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Thanksgiving, dark of the moon. Nothing down here in the underworld but vague shapes and black holes, Heaven resplendent but virtual Above me, trees stripped and triple-wired like Irish harps. Lights on Pantops and Free Bridge mirror the eastern sky. Under the bridge is the river, the red Rivanna. Under the river’s redemption, it says in the book, It says in the book, Through water and fire the whole place becomes purified, The visible by the visible, the hidden by what is hidden.

A political art, let it be tenderness, low strings the fingers touch, or the width of autumn climbing wider avenues, among the virtue and dignity of knowing what city you’re in, who to talk to, what clothes —even what buttons—to wear. I address / the society the image, of common utopia. / The perversity of separation, isolation, after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms, now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes. The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly ignorant. Let the combination of morality and inhumanity begin. 2. Is power, the enemy? (Destroyer of dawns, cool flesh of valentines, among the radios, pauses, drunks of the 19th century. I see it, as any man's single history. All the possible heroes dead from heat exhaustion at the beach or hiding for years from cameras only to die cheaply in the pages of our daily lie. One hero has pretensions toward literature one toward the cultivation of errors, arrogance, and constantly changing disguises, as trucker, boxer, valet, barkeep, in the aging taverns of memory. Making love to those speedy heroines of masturbation or kicking literal evil continually down filmy public stairs. A compromise would be silence. To shut up, even such risk as the proper placement of verbs and nouns. To freeze the spit in mid-air, as it aims itself at some valiant intellectual's face. There would be someone

It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower and every flower a tiny tributary that from the ground flows green and momentary is one of water's wishes and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass to find the sunlight hidden at the tip turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip then I might know like water how to balance the weight of hope against the light of patience water which is so raw so earthy-strong and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along drawn under gravity towards my tongue to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song which is the story of the falling rain that rises to the light and falls again

We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it. and to insulate Newtonian grace. leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.

I went into the forest searching for fire inside pleading wood, but I can’t say for how long I was moored between worlds. I heard a magpie’s rumination, but I don’t know if its wings lifted the moon or let it drift slow as a little straw boat set ablaze on a winding river. I learned the yellow-eyed wolf is a dog & a man. A small boy with a star pinned to his sleeve was hiding among thorn bushes, or it was how the restless dark wounded the pale linden tree outside a Warsaw apartment. Night crawls under each stone quick as a cry held in the throat. All I remember is my left hand was holding your right breast when I forced my eyes shut. Then I could hear something in the room, magnanimous but small, half outside & half inside, no more than a song— an insomniac’s one prophecy pressed against the curtains, forcing the ferns to bloom.

“So, why don’t you sleep with girls?” “I’m not really attracted to girls.” “Are you telling me you were really attracted to every man you slept with?” Conversation with a friend 1. After twenty I stopped counting, not like my friend Beverly, who sewed an embroidered satin star on her bell-bottoms for every new guy she fucked. She had them running down both legs and around the billowing hem, and was starting up the inseam when the jeans gave out in the wash. It was a boys’ game anyway, those years of our extended homage to the penis: the guitar playing the penis, drums saluting it, cock rock, Molotov cocktail, the motorcycle gripped between the thighs, and I went down, we all went down, in the old cultural disaster of idol worship—a thousand-year bender. Only this time it was the adolescent member, oiled and laved, thrust forward arcing, thin with ache, all tight flesh poked upward, claiming its own. How it came and went, penetrating but never settling down, and how often we were caused to admire it: hairless sweet warrior, raider against the State. But I have this sweet pink flower here between my legs—I put my hand down and touch it, still soft and wet, and many-folded, endlessly opening, hiding, seeking, hidden and sought, but never very much admired or even smiled on in those years, never served much less sung to. Not a garden then but a citadel, a wall to be breached, a new land claimed, but linger there? No, I would say there was an overall lack of appreciation, though breasts were well respected, slopping loose under T-shirts like little animals, and I would feel my nipples brush the cotton with pleasure, see them regarded also with pleasure. Still, sex then was a taking, like spoils of war, a victory over all those straight fucks back home, marooned in the dismal suburbs that birthed us squalling and red and watched us flee in ungrateful cars down night highways. And God knows it felt good those nights. I was ready, it was ready, to open and answer the call. And take me down and roll me over, yes, and give it to me—but why all this riding away afterward? Where was everyone going and why didn’t I get to ride along? Who knew at first nothing had changed, just wanting the thrust and tug and slam up against the headboard, I should say so, but left still wanting more, wanting to leap out of centuries’ shame and be something new, not this old consolation of women for the powerless, some kind of cosmic door prize awarded just for showing up with a dick, some proof to themselves these boys were men. “You’re good,” he said. Hell, I wasn’t taking a typing test, I was fighting to live in a dying world. I was throwing myself away, an offering to wildest space, surrender to the mind’s dissolve, the body’s electric light, nerve endings firing like exploding stars. “You’re good,” they all said: you’d think somebody was doing a survey. Girls say yes to boys who say no, and then your professor asks if you’re wearing underwear, when you meet for your conference on the poetry of Yeats. Crossing the border after midnight in a borrowed car after a visit to the after-hours doctor’s office in Sarnia. Nodding out in the back seat, pills wearing off. He was a legend among undergraduates: cheap and reliable, always on call, until a month later the headlines screamed “Abortion Doc!” when a girl died in his office and he dragged her down to the river and dumped her body in the underbrush.

govern a canine meeting, their paws all over instinct’s greeting, it’s we who do the dancing there, lest our restraints ourselves ensnare. Over the head, between the legs, we tangle with our rules & regs like film in a projector’s cogs, reclaim the lead, then blame the dogs.

X Should the wide world roll away Leaving black terror Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential If thou and thy white arms were there And the fall to doom a long way.

Show me the body that brides its quest, that sleeps its seemings, tremblant inconnue, jeweled Ophelia of diaphanous hue in all her slippings, weed-wedded, water-dressed, the sluice and swooning of her semblant rest— the river ruptures, the weeds branch blue— day’s jaune eyes (wide lucencies) bleed new hollow spaces where the breathings nest, irised mnemosyne, rumored as a rune. Oh roared red pulse, errata, when you die maiden-postured, murmur in the wrist, tendrilled syllables the waters twist, or innered element (it is an I) the dead girl blurring in the blooded noon.

In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She hates it even more if I’m there to wash her. She wants her son, the person she thinks of these days as her lover, or husband, or father. Memory and privacy, she cries at their loss as I soap her down like an old car. What protestations! And as I listen to her, I think of these bodies we have given so freely to men, yet feel ashamed of when in the eyes of another woman. How she fawns when she thinks a man’s around. Today, she bangs the walls. “I hate you! The water’s too wet!” Hanging onto the safety bars, she pitches back and forth like a child, wanting to be let out at the gate. I wash her back. She spins around in my soap-lathered hands, and loosening her face in mine, she glares. She sticks out her tongue, and biting down on it, she squeals, jowls swinging, arms jiggling. Then, in a dive of both hands between her legs, she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture and thrusts her pelvis bones forward like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval. In a gesture of obscenity, she unfolds her petals and displays her withered sex to me— the same way boys moon, flip the bird or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues— the profane she feels but can’t articulate.