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Yestereve, on the marble steps of the Temple, I saw a woman sitting between two men.  One side of her face was pale, the other was blushing.

I like to see doctors cough. What kind of human being would grab all your money just when you're down? I'm not saying they enjoy this: "Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it, no hope! You might as well hand over your wallet." Hell no, they'd rather be playing golf and swapping jokes about our feet. Some of them smoke marijuana and are alcoholics, and their moral turpitude is famous: who gets to see most sex organs in the world? Not poets. With the hours they keep they need drugs more than anyone. Germ city, there's no hope looking down those fire-engine throats. They're bound to get sick themselves sometime; and I happen to be there myself in a high fever taking my plastic medicine seriously with the doctors, who are dying.

No need to drive a nail into the wall To hang your hat on; When you come in, just drop it on the chair No guest has sat on. Don’t worry about watering the flowers— In fact, don’t plant them. You will have gone back home before they bloom, And who will want them? If mastering the language is too hard, Only be patient; The telegram imploring your return Won’t need translation. Remember, when the ceiling sheds itself In flakes of plaster, The wall that keeps you out is crumbling too, As fast or faster. Translated from the German by Adam Kirsch

Where you've fallen, you will stay. In the whole universe this one and only place is the sole place which you have made your very own. The country runs away from you. House, mill, poplar—every thing is struggling with you here, as if in nothingness mutating. But now it's you who won't give up. Did we fleece you? You've grown rich. Did we blind you? You watch us still. You bear witness without speech.

You’re speeding me down the Ventura freeway in your battered Scout, patched since your angry crash into the drunken pole that swerved into your road. We’ve got no seat belts, no top, bald tires, so I clutch any metal that seems as though it might be firm, belie its rusted rattling. Under my August burn I’m fainting white, but I’m trying to give you what you want: an easy mother. For the last two days you’ve been plugged into your guitar, earphones on, door closed. I spoiled our holiday with warnings about your accidental life, said this time I wouldn’t rescue you, knowing you’d hate me, knowing I’d make myself sick. We’re speaking now, the airport is so near, New York closer than my birthday tomorrow, close as bearded death whose Porsche just cut us off in the fast lane. When you were three, you asked if God lived under the street. I said I didn’t know, although a world opened under my feet walking with you over strange angels, busy arranging our fate. Soon, if we make it, I’ll be in the air, where people say God lives, the line between you and me stretched thinner, thinner but tight enough still to bind us, choke us both with love. Your Scout, putty-colored as L.A. mornings, protests loudly but hangs on.

(1916) I I found a dreadful acre of the dead, Marked with the only sign on earth that saves. The wings of death were hurrying overhead, The loose earth shook on those unquiet graves; For the deep gun-pits, with quick stabs of flame, Made their own thunders of the sunlit air; Yet, as I read the crosses, name by name, Rank after rank, it seemed that peace was there; Sunlight and peace, a peace too deep for thought, The peace of tides that underlie our strife, The peace with which the moving heavens are fraught, The peace that is our everlasting life. The loose earth shook. The very hills were stirred. The silence of the dead was all I heard. II We, who lie here, have nothing more to pray. To all your praises we are deaf and blind. We may not ever know if you betray Our hope, to make earth better for mankind. Only our silence, in the night, shall grow More silent, as the stars grow in the sky; And, while you deck our graves, you shall not know How many scornful legions pass you by. For we have heard you say (when we were living) That some small dream of good would “cost too much.” But when the foe struck, we have watched you giving, And seen you move the mountains with one touch. What can be done, we know. But, have no fear! If you fail now, we shall not see or hear.

