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The Age of Gold cracked me up last night, asters and sparrows to be exact, that unrelenting knot in the choral fire. It’s good exercise, to get out on stage, to stand in the silvered chamber and deny emptiness, when the pocket falls so deep one could mark anything out over the top. The India ink drops continuously, its likeness, still Helen as phantom not the truth of the state of her body but being awash in a sound uprooted. The desk is still a symbol I pile things on, pin down elegies, illegible dates, introductions scrawled on slender backs of envelopes, receipts, small machine-like cloud chambers, talon disconnected. Sunlight burns my feet putting away the wet mop, where I am stopped from almost killing myself. All that wobbling of the lens nonsense, I will cling to the truth of the soundtrack tearing through the unveiling: Jeanne Moreau’s scepter coated in dust a darkness poured from the open door, crowned enameled teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex • Their portrait is crushed to the point of flowers Their lines are reaching arms out from the center Their lace is torn over the image at points a flame-like insistence flaring this all up from behind one piss-driven, lifelike icicle the diamond district through a downpour past the love-sick dungeons of Dante, a cleaving after in Sappho, what remains of a dialogue? The small, blobbed cellular enclosure slipping it into strings letting it wither • No god but the act creator eternally rested in light fears for my life dissolved in the booth largely unknown fire exit back/ of the hotel closet door satin sheets light foot thunder lover impaled/ outside of that world cutting young poets much slack and the box for the board missing: remains of the maze spit out from a star

Enter JANUS JANUS Chronos, Chronos, mend thy pace, An hundred times the rolling sun Around the radiant belt has run In his revolving race. Behold, behold, the goal in sight, Spread thy fans, and wing thy flight. Enter CHRONOS,with a scythe in his hand, and a great globe on his back, which he sets down at his entrance CHRONOS Weary, weary of my weight, Let me, let me drop my freight, And leave the world behind. I could not bear Another year The load of human-kind. Enter MOMUS Laughing MOMUS Ha! ha! ha! Ha! ha! ha! well hast thou done, To lay down thy pack, And lighten thy back. The world was a fool, e'er since it begun, And since neither Janus, nor Chronos, nor I, Can hinder the crimes, Or mend the bad times, 'Tis better to laugh than to cry. CHORUS OF ALL THREE 'Tis better to laugh than to cry JANUS Since Momus comes to laugh below, Old Time begin the show, That he may see, in every scene, What changes in this age have been, CHRONOS Then Goddess of the silver bow begin. Horns, or hunting-music within DIANA With horns and with hounds I waken the day, And hie to my woodland walks away; I tuck up my robe, and am buskin'd soon, And tie to my forehead a waxing moon. I course the fleet stag, unkennel the fox, And chase the wild goats o'er summits of rocks, With shouting and hooting we pierce thro' the sky; And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry. CHORUS OF ALL With shouting and hooting, we pierce through the sky, And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry. JANUS Then our age was in its prime, CHRONOS Free from rage, DIANA —And free from crime. MOMUS A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time. CHORUS OF ALL Then our age was in its prime, Free from rage, and free from crime, A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time. Dance of Diana's attendants MARS Inspire the vocal brass, inspire; The world is past its infant age: Arms and honour, Arms and honour, Set the martial mind on fire, And kindle manly rage. Mars has look'd the sky to red; And peace, the lazy good, is fled. Plenty, peace, and pleasure fly; The sprightly green In woodland-walks, no more is seen; The sprightly green, has drunk the Tyrian dye. CHORUS OF ALL Plenty, peace, |&|c. MARS Sound the trumpet, beat the drum, Through all the world around; Sound a reveille, sound, sound, The warrior god is come. CHORUS OF ALL Sound the trumpet, |&|c. MOMUS Thy sword within the scabbard keep, And let mankind agree; Better the world were fast asleep, Than kept awake by thee. The fools are only thinner, With all our cost and care; But neither side a winner, For things are as they were. CHORUS OF ALL The fools are only, |&|c. Enter VENUS VENUS Calms appear, when storms are past; Love will have his hour at last: Nature is my kindly care; Mars destroys, and I repair; Take me, take me, while you may, Venus comes not ev'ry day. CHORUS OF ALL Take her, take her, |&|c. CHRONOS The world was then so light, I scarcely felt the weight; Joy rul'd the day, and love the night. But since the Queen of Pleasure left the ground, I faint, I lag, And feebly drag The pond'rous Orb around. All, all of a piece throughout; pointing{}}to Diana{}} MOMUS, Thy chase had a beast in view; to Mars Thy wars brought nothing about; to Venus Thy lovers were all untrue. JANUS 'Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new. CHORUS OF ALL All, all of a piece throughout; Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. 'Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new.

