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Man’s rich with little, were his judgment true, Nature is frugal, and her wants are few; Those few wants answer’d, bring sincere delights, But fools create themselves new appetites: Fancy and pride seek things at vast expence, Which relish not to reason nor to sense. When surfeit, or unthankfulness, destroys, In nature's narrow sphere, our solid joys, In fancy's airy land of noise and show, Where nought but dreams, no real pleasures grow; Like cats in air-pumps, to subsist we strive On joys too thin to keep the soul alive.

He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes to him almost breakfastless. "I have called — I hope I do not err — I am looking for a purchaser Of some score volumes of the works Of eminent divines I own, — Left by my father — though it irks My patience to offer them." And she smiles As if necessity were unknown; "But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles I have wished, as I am fond of art, To make my rooms a little smart, And these old books are so in the way." And lightly still she laughs to him, As if to sell were a mere gay whim, And that, to be frank, Life were indeed To her not vinegar and gall, But fresh and honey-like; and Need No household skeleton at all.

His Grace! impossible! what dead! Of old age too, and in his bed! And could that mighty warrior fall? And so inglorious, after all! Well, since he’s gone, no matter how, The last loud trump must wake him now: And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger, He’d wish to sleep a little longer. And could he be indeed so old As by the newspapers we’re told? Threescore, I think, is pretty high; ’Twas time in conscience he should die This world he cumbered long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that’s the reason, some folks think, He left behind so great a stink. Behold his funeral appears, Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears, Wont at such times each heart to pierce, Attend the progress of his hearse. But what of that, his friends may say, He had those honours in his day. True to his profit and his pride, He made them weep before he died. Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings; Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing’s a Duke; From all his ill-got honours flung, Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

"NOW YAHWEH ORDERED THAT A GREAT FISH SHOULD SWALLOW HIM." Into my backyard’s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline, Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens. From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block, neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men, laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight, in the middle of my world, my certain place, not stump roots on the cold Atlantic floor of mountains I’d imagined, one week every summer, from the hot Wildwood boardwalk. But just then Charlie lifted me above his head, saying “O Billy Boy you've never in your life seen this! Want it?” The ground gone, steep drag of thinned air, chicken squawk tingling in my ears with dim human voices. Charlie threw me in the sea. The underplace, swallowing my heart, opened like a horn of plenty, blood channels lit blue and red like pinball arteries, flesh-motes, mucus, sinew, pulsing viscera bits dripping from clothesline. Missile tracks horned across the ceiling. In the ribcage, stooped beggars crowded, kicking spongy gouts of something; deeper in the tunnel, toward the tail, in files winding out of sight, shaved heads, men and women in pajamas. Spear carriers paced the walls. Into my vaulted space came words not really words: shades, images with a worldly shape of meaning, but beyond me, aloof and hysterical. The silence wrapped me like a prickly woolen sleeve knit by my women’s voices, shouting, out there, unrecoverable, dense, while their horny hands plucked and the sweaty men teased, stuffing tacky down inside their headscarves. Inside, blood cells combed my walls, unfinished patterns seeped through as picturegrams that glided across the whale’s belly. A still life with ginger jar and pomegranates. A flayed, ripening Christ. An Ohio puddler stirring pigiron mash, whose back is the same one in Giotto’s Gethsemane that stays the hand slicing off a soldier’s ear. Mercury, my heart, the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things. Kettles steamed, tin basins quivered with guts, my dear hell’s bloodglyphs in things, in me. I’d not be whole in and of the world again. Quills cracked when Charlie put me down. In my backyard, in my head, women sang under a pier to the unformed sea, an unvoiced song I’d heard inside the monster, breezing now through clotheslines. Men scrubbed their hands at the spigot, the women sighing. Flies left charcoal scrawls on the air and grazed old stains; they lighted on my arms, not waiting, but constant, my familiars, until their manic newsiness went away. Then, in that twilight, slow, shadowless lightning bugs appeared, going on and off.

can kill you can fade your life away friends are all out shopping ain’t nobody home suicide hotline is busy and here i am on my own with a pill and a bottle for company and heart full of been done wrong i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric for a song saturday afternoons are killers when the air is brisk and warm ol’ sun he steady whispers soon the life you know will be done suicide line i can’t get you best friend out of town alone with a pill and a bottle i drink my troubles down the man i love is a killer the man i love is  thief the man i love is a junky the man i love is grief some call saturday the sabbath it’s the bottom of the line some say whether last or first, my heart’s gonna burst and there ain’t no help my way here with a pill and a bottle and a life full of been done wrong i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric for a song

Bury your heart in some deep green hollow Or hide it up in a kind old tree; Better still, give it the swallow When she goes over the sea. In Saturday’s Market there’s eggs a ’plenty And dead-alive ducks with their legs tied down, Grey old gaffers and boys of twenty— Girls and the women of the town— Pitchers and sugar-sticks, ribbons and laces, Poises and whips and dicky-birds’ seed, Silver pieces and smiling faces, In Saturday Market they’ve all they need. What were you showing in Saturday Market That set it grinning from end to end Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty—? Cover it close with your shawl, my friend— Hasten you home with the laugh behind you, Over the down—, out of sight, Fasten your door, though no one will find you, No one will look on a Market night. See, you, the shawl is wet, take out from under The red dead thing—. In the white of the moon On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder! Best make an end of it; bury it soon. If there is blood on the hearth who’ll know it? Or blood on the stairs, When a murder is over and done why show it? In Saturday Market nobody cares. Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping And still, for a long, long rest, There’s never a one in the town so sure of sleeping As you, in the house on the down with a hole in your breast. Think no more of the swallow, Forget, you, the sea, Never again remember the deep green hollow Or the top of the kind old tree!

