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It was a good day and I was about to do something important and good, but then I unscrewed the pen I was using to see the ink. Precision German craftsmanship. The Germans are so persnickety and precise, they wash their driveways. Their mountains and streams dance around each other in a clockwork, courtly imitation of spring. They build the Panzer tank, out of rakes hoses and garden gnomes; they built me. And I’ve seated myself above an avenue on the brink of mystery, always just on the lip, with my toes over the lip but my bowels behind. When I replaced the ink the sky was socked in, only one window of blue open in the north, directly over someone. But that person was reading about Rosicrucians in the laundromat, he was unaware as the blue window closed above him. The rest of us are limp and damp, I see a button in front of us that says “spin cycle.” I’m going to push it.

The Bone-man lives in a stucco house. He ticks his heels on the cold terrazzo floor. He parks his ragtruck in the yard, instructs his crew on the white telephone. I am training my dog to attack the red-capped hunter bearing his long package. I am training the tethered jay to cry out against the killer who cracks the latch. On the open map, the road to my house bulges like a vein. He takes a train, he rents a car, he lurches in with an open fly. Sweet Eve was just the Farmer’s Daughter, he wooed her with a wormy apple. He’s a dirty joke, he’s always everybody’s last lover, he’s a regular can of worms—you wry Medusa, I am a mongoose staring you down.

If I could hold light in my hand I would give it to you and watch it become your shadow.

The cost of flight is landing. On this warm winter day in the southwest, down here on the edge of the border I want to go to France where we all came from where the Occident was born near the ancient caves near Lascaux. At home I’m only sitting on the lip of this black hole, a well that descends to the center of the earth. With a big telescope aimed straight down I see a red dot of fire and hear the beast howling. My back is suppurating with disease, the heart lurches left and right, the brain sings its ditties. Everywhere blank white movies wait to be seen. The skylark dove within inches of the rocks before it stopped and rose again. God’s toes are buried deep in the earth. He’s ready to run. But where?

Talking to my friend Emily, whose drinking patterns and extravagance of personal feeling are a lot like mine, I’m pretty convinced when she explains the things we do while drinking (a cocktail to celebrate the new account turns into a party that lasts till 3 a.m. and a terrific hangover) indicate a problem of a sort I’d not considered. I’ve been worried about how I metabolize the sauce for four years, since my second bout of hepatitis, when I kissed all the girls at Christmas dinner and turned bright yellow Christmas night, but never about whether I could handle it. It’s been more of a given, the stage set for my life as an artistic queer, as much of a tradition in these New York circles as incense for Catholics or German shepherds for the blind. We re-enact the rituals, and our faces, like smoky icons in a certain light, seem to learn nothing but understand all. It comforts me yet isn’t all that pleasant, like drinking Ripple to remember high school. A friend of mine has been drinking in the same bar for decades, talking to the same types, but progressively fewer blonds. Joe LeSueur says he’s glad to have been a young man in the Fifties with his Tab Hunter good looks, because that was the image men desired; now it’s the Puerto Rican angel with great eyes and a fierce fidelity that springs out of machismo, rather than a moral choice. His argument is pretty convincing, too, except lots of the pretty blonds I’ve known default by dying young, leaving the field to the swarthy. Cameron Burke, the dancer and waiter at Magoo’s, killed on his way home from the Pines when a car hit his bike on the Sunrise Highway. Henry Post dead of AIDS, a man I thought would be around forever, surprising me by his mortality the way I was surprised when I heard he was not the grandson of Emily Post at all, just pretending, like the friend he wrote about in Playgirl, Blair Meehan, was faking when he crashed every A List party for a year by pretending to be Kay Meehan’s son, a masquerade that ended when a hostess told him “Your mother’s here” and led him by the hand to the dowager—Woman, behold thy son—underneath a darkening conviction that all, if not wrong, was not right. By now Henry may have faced the same embarrassment at some cocktail party in the sky. Stay as outrageously nasty as you were. And Patrick Mack, locked into memory as he held court in the Anvil by the downstairs pinball machine, and writhing as he danced in Lita Hornick’s parlor when the Stimulators played her party, dead last week of causes I don’t know, as if the cause and not the effect were the problem. My blond friend Chuck Shaw refers to the Bone- crusher in the Sky, and I’m starting to imagine a road to his castle lit by radiant heads of blonds on poles as streetlamps for the gods, flickering on at twilight as I used to do in the years when I crashed more parties and acted more outrageously and met more beauties and made more enemies than ever before or ever again, I pray. It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids with haircuts from my childhood and inflated self-esteem from my arrival in New York, who plug into the history of prettiness, convincing to themselves and the devout. We who are about to catch the eye of someone new salute as the cotillion passes, led by blonds and followed by the rest of us, a formal march to the dark edge of the ballroom where we step out onto the terrace and the buds of the forsythia that hides the trash sprout magically at our approach. I toast it as memorial to dreams as fragile and persistent as a blond in love. My clothes smell like the smoky bar, but the sweetness of the April air’s delicious when I step outside and fill my lungs, leaning my head back in a first-class seat on the shuttle between the rowdy celebration of the great deeds to come and an enormous Irish wake in which the corpses change but the party goes on forever.

