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There will be no edges, but curves. Clean lines pointing only forward. History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice. Women will still be women, but The distinction will be empty. Sex, Having outlived every threat, will gratify Only the mind, which is where it will exist. For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs. The oldest among us will recognize that glow— But the word sun will have been re-assigned To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device Found in households and nursing homes. And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged, Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift In the haze of space, which will be, once And for all, scrutable and safe.

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and cybernetics, when we set up exhibits in the cafeteria for the judges to review what we’d made of our hypotheses. The class skeptic (he later refused to sign anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental degradation of language) chloroformed mice, weighing the bodies before and after to catch the weight of the soul, wanting to prove the invisible real as a bagful of nails. A girl who knew it all made cookies from euglena, a one-celled compromise between animal and plant, she had cultured in a flask. We’re smart enough, she concluded, to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland, poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed he really had built it when a kid no one knew showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that the tiniest particles could be changed into something even harder to break. And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now, it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes to paint it on the backs of shaven mice. She wanted to know what it took, a little vial of sure malignancy, to prove a daily intake smaller than a single aspirin could finish something as large as a life. I thought of this because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow became extinct. It may never be as famous as the pterodactyl or the dodo, but the last one died today, a resident of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water and they inflate. One other thing this brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

Just now I touched my chest And felt my heart quivering there. This must be one of the bad times. I think it is quivering with remorse And exhaustion. Once I saw a heart Beating in a documentary. I was a very Little girl and the sight disgusted me. Throbbing and not stopping my heart betrays Me and yet remains sure and true, a thing Of nature. Earth bleeding Its guts out on the sea floor exhausts Me with remorse and shame, and yet I have to trust it As wealth is proven by how terribly it devastates Itself, and I am but one symptom among billions of the wealth Of Earth. A tired feeling that is recuperated by a passing spaceship Or an infinitude like fame but more universal. I will have to miss you Earth; I miss you already. And yet when I touch myself whom I should Not trust it is still only the heaviest and most jealous feelings that bind me to you, like blood.

Of course I chose the terry cloth surrogate. Milkless artifice. False idol. Everyone, I’m told, has a mother, but Master bred me in a laboratory, his colony of orphans. Rhesus macaque.Macaca mulatta. Old World monkeys, my matriarchs ruled the grasslands and forests long before white men like him weaned their whiteness and maleness from our chromosomes, slashed and burned our home, what they once called The Orient. French Indochina. Việt Nam. Master, like a good despot, besotted and dumbstruck, dying to discern the genesis of allegiance, the science of love and loss, nature versus nurture, segregated me at birth from my maker, pelt sopping with placental blood. In a chamber where he kept track of me, his pupils recorded my every movement, my every utterance, hoping I might evince to them a part of themselves. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew famine and emaciation, and nevertheless I picked that lifeless piece of shit because it was soft to hold. Who wouldn’t want that? Though it couldn’t hold me, I clung to the yellow-face devil as though it was my true mother and I grasped the function of motherhood: witness to my suffering, companion in hell. Unlike infants with wire mothers I didn’t hurl myself on the floor in terror or tantrum, rocking back and forth, colder than a corpse. I had what Master believed to be a psychological base of operations. Emotional attachment. Autonomy. Everything he denied and did to me, his ceaseless cruelty concealed as inquisition, unthinkable until it was thought, I endured by keeping for myself the wisdom he yearned to discover and take credit for. Love, like me, is a beast no master can maim, no dungeon can discipline. Love is at once master and dungeon. So don’t underestimate me. Simple- minded and subservient as I might appear to be, I gathered more about Master than he did about me, which, I guess, is a kind of fidelity conceived not from fondness but fear magnified by fascination. Master made me his terry cloth surrogate, his red-clawed god, nursing his id on my tits, and for that, I pitied him. All this time he was the animal. All this time he belonged to me.

In the old place, there was no place that did not see me. Wherever I went mothers whispered about me like a Greek chorus: I heard that boy...    I heard that. I was just a boy. But it was true, what they said, that I liked other boys, that I had stolen Sarah’s, though he was four years older and they were very much in love. I made him break up with her in a Chili’s parking lot while I waited inside. I was fourteen. How embarrassing to have been fourteen, to have eaten at that Chili’s, often. That summer I had no taste for anything but him. Faintly of chlorine. When he left for college I had no one. Sarah’s friends stared me down at school. I found it was better, if I could not be no one, to be someone. Small, but particular. Specified, which was an apprenticeship for special. Cold, another word for cool.

Sharpen your wit— Each half of it— Before you shut Scissors to cut Shear skin deep Underneath wool Expose the sheep Whose leg you pull

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief; The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!

