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Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

Rose-cheek'd Laura, come, Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's Silent music, either other Sweetly gracing. Lovely forms do flow From concent divinely framed; Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's Birth is heavenly. These dull notes we sing Discords need for helps to grace them; Only beauty purely loving Knows no discord, But still moves delight, Like clear springs renew'd by flowing, Ever perfect, ever in them- Selves eternal.

If you don ’ t have any control over your life and being happy If you don ’ t have any control over your life and be happy A family in the wall Mouse avenue in kitchen A piece of cake Looms oozing Men and women are signs of life Children are signs of life When they put the cap on the oil well I thought my life pollutes Reading lamp = coal burn My failures to love To be friend family When are we given the right to control Fantasy? Sixty-eight is a little bit of Time in the world To be more sentient Kinder and “get up try again” Body ow I pretend if I were in New York I could choose friends as I did in school Fork into flesh of animal Work all your life Not hard enough! there are things undone I was thinking you were my father I wasn ’ t here, then I was Through you Through an internal externalized Spill It bumps around the world Tries not to be stupid When Dad you grew up Trying to intentionalize Family back of you George, young and into the continents With problems I already have what I desire I just have it in the future The structure of being is wanting And like a fountain I suck up Later My excesses A little evaporates One day it ’ s dry and drying Means I ’ m done Oh whatever you ’ ll always be there no? I can say when I die “I was agent of clock” They call it an alarm I stopped having time to weed, friends Started in dark Light housed me The TV is so loud I can ’ t think I ’ m sorry I can ’ t be in that room Nobody has yelled at me for a long time Thank you You exist because your dad and mom And you tried to go away Continuity sweepstakes Freed under the cap Get up orderly   loving

a labyrinth, as if at its center, god would be there— but at the center, only rose, where rose came from, where rose grows— & us, inside of the lips & lips: the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair, we are born of, fed by, & marry with, only flesh itself, only its passage —out of where?    to where? Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream, Never mind you, Jim, come rest again on the country porch of my knees.

Why do roses need their thorns? Some things are little known. But thorns of roses spring and seize the surface of  fey airs before the roses come. I’ve seen thorns huddle in a harmony alone, hunkered down on green, wiry canes, smoothed blades of whipping rose stalks, and curl their polished tridents to night’s call. They are like stars digging into firmament with such desire, you don’t quite get it, and so healthy that they almost have to wound, or like bodies that can’t be argued, borrowed, tamed. The touch of a thorn is a wry, deep telling of the senses not to bloom without a wish to, without belief  in pain to hold us true.

'O words are lightly spoken,' Said Pearse to Connolly, 'Maybe a breath of politic words Has withered our Rose Tree; Or maybe but a wind that blows Across the bitter sea.' 'It needs to be but watered,' James Connolly replied, 'To make the green come out again And spread on every side, And shake the blossom from the bud To be the garden's pride.' 'But where can we draw water,' Said Pearse to Connolly, 'When all the wells are parched away? O plain as plain can be There's nothing but our own red blood Can make a right Rose Tree.'

Blacksmithing demonstration, mountain arts and crafts fair, Monteagle, TN “But can you forge a nail?” the blond boy asks, And the blacksmith shoves a length of  iron rod Deep in the coal fire cherished by the bellows Until it glows volcanic. He was a god Before anachronism, before the tasks That had been craft were jobbed out to machine. By dint of   hammer-song he makes his keen, Raw point, and crowns utility with rose: Quincunx of facets petaling its head. The breeze-made-visible sidewinds. The boy’s Blonde mother shifts and coughs.Once Work was wed To Loveliness— sweat-faced, swarthy from soot, he Reminds us with the old saw he employs (And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.”

“painting has no air . . .” —Gertrude Stein That there should never be air in a picture surprises me. It would seem to be only a picture of a certain kind, a portrait in paper or glue, somewhere a stickiness as opposed to a stick-to-it-ness of another genre. It might be quite new to do without that air, or to find oxygen on the landscape line like a boat which is an object or a shoe which never floats and is stationary. Still there are certain illnesses that require air, lots of it. And there are nervous people who cannot manufacture enough air and must seek for it when they don’t have plants, in pictures. There is the mysterious traveling that one does outside the cube and this takes place in air. It is why one develops an attitude toward roses picked in the morning air, even roses without sun shining on them. The roses of Juan Gris from which we learn the selflessness of roses existing perpetually without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read “La Merveille” and escape.

There is no escaping the storm of roses crisscrossed on the split-cracked wall of a dead fountain arch. There is no escaping their uterine balls, expanding as a reminder of the children I never had. If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations, the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps. And there’s no going back, no indiscovery of Mars or these red planets brooding before me, light predators, sun-hatched and bloodening like the fists of women who have gone to war.

. . . mangiavano le rose. Because I do not know what a hendecasyllable is and words is all I have to transubstantiate and give, within me I hunger for a tongue of my own, unpronounceable flavors worth a thousand madeleines (Monsieur P.) as hunting-horns spiral through my belly and I say: