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for Shanshan The wave of that year flooded the sands on the mirror to be lost is a kind of leaving and the meaning of leaving the instant when all languages are like shadows cast from the west life's only a promise don't grieve for it before the garden was destroyed we had too much time debating the implications of a bird flying as we knocked down midnight's door alone like a match polished into light when childhood's tunnel led to a vein of dubious ore to be lost is a kind of leaving and poetry rectifying life rectifies poetry's echo

Sing the mass— light upon me washing words now that I am gone. The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned out and over the town. I could have lived forever under that sky. Forgetting where I was, I looked left, not right, crossed into a street and stepped in front of the bus that ended me. Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful— my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung some distance down the road? Will you believe me when I tell you I had never been so in love with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw? The way an age-worn man held his wife’s shaking arm, supporting the weight that seemed to sing from the heart she clutched. Knowing her eyes embraced the pile that was me, he guided her sacked body through the crowd. And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence. I saw her start to pray. You see, I was so beautiful the woman sent to clean the street used words like police tape to keep back a young boy seconds before he rounded the grisly bumper. The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory would fly him through the world on pinions of passion much as, later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down to tears when she pooled my blood with water and swiftly, swiftly washed my stains away.

the winged thang built her dream palace amid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough she did not know it was urban turf disguised as serenely delusionally rural nor did she know the neighborhood was rife with slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned swoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil that slowly polluted the earth, and was never to detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below following her nature she flitted and dove for whatever blades twigs and mud could be found under the humming blue and created a hatchery for her spawn not knowing all were doomed

An early sadness for the future (as in dreams of myself young and sad) accompanies my departure towards a conventional story: a town of girls a New York City dormitory. And so a trail proceeds from our house on the top of the hill down the back way of former army barracks and past the borrowed church (ours had no tank) where I was baptized reasoning “it must be true” out of the love I had for my mother. And Tony’s house there across the street from it absolutely in the Mexican gully in dreams of which he and I still fight armed enemies he stepped on a land mine in Nam when I remind my brother, twenty years after his face contorts he knows the look of that death a week before he himself dies blood-tinged ruddy-winged, but that’s another dream-site the Needles Cemetery inelegant unbeautiful and dear and dry. See how many loves, how much thus sadness in the future begins to haunt that walk down that hill towards the highway away to the dormitory as I go to New York to sever love’s connections and make the “real ones” generated by actual mating by beauty and clothes the black wool suit with its three button jacket the oddly puffed-sleeved orange sweater and an orange and midnight- blue paisley waistless dress. New trail there, Brett knows my future love though I don’t hitchhikes with him to California years before I catch up to the poets in Iowa City that will be in ’69, my brother hasn’t yet signed up for Nam then when he gives me rattles off a rattler which I keep in my wooden India box I still have until they stink. I can’t keep track of the track there’s nothing but sidetrails of love and sadness so love is all that makes my people act they go to war for love you know, of who and what you are like I was baptized by the cruellest-lipped prissiest-mouthed man in the world for love, but I could just have gone swimming walked back up love’s hill back up at the house you can get to the pool barefoot if you can find enough bush or telephone-pole shadows. We’d all swim together I’d tread water dreaming of the future but a wilder larger eye birdlike distant holds the pool in its pupil anyone’s that too, and hold the enlarging water sad how not be why don’t the smart girls in New York know this why don’t you or I know what we know the eye and the water both enlarge still why don’t smart girls in Paris, yes larger but will never flood the containing eye, but why not and sometimes it does when you or your own are the news.

On this first dark day of the year my daddy was born lo these eighty-six years ago who now has not drawn breath or held bodily mass for some ten years and still I have not got used to it. My mind can still form to that chair him whom no chair holds. Each year on this night on the brink of new circumference I stand and gaze towards him, while roads careen with drunks, and my dad who drank himself away cannot be found. Daddy, I’m halfway to death myself. The millenium hurtles towards me, and the boy I bore who bears your fire in his limbs follows in my wake. Why can you not be reborn all tall to me? If I raise my arms here in the blind dark, why can you not reach down now to hoist me up? This heavy carcass I derive from yours is tutelage of love, and yet each year though older another notch I still cannot stand to reach you, or to emigrate from the monolithic shadow you left.

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, Their usage, pride, admitted within doors; At home, under caved chantries, set in trust, With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs They lie; they lie; secure in the decay Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, Before the scouring fires of trial-day Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

This morning as I gulp five gleaming white capsules of shark cartilage to make me strong again, I want another look at the terrible eye with its nictitating membrane, those extravagant fins, the ampullae of Lorenzini freckling its snout, all of that huge body on the rippled sand in turtle grass with an entourage of neon-blue barjacks, and a remora wriggling in and out of its gill-slits. I even want to touch it again, and this time not just with my fingertips, but my palm, loveline and lifeline, my wrist, the underside of my forearm. I want to press my cheek against its chaste astonishing skin smooth as a headstone, want the touch that feels like a blow, the summoning touch, the touch of reckoning, the consummating touch, as well as the stinging sandblown touch of regret, the stranger's touch on the train, the reproachful touch, even the last touch of a human who has lain down with a shark, the touch I have spent my life so ignorant of, your touch as you unbutton my shirt, the searing, unbearable touch.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too! Her mirth the world required; She bathed it in smiles of glee. But her heart was tired, tired, And now they let her be. Her life was turning, turning, In mazes of heat and sound. But for peace her soul was yearning, And now peace laps her round. Her cabin'd, ample spirit, It flutter'd and fail'd for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty hall of death.

The man sits in a timelessness with the horse under him in time to a movement of legs and hooves upon a timeless sand. Distance comes in from the foreground present in the picture as time he reads outward from and comes from that beginning. A wind blows in and out and all about the man as the horse ran and runs to come in time. A house is burning in the sand. A man and horse are burning. The wind is burning. They are running to arrive.

This prairie holds us with its plainness. An ugly wife. We would not stay but children comfort us and we need this flatness. On our table a carp with a tumor on its lip, larva eating its side. An old man laughs, one silver tooth in his head like a galvanized watertank. We are driven back into the land, our raccoon faces banded around the eyes with motorcycle goggles. Every car we had rusting in the yard. We saddle the buffalo and say we are captives. This barrenness holds us down like a wife.