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After the death of my father, I locked myself in my room, bored and animal-like. The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle, the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face, chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured out of me except sensibility, dilated. It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal, truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms reaching out into a dark and crowded space, illuminated like a perforated silver box or a little room in which glowing cigarettes came and went, like souls losing magnitude, but none with the battered hand I knew.

Radiante, 1967, by Olga Albizu Jestered ochre yellow my umber Rothko divisions my Brooklyns with Jerry Stern black then oranged gold leaf & tiny skulls perforations Dada sugar bread of Oaxacan ecstasy Lorca’s green horse the daffodil head corruptions of the State in tenor exhalation saxophonics blossomings rouged monkey Dalí roll down the keys the high G’s underStreets of the undeRealms my hair. Throttle up into hyper-city correlations = compassion compassion the void extends

Mittens are drying on the radiator, boots nearby, one on its side. Like some monstrous segmented insect the radiator elongates under the window. Or it is a beast with many shoulders domesticated in the Ice Age. How many years it takes to move from room to room! Some cage their radiators but this is unnecessary as they have little desire to escape. Like turtles they are quite self-contained. If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.

I "—science per se—" my God, when I hear them on the radio saying that, it slays me. Is there a science that's not per se? I don't get out much, rarely get to see any lakes, gardens only sporadically and then behind fences, or in allotments, that's about the size of it, I rely on ersatz: radio, newspaper, magazines— so how can people say such things to me? It makes you wonder whether there are any surrogates for hollyhocks, for warm life, French kisses, hanky-panky, all those things that make existence a little luxurious, and all of them somehow of a piece! No, all this cerebration is not my cup of tea, but there are sometimes hours on end where there's no woman on any wavelength (I receive medium-wave, short-, long-, and VHF), no voice saying, "first you say no, then maybe, then yes," nothing but these opinionated pedagogues, it seems that everything the West thinks of as its higher product is produced by the seated male— as I say, give me the hanky-panky any day! II "—the last vestiges of the ancient culture would have completely disappeared—" (well, and what if) "—a sonorous past—" (la-di-dah) "—in villages in New Mexico farmers still bless their fields and livestock with these songs—" (very nice, I'm sure, but I don't get out of Brandenburg much). We hear Professor Salem Aleikum, the reporter still slavering over him: "the professor is lying on the porch of his house with his lute cradled in his arm singing the old ballads"— probably on an ottoman, with a carafe of ice water at his side, rejecting old hypotheses, putting out new ones— the great rivers of the world the Nile, the Brahmaputra, or what the hell do I know wouldn't be enough to drown all those professors— don't have any acreage, don't have any livestock, nothing blesses me, life is one continuous affliction, but nothing like those professors teach, teach, teach, from every pore, who turn everything into illustrated lecture (with slides).

Don’t hurt the radio for Against all Solid testimony machines Have feelings Too Brush past it lightly With a fine regard For allowing its molecules To remain 100% intact Machines can think like Wittgenstein And the radio’s a machine Thinking softly to itself Of the Midnight Flower As her tawny parts unfold In slow motion the boat Rocks on the ocean As her tawny parts unfold The radio does something mental To itself singingly As her tawny parts unfold Inside its wires And steal away its heart Two minutes after eleven The color dream communicates itself The ink falls on the paper as if magically The scalp falls away A pain is felt Deep in the radio I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair And do my dance for the radio It’s my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio And while remaining motionless elsewise Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible While uttering a horrible and foreign word Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx And placing it on the blue chair The blue chair isn’t here So I can’t do that trick at the present time The radio is thinking a few licks of its own Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow’s grammar Beautiful spas of seltzery coition Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker The radio says Edwardian farmers from Minnesota march on the Mafia Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips The radio fears foul play It turns impersonal A piggy bank was smashed A victim was found naked Radio how can you tell me this In such a chipper tone Your structure of voices is a friend The best kind The kind one can turn on or off Whenever one wants to But that is wrong I know For you will intensely to continue And in a deeper way You do Hours go by And I watch you As you diligently apply A series of audible frequencies To tiny receptors Located inside my cranium Resulting in much pleasure for someone Who looks like me Although he is seated about two inches to my left And the both of us Are listening to your every word With a weird misapprehension It’s the last of the tenth And Harmon Killebrew is up With a man aboard He blasts a game-winning home run The 559th of his career But no one cares Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping To be replayed in 212 years Heaven must be like this, radio To not care about anything Because it’s all being taped for replay much later Heaven must be like this For as her tawny parts unfold The small lights swim roseate As if of sepals were the tarp made As it is invisibly unrolled And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of Georgia Only through your voice

Thousands of planes were flying and then they stopped. We spend days moving our eyes across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor; we prepare for almost nothing that might happen. Early on, distant relations kept calling. Now, nothing: sound of water tippling a seawall. Nothing: sparks lighting the brush, sparks polishing the hail, the flotsam of cars left standing perfectly still. Thud of night bird against night air, there you are on the porch, swath of feathers visible through the glass, there you are on the stairs where the cat fell like a stone because her heart stopped. What have you found in the wind above town square? Is it true that even the statues have gone? Is there really a hush over everything as there used to be in morning when one by one we took off our veils?