Music is most sovereign because more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace. —Plato, The Republic The cranes are flying ... —Chekhov And here it comes: around the world, In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved, Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer, Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt In a township of corrugated metal roofs) And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse Strains of premeditated art, is now improvisation, The desperately new, where to the sine-curved Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates The death and cremation of history, Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes, And a girl wearing a skull That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain, Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen. Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions Of shootouts, of tortured ones in basements, Of cold insinuations before sex Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal. The girl tosses her head and dances The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume, The boy dances stealing the truck, Shooting his father. The point is to become a flying viper, A diving vulva, the great point Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself Into far other habitats, or seed That travels a migrant bird’s gut To be shit overseas. The creatures gamble on the whirl of life And every adolescent body hot Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots, These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip My hair and vibrate my pelvis Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise That imitates history’s catastrophe Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive, Maybe we’ll all survive. . . . At the intersection of poverty and plague The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

Saturday morning two hawks flew over the soccer field and swooped in low as Abram almost scored a goal. Moses, on the sideline, sat on a stray ball reading a book, not looking up at the game or the hawks or his brother who noticed. That night at the Basic Trust Day Care Poker Tournament I got knocked out with queen/nine against queen/jack by Dan Shiffman who seemed almost sad to beat me. I sucked on ginger candies and held new baby Phoebe Kate, born on the same due date as the baby I miscarried. When she left I cried and had more candies. In the end, Josh beat everyone and won a 40-inch flat-screen TV. Sunday morning I couldn’t sleep so got up early, went to the Hell’s Kitchen flea market and bought a dining table and chairs from a man named Toney. Bargained him down to $690 (including delivery) because “the chairs need new upholstery.” A 1950ish Danish with expandable top and funny splayed feet—it reminds me of my late Grandma Lotty, her sister Marguerite, and the heavy-laden tables of childhood. I’ve no idea what it will look like with my small family gathered round or if I’ll overworry the polished surface. We’ll see— it arrives on Tuesday. This morning I got a stack of papers from sophomore lit. The top two had the author’s name misspelled. I’ve not yet looked at any others. I talked in class about how Art Spiegelman chose realism over sentiment, how we conflate historical time with personal time, how on 9/11 I took my nine-month old son to his first day of day care and the city expoloded, went up in smoke, and no one but me cares that he spent hours there, only nine months old, while we watched TV in our phone-jammed airspace, breathed in fumes, tried to give blood, wondered was there anywhere, anywhere we could or should flee to?— Josh called right after class and said he’d gotten “strong intent” from an agent who’s “all about the money.” Nothing disastrous happened this week. Not so far. Unless you count what I saw next, between classes on my way to read student poems at Empanada Mama’s on 48th and 9th. A teenage boy lying on his side in the middle of the street. The traffic stopped and a crowd watched while six or seven other boys ran back and forth and stamped down hard on his skull. I turn a gag into a kind of cough and dial 911 We’ve already called the fucking police, says a woman as I retch into an empty trash can. Finally three teenage girls surround the boy and the other boys move off. Later, on my way back to Fordham, I stop a cop and ask about the boy.EMTs got him, says the officer. They had no shame, no fear, even with all of us watching . . . I tell him. They’re kids, ma’am, he says.You know what kids is like. Tonight in Writer’s Workshop I & II I read two cantos from Model Homes by Wayne Koestenbaum and then “A Poet’s Life” by David Trinidad. These poems hijack form and make it present, contemporary, immediate. Look how Wayne puts a plumber and lovers, his mother, porn mags, fashion into terza rima that lead us along, punch drunk, addicted to real life. And oh how David’s crown of sonnets breaks our hearts!

These grapes of stone were being proffered, friend. — John Berryman grapes, rough-touched and round, stone- carved, to be squeezed into the fundaments of rock wine. She imagines it would be cold, not sought for its smoothness, and likely full of grit if not refined with care. The satyr laughs carelessly for one caught in stone. The cracked edges of his mouth spill grit as he leers after the loss of his fundaments which fall along the smooth, cold torso plane, exhibiting immaculate coolness at this literal loss of face. Carefully, she strokes his head, as if smoothing the fetlocks handcrafted from stone. Her affection is unforced, a fundamental attraction to those beautiful, gritty things made lovely by decay, their gritted teeth so much more interesting than the art gallery’s cold geometrics, which appear fundamental but fail to consider the careless chaos spinning at the stone center of all smooth creations. And those grapes! Their unsmooth surface mirrors the messy passion flushing the grit- dusted cheek, the hideous mouth of crumbling stone. What heat from the Dionysian’s cold, brittle fruit! The obliteration of all care if she could only perform the fundamental act of eating. She thinks about wilderness, fun, mental liberation, dancing her soles smooth, pleasure as pervasive as care is now, her feet a frenzied blur on the gritty forest floor, shaking and pummeling out the cold as she prances over starlit stones. She does not care who sees her, as she grips the stone grapes, feels the smooth, crumbling cold enter her hand, fingers embracing a thing more fundamental than earth, bone, grit.

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares. To make, you first have to create materials. Re: man , we know the rib removed. But,before— ? Forget ash to ash, dust & c. Stick a floating rib (i.e. thoracic 11–12, y’know — “Edenic”) in a glass of  water with the promise it’ll grow roots like leek or fur like chia. The joke’s Crusoe astride the bone or   Jim & Huck paddling rustic as a ballpoint pen will go. —Nn- o. (That’s not a plank