In someone’s distant algorithm your mortgage was bundled to another’s —hedged— and stamped a new “security.” While it was swapped from investor to investor accruing fees and interest at each turn, your shadow partner defaulted and she abandoned her home. Someone uses your mortgage to leverage something far inside the starbursts of a server. Likewise marriage has no image— What’s a mortgage and who’s it engage on the other side of the firewall? * I witnessed a will which—the language invested with law godmothers the peacock’s fanned screech— would take care of the baby in the event of a [blesses herself] It lives at the Cathedral and seems to be some kind of mascot for Baptisms * Securities: The future art you’ll make and its pleasure is hedged against the boys who died you fancied.

Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round, Astir with restless, hurried life and spanned By arches that with thund’rous trains resound, And throbbing wires that galvanize the land; Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand; The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found; The last burlesque is playing in the Strand— In modern prose all poetry seems drowned. Yet in ten thousand homes this April night An ancient People celebrates its birth To Freedom, with a reverential mirth, With customs quaint and many a hoary rite, Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright, Its God shall be the God of all the earth.

The songs we join in are beeswax candles burning with no smoke a clean fire licking at the evening our voices small flames quivering. The songs string us like beads on the hour. The ritual is its own melody that leads us where we have gone before and hope to go again, the comfort of year after year. Order: we must touch each base of the haggadah as we pass, blessing, handwashing, dipping this and that. Voices half harmonize on the brukhahs. Dear faces like a multitude of moons hang over the table and the truest brief blessing: affection and peace that we make.

To invent the alef-beit, decipher the grammar of crows, read a tangle of bare branches with vowels of the last leaves scrawling their jittery speech on the sky’s pale page. Choose a beginning. See what God yields and dirt cedes when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage, when your hand dips grain from a sack, scattering it among engraved furrows. Beyond the hill, a plume of dust where oxen track the hours. Does God lead or follow or scout? To answer, count to one again and again: a red maple leaf and a yellow maple leaf that wind rifles and rain shines until they let go, blazing their scripted nothingness on air.

I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling, nevertheless I see for a moment that's not it: it is the First Things. Word after word floats through the glass. Towards me.

It started about noon.  On top of Mount Batte, We were all exclaiming.  Someone had a cardboard And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover. It was hard to believe.  The high school teacher We’d met called it a pinhole camera, People in the Renaissance loved to do that. And when the moon had passed partly through We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree, Dozens of crescents—made the same way— Thousands!  Even our straw hats produced A few as we moved them over the bare granite. We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine Told a joke.  Suns were everywhere—at our feet.

When the child's forehead, full of red torments, Implores the white swarm of indistinct dreams, There come near his bed two tall charming sisters With slim fingers that have silvery nails. They seat the child in front of a wide open Window where the blue air bathes a mass of flowers And in his heavy hair where the dew falls Move their delicate, fearful and enticing fingers. He listens to the singing of their apprehensive breath. Which smells of long rosy plant honey And which at times a hiss interrupts, saliva Caught on the lip or desire for kisses. He hears their black eyelashes beating in the perfumed Silence; and their gentle electric fingers Make in his half-drunken indolence the death of the little lice Crackle under their royal nails. Then the wine of Sloth rises in him, The sigh of an harmonica which could bring on delirium; The child feels, according to the slowness of the caresses Surging in him and dying continuously a desire to cry.

First they pulled from the burning a miracle, then a mistake. The Lord will lift them the priest with the grief in his eyes cried. Lord, what blue eyes bound there, what hurling, diving, shining, burning — reason surfaces and sinks, sinks and surfaces. Dawn without sunrise. Gray. Purple. Her Majesty in mourning. Her Majesty the warring. In the double house of  life all this was repeating itself, Naneferkaptah had already himself lived Setne’s story. When the rains began the teams with two-by-fours found the going treacherous as those in the desert found the food wretched. They prayed to the golden serpent on the staff to save them. And the serpent stretched itself tap, tap and became a hymn, white-throated, rising to give itself up for the good of the chosen ones. Mother I remember the buttons on your dressing gown. So blue and beady-eyed and true, when did I begin To fear them. The world now not so round with us. Velocity threatening to meet, to marry density at every corner carrying carrying Who can see the writing on our foreheads almost wet still Who can see tap, tap algae bloom beneath the board smoke from the sky Tell me if that is a hand if it is human what will it speak