It has arrived—the long rag rug multiply folded. On top, one alien hair. I put my face to the folds and smell despair palpable as salt air in all those rooms and houses, small and smug— enclosures I passed through on my way where? Whoever did the weaving appears old in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face, can only conjure up the faintest trace of an abstracted grace, clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold these precious things, in some unheard-of place? I perch her on a hill, precariously beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom. Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room (no bigger than the loom) is proof against the violence of the sky From it I further spin what I once called my home: Endless horizons fading into haze, the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear; snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere, the brightness of the air, terraces, valleys organizing space and time’s cessation. So this package here I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today (rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace my strands of language barely can express; dishrags of dailiness dispersed and recombined and freshly gay) comes to me imbued with images, slowly and faithfully across the water, across the world. It represents a time I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme as soon as I went home, if that is where I am. These rugs recover the sense of stepping twice into a single river.

I guess you could call it a sort of sympathetic magic. How else to explain this obsessive reorganizing of my home, my books, my papers, my poems, this housekeeping of my hard drive and floppies, all the deleting and casting away of redundancy and obsolescence, dead files and moved-on addresses and the scrubbing, the constant scrubbing and dusting and the howl of the protesting vacuum that struggles to inhale at least the 70% of house-dust that is dead human skin some of which might be hers.

O the Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa; An' he's the goodest man ever you saw! He comes to our house every day, An' waters the horses, an' feeds 'em hay; An' he opens the shed—an' we all ist laugh When he drives out our little old wobble-ly calf; An' nen—ef our hired girl says he can— He milks the cow fer 'Lizabuth Ann.— Ain't he a' awful good Raggedy Man? Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! W'y, The Raggedy Man—he's ist so good, He splits the kindlin' an' chops the wood; An' nen he spades in our garden, too, An' does most things 'at boys can't do.— He clumbed clean up in our big tree An' shooked a' apple down fer me— An' 'nother 'n', too, fer 'Lizabuth Ann— An' 'nother 'n', too, fer The Raggedy Man.— Ain't he a' awful kind Raggedy Man? Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' The Raggedy Man one time say he Pick' roast' rambos from a' orchurd-tree, An' et 'em—all ist roast' an' hot!— An' it's so, too!—'cause a corn-crib got Afire one time an' all burn' down On "The Smoot Farm," 'bout four mile from town— On "The Smoot Farm"! Yes—an' the hired han' 'At worked there nen 'uz The Raggedy Man!— Ain't he the beatin'est Raggedy Man? Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! The Raggedy Man's so good an' kind He'll be our "horsey," an' "haw" an' mind Ever'thing 'at you make him do— An' won't run off—'less you want him to! I drived him wunst way down our lane An' he got skeered, when it 'menced to rain, An' ist rared up an' squealed and run Purt' nigh away!—an' it's all in fun! Nen he skeered ag'in at a' old tin can ... Whoa! y' old runaway Raggedy Man! Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes, An' tells 'em, ef I be good, sometimes: Knows 'bout Giunts, an' Griffuns, an' Elves, An' the Squidgicum-Squees 'at swallers the'rselves: An', wite by the pump in our pasture-lot, He showed me the hole 'at the Wunks is got, 'At lives 'way deep in the ground, an' can Turn into me, er 'Lizabuth Ann! Er Ma, er Pa, er The Raggedy Man! Ain't he a funny old Raggedy Man? Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' wunst, when The Raggedy Man come late, An' pigs ist root' thue the garden-gate, He 'tend like the pigs 'uz bears an' said, "Old Bear-shooter'll shoot 'em dead!" An' race' an' chase' 'em, an' they'd ist run When he pint his hoe at 'em like it's a gun An' go "Bang!—Bang!" nen 'tend he stan' An' load up his gun ag'in! Raggedy Man! He's an old Bear-shooter Raggedy Man! Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' sometimes The Raggedy Man lets on We're little prince-children, an' old King's gone To git more money, an' lef' us there— And Robbers is ist thick ever'where; An' nen—ef we all won't cry, fer shore— The Raggedy Man he'll come and "splore The Castul-halls," an' steal the "gold"— An' steal us, too, an' grab an' hold An' pack us off to his old "Cave"!—An' Haymow's the "cave" o' The Raggedy Man!— Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! The Raggedy Man—one time, when he Wuz makin' a little bow-'n'-orry fer me, Says "When you're big like your Pa is, Air you go' to keep a fine store like his— An' be a rich merchunt—an' wear fine clothes?— Er what air you go' to be, goodness knows?" An' nen he laughed at 'Lizabuth Ann, An' I says "'M go' to be a Raggedy Man!— I'm ist go' to be a nice Raggedy Man!" Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!

In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood, Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood, As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass, Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass, One sees a ragpicker knocking against the walls, Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls, But stumbling like a poet lost in dreams; He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes. He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws, Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause; Beneath the sky, like a vast canopy, He is drunken of his splendid qualities. Yes, these people, plagued by household cares, Bruised by hard work, tormented by their years, Each bent double by the junk he carries, The jumbled vomit of enormous Paris,— They come back, perfumed with the smell of stale Wine-barrels, followed by old comrades, pale From war, mustaches like limp flags, to march With banners, flowers, through the triumphal arch Erected for them, by some magic touch! And in the dazzling, deafening debauch Of bugles, sunlight, of huzzas and drum, Bring glory to the love-drunk folks at home! Even so, wine pours its gold to frivolous Humanity, a shining Pactolus; Then through man's throat of high exploits it sings And by its gifts reigns like authentic kings. To lull these wretches' sloth and drown the hate Of all who mutely die, compassionate, God has created sleep's oblivion; Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun.