wayne the ironic; Fat Wayne — tits pushed beneath a Fred Perry Wayne; Wayne from near Slough; Ugly Wayne — the unlikely mess of his wife Wayne — canned laughter; Wayne who renamed another Wayne Fleabag; Track-suited Wayne — your hubcaps, his pockets; Home and A-Wayne; Randy Wayne; Wayne, fountains of him, every drop snug to someone’s mum; Wayne, boyfriend of Stacey; Wayne-ker; Wayne the rap star, gold teeth, grime; Wayne the Superhero, Wayne the Cowboy; Dancing Wayne — in tights; It’s-Wayning-Men; a cavalcade of Waynes fucking each other up in a Geoff Hattersley poem — in a pub, in Barnsley; Purple Wayne; Wayne’s World Wayne; Wayne “Sleng Teng” Smith; A-Wayne in a Manger; all of them have stopped what they’re doing, all of them divided in two rows and facing each other, all of them, arms raised, they are linking fingers, all of them: an architrave through which 
I celebrate, marching like I am the bridegroom, grinning like I am the bride

From now on they always are, for years now they always have been, but from now on you know they are, they always will be, from now on when they cry and you say wryly to their mother,better you than me, you’d better mean it, you’d better hand over what you can’t have, and gracefully.

you know I wanted to know which one, the bridges are all made of metal out here, the diners are still chrome-plated-affairs, a silver lunch box you could almost pick up and carry on your way home but instead you fit yourself inside of its dents, bulky, heavy metal, you just went for the leather jacket, you know I flung myself through that metal that was so heavy, no not mental, but metal, I flew threw(ough) the Blue Sky Diner, right through Sunnyside's train yards, so high I saw both the trees and trains, the tops of the semitrucks that squish through skinny streets with not metal but bricks beneath the surface, you know it was all one and the same, unironic heavy metal, you know there is such a thing, I hate to have to say it this way, you know under the bridge near Skillman High School is the best place for a heavy metal concert next to the metal Queensboro Bridge, next to the Blue Sky Diner flying in the sky, adjacent to Sky Line Auto and landing for a beer with a splash at the Fire Water Inn - you know you're on fire, in the water, and the metal, hot, dunked into it, sizzles - yeah, I know you said the riffs sounded like metal, I know exactly which ones, which dented sides the notes screeched to and fro to, over and over, a riff engaged in a tiff of metal, the most perfect sound, perfect sound of all

‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed. ‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’ Something about his brother dying. The serfs’ punishments have not ceased to suppurate on their backs. Woodlots. People. Someone crying under the yellow autumn birchgrove drove him wild: A new set of resolves: When gambling, that almost obsolete fever, or three days with the gypsies sparked him into pure ego, he could, just the same, write home, ‘Sell them.’ It’s true. ‘Still,’ (someone who loved her said, cold and firm while she dissolved, hypocrite, in self disgust,lectrice) ‘Still, he kept on. He wrote all that he wrote; and seems to have understood better than most of us: to be human isn’t easy. It’s not easy to be a serf or a master and learn that art. It takes nerve. Bastard. Fink. Yet the grief trudging behind his funeral, he earned.’

You watch the night like a material Slowly being crammed into a tube of rooms; It showers into gunshot, pepper, dew, As if a hand had squeezed it at one end, Is blank as innocence when daylight comes Projecting sunlit patches on the wall That fade. Too much is going on, too much Of life, you say, for you to live alone On top of an old tenement, on a train That might start off sometime, but never does. Your view is gone. Turn around, and boom!, A park appears between two fixed ideas Whose narrow aperture of sky in time Will house the slums of 1989 . . . Now New York is feigning its gray dark London winter. Invisible uptown Is out there somewhere, raining on its own. Palmed in the dusty pane, a circle bares A scene that seems reprinted from the past: A man with a dog is walking very fast Along a path among the stunted trees Of the little square below. He disappears.

Someone, and no matter who, inhabits my head like it’s an empty house, he enters, he leaves, he bangs each door behind him, powerless I put up with this ruckus. Someone, and maybe it’s me, palms my most private thoughts, he crumples them, returns them to dust. Someone, and it’s much later now, slowly walks across the room and, not seeing me, stops to contemplate the havoc. Someone, and no matter where, collects the pieces of my shadow.