Now as the farmer sits at his accounts Reviewing fleeces neath deciduous beeches And notes in red contented ink Net profits of his quite impossible serenity; As graded apples marketably beautiful Into the bushel-baskets sink And trussed hay to the tin roof reaches, And where red tiles through darkening trees are reared A whole year's work is sold in sacks of meal; Now suddenly running Drops like a sprig Of oak in a gale on the neck The little wriggler, Vindictive-legged cunning, Drops like a fleck Of blood on a finger ring Crooking in his sting. It wriggles and stops, Wriggles and turns Through copper ferns Through stubble of crops Into the garden of his most impossible serenity. Chrysanthemums Wilt in alarm As dangerous comes Its arching arm A probable harm Nearer to his impossible serenity. Brambles turn sour Berries crinkle All fruits, Every flower, All roots wrinkle: The trees' atour Lapses, and the power Of his impossible serenity Collapses. The scorpion poison grips, its patterns spread Like wine that trickling on a dusty floor Hence and thence makes pellets and canals. Asphodel, improbable, beside the river bed Is found rank ramsons with a garlic smell. And cider in a dirty cask, lovelike, turns vinegar. Where had been pears and pippins, is a row of rotten balls, Globes of mundungus, faced with foul fungus, And locusts swarm to make the end complete. The last bee disembowelled waves its dislocated feet. Diseased the last elm falls, and with it falls The indistinct last glint of Dionysus Lysius. Earth is with scorpions like spiders hung. From every tile and brick they flick Like leaping twisting mixing flies on dung. A pretty virgin makes a pretty shrew, As those lo longer virgins also do, Because they are no longer so, or else because they are. The fracasado, self-considering as from far, By force of self-perverted scales Pities himself for impotence, and rails Oftener therefore: more he pities, more he fails. The scolding wife drives man to keep a scolding whore: If either dies, he grieves because she scolds no more, And scorns the other still because she scolds. The man whose one wife makes him ten cuckolds Wishes the girl were plain: she finds no joys In playing with her multiplicated boys, Wishes herself plain too, to find her joy in one. Whose wife Is dutiful and bashful all her life Thinks he would be happier if she were loved by other men. Surely some wit usurps the throne of Cypris, when Woman so seems what never woman was, For man to caper to as man should not. The golden mean is not. The man of business bonded to his trade Postpones his culture till his fortune has been made. The cultured man to realize his will Can find no means, nor wherewithal to touch His learning, since his culture costs too much. Reformers, visionaries, poets, other such, Because their vision real is, too sane their wit, The multitude they seek to benefit Lunatic calls them: and although they spurn Others' opinions, lunatic for lack of heed they turn, Parodying their visions of perfection. The land, too stupid to desire a change, Too lazy for that mental insurrection, Yet knowing their salvation lies In broader education Like cats enough uneasy to surmise They have the mange, Further enlightenment refuses And its chief men accuses Of unenlightenment, With consequent Stagnation. Over its losses Autumn its mosses Draws: the dormice go to sleep. In the shorter afternoons Determined to forget, the caterpillars crawl Into the weak oblivion of cocoons. To easier life the coward birds have all Flown from the towns and woods and pools: But some remain at large, poor ignorant fools. The bats are wiser, who hang upside down, Less crazily inverted than the town: Snails in cement immure their sleepy souls: Less mad, though timid, are the celibate Ferns that abide the next arriving spring To unroll fronds again, when warblers sing, Meantime intelligently hibernate, And delicately, Up to date. But we as leaves evacuate a lime Cannot deceive ourselves nor bide our time: Forced to retire by buds that seize our place, Self-superannuated, in disgrace, Know but too well that what we most deride In others is the poison on our side, Stung by the poison we ourselves put up Ourselves the poisoned cup We give our intellectual pride To sup. A scorpion drops from a unicorn's nape Into the virgin's lap. A scorpion drops from blood Xanthippê's tongue And Socratês though he have wrung A whole night's liquor from a score kulixes And sadly his wine mixes, Drinking all below the table, Wanders, constitutionally unable To drink himself unwise. Yes, even him approaching now to weigh these things The scorpion stings. This belt of fretted stars that so promiscuously plays Upon our eyes, we learn to name them all, Picking our favourites out like horses in a race. But now their steady passages recall How, geared to the years, They tick our lives out: and we cease to see Much hope in false futurity: Instead we falsify stars that have been With promise that we alter since those stars, Raising reality Not in what we see, Nor in what meteors there yet may be, But in fixed stars we would we once had seen.

Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it, my zither on a double looking feeble as a "promising" first book. Oedipal & reckless, my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks ahead, & perhaps the muse would smile upon me with some s es or some blanks. January, Vermont: snowflakes teased the windows of the Burlington airport bar. The waitress tallied tips & channel-surfed above the amber stutter of the snowplow's light: it couldn't keep up, either. Visibility to zero, nothing taking off & his dulcimer before me (50 bonus points for "bingos") like a cautionary tale. The night before I'd been his warm up act, the audience of expensive preppies doubling to twenty when he shambled to the podium to give them Martial & his then-new poems. "Why do you write something nobody reads anymore?" queried one little trust fund in a blazer. "Because I'm willing to be honestly confused & honestly fearful."Il miglior fabbro, a.k.a.Prez: sweet & fitting honorifics he has left upon the living's lips. Sweet & fitting too that I could know the poems much better than the man, flawed as I am told he was. Connoisseur of word-root & amphibrach, of Coltrane solo & of California reds, of box score & Horatian loss, his garrulousness formidable & masking a shyness I could never penetrate, meeting him would always find me tongue-tied, minding my p s &q s, the latter of which I could not play, failing three times to draw a u. The dead care nothing for our eulogies: he wrote this many times & well. & yet I pray his rumpled daimonion shall guide our letters forward as they wend the snow-white notebook leaves, the stanzas scrolling down the laptop screens. Game after game & the snow labored on. Phalanx, bourboned whiteout & the board aglow as he'd best me again & again.Qintar &prosody, the runway lights enshrouded & the wind,endquote, shook the panes.

I climbed up the door and I opened the stairs. I said my pajamas and buttoned my prayers. I turned off the covers and pulled up the light. I’m all scrambled up since she kissed me last night.