‘Poems from prison! About what?’ ‘Life and God.’ ‘God in prison? Friend, you trifle with me. His face, perhaps, at the bars, fading like life.’ ‘He came in with the warder, striving with him. Where else did the severity of the man spring from, but awareness of a charity he must overcome?’ ‘The blows, then, were God chastening the beloved! Who was the more blessed, the dispenser or receiver of them?’ ‘It is the same outside. Bars, walls but make the perspective clear.Deus absconditus! We ransack the heavens, the distance between stars; the last place we look is in prison, his hideout in flesh and bone.’ ‘You believe, then?’ ‘The poems are witness. If his world contracted, it was to give birth to the larger vision. Not meadows empty of him, animal eyes, impersonal as glass, communicate God. On the bare walls of a cell the oppressor watches the diminishing of his human shadow, as he withdraws from the light.’

The body wicks away its nest, leaves sediment. In salt the silhouette of a wolf or a sheepshead. Who knows who steals bones if  not the connoisseur of  bones, and who drops a crank behind the body if  not the one who drains the river bed? In unrest, buzzards. Or a flat line. The probability of  sparrows a spark between two enemy pistons. A dirigible built solely for the grave.

Choice by extinction sounded ominous to Yanks like us — we all remembered the war. But that was just Herr Schreiff’s personal English. We were on the same side now, building the thing, the thing, the VTOL fighter. What’s today? There must be some big dates coming up, historic dates. He’d say,Cold hands frog heart, and it became a gag among the engineers: Soft hands wombat heart, Sweaty hands lawnmower heart. The docs in this place want to put in a pacemaker; I said no, I’m not in this for the long run. On his birthday Schreiff brought in three bottles of schnapps and we sat around half pickled trying to do the do the debug the navigation. What a fright? Patty —     Debbie —    Susan called, wanted to know could she bring me anything. I told her,My old brain. I used to be smart, you know? I’m assuming someone is in charge of the dates, the historic dates. Schreiff had worked for Heinkel during the war, on those last-ditch plywood jet fighters that kept disintegrating in midair and killing their precious test pilots. Ah Christ, look at this mess! Where’s the thing, the thing to call the nurse? Someone needs to deal with those important dates, it’s all so disorganized.

This is not morning. There is a nastiness slowing your shoes, something you shouldn’t step in. It’s shattered beads, stomped flowers, vomit— such stupid beauty, beauty you can stick a manicured finger into and through, beauty that doesn’t rely on any sentence the sun chants, it’s whiskey swelter blown scarlet. Call this something else. Last night it had a name, a name wedged between an organ’s teeth, a name pumping a virgin unawares, a curse word. Wail it, regardless, Weak light, bleakly triumphant, will unveil scabs, snippets of filth music, cars on collapsed veins. The whole of gray doubt slithers on solemn skin. Call her New Orleans. Each day she wavers, not knowing how long she can stomach the introduction of needles, the brash, boozed warbling of bums with neon crowns, necklaces raining. She tries on her voice, which sounds like cigarettes, pubic sweat, brown spittle lining a sax bell the broken heel on a drag queen’s scarlet slings. Your kind of singing. Weirdly in love, you rhumba her edges, drink fuming concoctions, lick your lukewarm breakfast directly from her crust. Go on, admit it. You are addicted to her brick hips, the thick swerve she elicits, the way she kisses you, her lies wide open. She prefers alleys, crevices, basement floors. Hell, let her woo you. This kind of romance dims the worth of soldiers, bends and breaks the back, sips manna from muscle, tells you Leave your life. Pack your little suitcase, flee what is rigid and duly prescribed. Let her touch that raw space between cock and calm, the place that scripts such jazz. Let her pen letters addressed to your asking. You s-s-stutter. New Orleans’s, p-please. Don’t. Blue is the color stunning your tongue. At least the city pretends to remember to be listening. She grins with glint tooth, wiping your mind blind of the wife, the children, the numb ritual of job and garden plot. Gently, she leads you out into the darkness and makes you drink rain.

(excerpt) SCENE. —A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the Scene, morning slowly breaks. Prometheus . Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which Thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise, And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, With fear and self-contempt and barren hope. Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate, Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn, O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, And moments aye divided by keen pangs Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair,—these are mine empire:— More glorious far than that which thou surveyest From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God! Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm, Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below, Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones. Heaven's wingèd hound, polluting from thy lips His beak in poison not his own, tears up My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by, The ghastly people of the realm of dream, Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind: While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. And yet to me welcome is day and night, Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom —As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim— Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet, which then might trample thee If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief, Not exultation, for I hate no more, As then ere misery made me wise. The curse Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, Whose many-voicèd Echoes, through the mist Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost, Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poisèd wings Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss, As thunder, louder than your own, made rock The orbèd world! If then my words had power, Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within; although no memory be Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.