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Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks they bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall. Riding the backs of the Trojan Women, In Euripides’ great wake they are swept up, But the women of the chorus, in black stockings and kerchiefs, Stand up bravely to it, shawled arms thrash In a foam of hysterical voices shrieking, Seaweed on the wet flanks of a whale, For each town has its Cassandra who is a little crazy, Wed to some mystery or other and therefore painfully sensitive, Wiser than anyone but no one listens to her, these days the terror Reaches its red claws into back ward and living room alike, For each town has its Andromache who is too young, With snub nose and children just out of school Even she cannot escape it, from the bombed city she is led out Weeping among the ambulances, And each community has its tart, its magical false Helen Or at least someone who looks like her, in all the make-up she can muster, The gorgeous mask of whatever quick-witted lie will keep her alive At least a little while longer, on the crest of the bloody wave, That dolorous mountain of wooden ships and water In whose memory the women bring us this huge gift horse, This raging animal of a play no one dares to look in the eye For fear of what’s hidden there: Small ragdoll figures toppling over and over From every skyscraper and battlement hurtling Men and women both, mere gristle in the teeth of fate. Out over the sea of the audience our numb faces Are stunned as Andromache’s, locked up there on the platform Inside Euripides’ machine the women sway and struggle One foot at a time, up the surging ladder Of grief piled on grief, strophe on antistrophe, In every century the same, the master tightens the screws, Heightens the gloss of each bitter scene And strikes every key, each word rings out Over our terrified heads like a brass trumpet, For this gift is an accordion, the biggest and mightiest of all, As the glittering lacquered box heaves in and out, Sigh upon sigh, at the topmost pitch a child Falls through midnight in his frantically pink skin. As the anguished queen protests, the citizens in the chorus wail Louder and louder, the warriors depart Without a glance backwards, these captains of the world’s death Enslaved as they are enslavers, in a rain of willess atoms anonymity takes over utterly: as the flaming city falls On this bare beach, in the drab pinewood hall The Reading Club packs up to go; scripts, coffee cups, black stockings, Husbands and wives pile into the waiting cars Just as we expect, life picks up and goes on But not art: crouched back there like a stalled stallion Stuffed in its gorgeous music box is the one gift That will not disappear but waits, but bides its time and waits For the next time we open it, that magical false structure Inside whose artifice is the lesson, buried alive, Of the grim machinations of the beautiful that always lead us To these eternally real lamentations, real sufferings, real cries.

I read your poetry once more, poems written by a rich man, knowing all, and by a beggar, homeless, an emigrant, alone. You always wanted to go beyond poetry, above it, soaring, but also lower, to where our region begins, modest and timid. Sometimes your tone transforms us for a moment, we believe—truly— that every day is sacred, that poetry—how to put it? — makes life rounder, fuller, prouder, unashamed of perfect formulation. But evening arrives, I lay my book aside, and the city's ordinary din resumes— somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. No one else with a book, the slick weeklies gossip amongst themselves on the side tables as the ticker rolls the Dow Jones down down down under a profile of the marathon bombers (the older, a boxer). Jove argues for the removal of a race of   peoples that do not please him:What is past remedy calls for the surgeon’s knife

Re-reading him in Bouchon past noon, it is mobbed midtown, like an ant farm seen through painkillers. God, what a bust it’s all been, capitalism, communism, feminism, this lust to liberate. Che should have stayed in medicine. The girls here admit they can’t wait to marry and get to the alimony, before they hit thirty. The men, heads skinned like Lager inmates, know only the revolutions in diets and spinning classes. Still, one table away, these two, with gnarled empretzled hands, seem unhappy in the old way.

hearing all bells at once instructs the final exhale Camelot in thimble of  the gods Marilyn Monroe’s ambulance lost on the way to the palace of  temperament a branch of government for the magical arts punch wall of forest for an oaken desk another dream we needed agitating the sentence as it rows across a newly destroyed heart folding following tormenting one another we were all once young and beautiful squandering everything it’s what we came here to do cut off engines to the child registering disposition of the cat in the dark as the size of the darkness

