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How burdensome they seemed, wartime oldies that could drive our parents teary: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with its hint of being swept off in a global riptide; or the shaky follow-up of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” followed by a shakier “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me),” “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” or “Ac- Cent-Tchu-Are the Positive.” We suffered them on the old cathedral radio, crooned by Crosby and Sinatra, had to watch them strangled on The Lawrence Welk Show or laced with Como’s heavy dose of sedative. Dad told us, “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Mom hummed, “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—till our music cut the cord. Brash and free of corn, it hailed rock ‘n’ roll, caught Maybellene at the top of the hill, moaned “m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll.” We played it loud and often, but they never understood.

When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself I repeat If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how Will I understand anything Please refrain from talking during the movie I need a life that isn’t just about needing To escape my life Please God please may Carrie please fall for me I want to show off my hidden camera I’m an informer but I have my limits You hurt him once before now what If she’s there I don’t know if I can go Please refrain from talking during the movie Leave a message if you can’t reach me To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt When I think I read new things I want A life where I read and think new things Please refrain from talking during the movie I want to know nothing Again Please God please may Carrie please fall for me I repeat myself when I can’t Make you understand I repeat

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden in white pulp: the bones of squid which I pull out and lay blade by blade on the draining board— tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce the heart, but fragile, substance belying design.               Or a fruit,mamey, cased in rough brown peel, the flesh rose-amber, and the seed: the seed a stone of wood, carved and polished, walnut-colored, formed like a brazilnut, but large, large enough to fill the hungry palm of a hand. I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

During the day I play at drowning looking for the smoke of eyelashes and faded hair the lilac shadows of blood and the ruins of coffee but a night I dream of the last syllable in my mother's heart the last red word in her lungs.

Plucking your eyebrows, Putting on mascara, But will that help you To see things anew? The one who sees Is changed into The one who’s seen Only if one is Salt and the other Water. But you, says Kabir, Are a dead Lump of quartz.

The spine is a slide of human marvels; it is a hierarchy of white florets; it is a cult of secret brothers; it is a deliberate list; so look how the spineless relax in their unblushing banality. I lose my patience in Greensboro where no discoveries are ever made and the only inner lavishment is the bar, occasionally. T he spineless aspire to incessant interludes that never arrive anywhere and that can’t r emember wherefrom they came. Mary is slightly spineless, for instance: her dress is cream her skin is cream her creamy mind is fine and her life will end finely—how sad is that to think of, the finery of a cream life? It is the saddest of all truths that can be read on a person’s face in a decorous garden that person has planted themselves and of which they are explaining to you the intricacies and expense: “notice how in the light”; “three pallets shipped last week”; “have complementary attitudes when it comes to soil-type and moisture.” She isn’t wicked; but, also, she destroys the art of her life.

Out here in the desert, everything is one thing: the desert. What god but the One God, exotic in his reachless amount casting love over our encampment beside the nervy water of Jordan? John, you have a little gristle when you speak and what’s left of you is the scrape of a year starved on grasshoppers. It is touching to see the basin of your devoted body. A little bit east, whole lambs were smeared on the temple. The city was coiled, white within its walls (violet), its muscles twisting over muscles. The temple, sleek at the top, smiled with music—it might’ve lifted for a second. I was just there. The priests wore such tall hats, heavenly bodies dropped behind their eyes. The mothers of Jerusalem suggested curtains tattering down from the markets that whirred with the songs of bargaining, parting one from the other, laughing home. The dust lifted into the hair of the peaceful citizens and was shaken out. The land was socializing. The invalids were blind as stars; the children plaited their hair in a manner pleasing to mountain lions: the boys; the trumpets bellowed like lonely bulls—they were distressed, despite their red velvet dresses; the widows were wrapping themselves in silk as their sons carried nearby stones outside the city; mules were begging to be beaten with softer sticks; a yellowing vine was making love to a young tree; grape skins were staining the feet of dancers; merchant’s fingers became little bodies which wrapped themselves around each coin; cups of hot tea startled the mouths of the idle; a tangle of serpents tried to choose just one mate; the lit membrane of a sheet hung in a window to dry, itself a heavenly body. I could go on, John, but why leave the sheet? What sermon on hope or virtue can you make that is more convincing than it? Leaving the city was a wrenching kind of death, but lying here by you, John, in rocks and flat dirt—Heaven is unexpected.

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it’s morning, afternoon or evening — the loot of hours — a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded.

For Julien Poirier Eke out a few more bars for the jewels behind doors. Lutes and harps lay up to bolster language out from underneath. More absentmindedly walking the room, swishing about beyond argument or caging names. Calling out over the whole wet season, commercial speculations (cycles). I love that edge the wall makes — casino game-board green — my love comes bursting out the center of the glass (foiled) I abandon my trap in fragments. The grand terrace band (it’s waning) finale of synchronized dives, straight to my deepest forest overnight, this unfinished, uproarious music for vacuum.

There were no alarms, no sentries: how could there have been? The doors were even standing open, and if we could do it again we wouldn't have it any other way. Defenseless—isn't that better? Unarmed? Now we follow these strangers, who lead us along without loving us, without curiosity or comprehension, merely sufficiently convinced of our value, and perhaps intent on profiting from us. We will be passed from hand to hand in the markets of the great prairie. We will grow ever quieter, ever more condemned to wrap ourselves in the blind solitude of objects. Beneath the touch of countless rags, we will let the slightest traces of our origin be erased.