All around the altar, huge lianas curled, unfurled the dark green of their leaves to complement the red of blood spilled there—a kind of Christmas decoration, overhung with heavy vines and over them, the stars. When the angels came, messengers like birds but with the oiled flesh of men, they hung over the scene with smoldering swords, splashing the world when they beat their rain-soaked wings against the turning sky. The child was bright in his basket as a lemon, with a bitter smell from his wet swaddling clothes. His mother bent above him, singing a lullaby in the liquid tongue invented for the very young—short syllables like dripping from an eave mixed with the first big drops of rain that fell, like tiny silver pears, from the glistening fronds of palm. The three who gathered there—old kings uncrowned: the cockroach, condor, and the leopard, lords of the cracks below the ground, the mountain pass and the grass-grown plain—were not adorned, did not bear gifts, had not come to adore; they were simply drawn to gawk at this recurrent, awkward son whom the wind had said would spell the end of earth as it had been. Somewhere north of this familiar scene the polar caps were melting, the water was advancing in its slow, relentless lines, swallowing the old landmarks, swelling the seas that pulled the flowers and the great steel cities down. The dolphins sport in the rising sea, anemones wave their many arms like hair on a drowned gorgon’s head, her features softened by the sea beyond all recognition. On the desert’s edge where the oasis dies in a wash of sand, the sphinx seems to shift on her haunches of stone, and the rain, as it runs down, completes the ruin of her face. The Nile merges with the sea, the waters rise and drown the noise of earth. At the forest’s edge, where the child sleeps, the waters gather— as if a hand were reaching for the curtain to drop across the glowing, lit tableau. When the waves closed over, completing the green sweep of ocean, there was no time for mourning. No final trump, no thunder to announce the silent steal of waters; how soundlessly it all went under: the little family and the scene so easily mistaken for an adoration. Above, more clouds poured in and closed their ranks across the skies; the angels, who had seemed so solid, turned quicksilver in the rain. Now, nothing but the wind moves on the rain-pocked face of the swollen waters, though far below where giant squid lie hidden in shy tangles, the whales, heavy-bodied as the angels, their fins like vestiges of wings, sing some mighty epic of their own— a great day when the ships would all withdraw, the harpoons fail of their aim, the land dissolve into the waters, and they would swim among the peaks of mountains, like eagles of the deep, while far below them, the old nightmares of earth would settle into silt among the broken cities, the empty basket of the child would float abandoned in the seaweed until the work of water unraveled it in filaments of straw, till even that straw rotted in the planetary thaw the whales prayed for, sending their jets of water skyward in the clear conviction they’d spill back to ocean with their will accomplished in the miracle of rain:And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit moved upon the face of the waters.

ready to receive remains built for death, ready to receive the flatly desolate superficial deeply commissioned intellectual offer of suggestive actions, for the hunger assassin to fall back on and become forcefull psychological damage, bottled for drinkable agitation. riding a back seat writing construction, contesting the oncoming molten universe, immersed in villagers, city dwellers, trembling, laughing, (white teeth redone for the perfect test of time), to inhale flesh and stone from long ago, forgetting the horrors of holy oil infusion clocks and gritty body galleries, leaving behind the mourning river’s crimson fragrance smoldering from the previous unbearable fever. in a posture of myself on a speeding body, without hands and feet, I am ready to receive the vomit of consciousness and proceed down the avenues of suggestion to become a limited option.

Toward summer or its dependence On demarcations in the sandy vial Some tree spelling astronaut onto a Planet’s arm, it stopped making sense. I am not an apothecary or a wave Or a dog by the 15 th hole, I am not A light sparking a whole country’s demise. I will never be a towel holding someone’s Sunscreen while they wash it off in foreign Seas. My hair goes up and down, it’s true As it is I am not a bag of tea nor will I ever Be exceptionally happy. Let the director Know I was distressed by the construction Noise, that I had no known allergies that My parents convinced me I was wanted And why wouldn’t you believe them. If the earth when it opened dragged away Our sense of faith, doubt was an Invention I preferred to ignore in the Manner of solicitations by mail.

This dog standing in the middle of the street, tail stiff, fur bushy with fear, and a pedigree rabbit, its neck broken and bleeding beneath his paws, might have been forgiven or simply taken away and shot under different circumstances and no one would have said much, except his owner who’d gone out into the yard at the start of the commotion, having been involved at other times with the dog’s truancies, and yelled, “Bosco, Bosco, goddamnit!” but unavailing, and everyone understanding that once more Bosco had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature. But this other sentiment we shared as well: the man Who’d raised the rabbit shouldn’t husband something so rare and beautiful he couldn’t keep it from the likes of Bosco.

The smashed weirdness of the raving cadenzas of God Takes over all of a sudden In our time. It speaks through the voices of talk show moderators. It tells us in a ringing anthem, like heavenly hosts uplifted, That the rhapsody of the pastoral is out to lunch. We can take it from there. We can take it to Easy Street. But when things get tough on Easy Street What then? Is it time for realism? And who are these guys on the bus Who glide in golden hats past us On their way to Kansas City?