After lockdown, tier by tier undresses to sleep: Each skull nestles in its mattress-hollow. Wall facing wall inside of wall shrinks to a keyhole: A fly creeps through and starts to buzz, reeling through bars Down steel corridors. A dreamer’s eye follows the fly, And wherever the fly lands, the eye touches down With an airier Midas touch that turns all to glass: The eye wakes to Bentham’s panopticon, glazed cage Of an inspection house where only the Warden sees all. —I am asleep and not asleep, I stare up into faces swarming: Cellblocks of memory focus face by face, Mine flitting in and out of theirs: In prison issue They come, footsteps mingling over mine in a child’s game Of chase from yard to cell, only we’re all grown men, Meatier, less and more malign than A boy’s imagining himself grown... —I was asleep and not asleep, Faces came and went. Frank the Joker, the West Virginia biker, who composed “A rhyme to fit the crime”: “There was a young fellow named Frank Who gave his girlfriend a spank; She fell in a heap In front of Frank’s jeep And old Frank ran her down for a prank.” Or the white-haired lifer, densley oracular: “Sometimes, after lockdown, your thoughts Just don’t have the energy to climb the wall.” The Giggler who bolted His brother in a barn and burned it down, Eyes challenging, sly: “They killed this guy and see, I think this is funny, hilarious In fact, but you, you won’t think so—they cut off his dick And shoved it in his mouth.” Or the child molester who said about flowers At funerals: “They’re there, aren’t they, To hide the stink off the corpse?” Or Pat, armed robber Who held aloof: Rolled shirtsleeves, forearms Carved from basalt, smoke rings Lazily effusing: “The johns here, they got no doors: You ever try to take a shit while someone’s watching? It took six months to get used to that— But here, man, the bars feed on Time, they nibble It to nothing.” —I wanted to sleep and couldn’t sleep, I stared up into faces swarming. Three o’clock dark dissolves The walls, faces start to drift, their atoms Mix with concrete’s Atomic swirl, bodies get stuck Floating halfway through, heartbeats Booming as through a stethoscope: Like Michaelangelo’s slaves, if a fly Landed on their noses, They couldn’t lift a hand to brush it off. Dark velleities buzz in this hive of steel Where power handshakes Flower in forests Of interlocking fingers: In red prison uniform, a man On death row, convicted 1984, exonerated and pardoned October 2000 (New York Times, Dec. 10): “You could hear the humming of the chair Every time they cut it on, like an air-conditioner Cutting on. My daddy came to see me, he said, ‘What's that?’ I said, ‘The chair.’ The way they put it, they got to test the chair.” —I was asleep And couldn’t wake up. Inside my skull, glass Keeps shattering: Dream-beings Unsubscribed to the will, with insect bodies And human heads, dash against walls, mammal softness Of cheeks and lips join with stingers Pulsing...my eyes awake and not awake, where is the chamber As in the horror movie Return of the Fly that, circuitry and test-tubes Sparking, would unscramble these divided Natures? (They called me “Teach” As in “Hey, Teach, how do you spell...” When I confessed I’d been in jail, they looked disappointed in me: Their side of the wall was theirs, not mine.) —I tried to turn over, to look away, But couldn’t wake up, couldn’t not wake. Chemicals drip into a man’s veins, one each For heart, lungs, brain. Strapped to a table, he stares Impassive, eyes flickering shut, body A meat wall, IV tubes Almost empty... —I was asleep and not asleep, I couldn’t move to wake. I hear shrill wings—that fly inspecting bread crumbs Under dining hall tables while the Warden blares Descartes over the Intercom: “If a man’s head were lopped off His mouth would keep on moving, faultlessly Justifying his crimes.” But that fly, that speck against Steel, its wings steered in ways that seem crazy To eyes awake, not awake, Not seeing, all-seeing, the head unmoving Moving to turn away...oh seely fly I can’t not see, can’t move to brush away From my unsleeping eyes, you veer In spirals unflattened into pathos Of careening chaos, your eccentric Flight path darts Through bars, oh alas, hairy Vibrant fly!

Mountains rise above us like ideas Vague in their superior extent, Part of the range of disillusionment Whose arresting outline disappears Into the circumstantial clouds that look Like footnotes from above. What wisdom said The mind has mountains? Imagination read The history of the world there like a book. Playing peek-a-boo with famous peaks Afflicted with the vapours leaves a sense, Frowned down upon by all that bleak immense City of rock and ice, that men are freaks, In the original program of creation, Afterthoughts. Each jack pine seems a brother; Even in lichens we perceive another Example of our own organization, Tenacious, patient, in a century Growing perhaps a quarter-of-an-inch: Glaciers do more daily, an avalanche In minutes. The eroded immobility Attributed to mountains is a fable, Like the Great Divide. They move when you’re not looking, Like stars and stocks, distinctly better looking From a distance, and chronically unstable.

The process of through is ongoing. The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. We were just going. I was just leaving, which is to say, coming elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words move through my limbs, lungs,                mouth, as I appear to sit peacefully at your hearth           transubstantiating some wine. It was a rough red,              it was one of those nights we were not forced by circumstances                       to drink wine out of mugs. Circumstances being,      in those cases, no one had been transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough       to wash dishes. I brought armfuls of wood           from the splitting stump. Many of them, because it was cold,      went right on top of their recent ancestors.              It was an ice night. They transpired visibly,            resin to spark, bark to smoke, wood to ash.        I was transgendering and drinking     the rough red at roughly the same rate           and everyone who looked, saw. The translucence of flames       beat against the air against our skins.                          This can be done with or without clothes on.               This can be done with or without wine or whiskey        but never without water: evaporation is also ongoing.       Most visibly in this case in the form of wisps of steam     rising from the just washed hair of a form at the fire whose beauty was                  in the earth’s turning, that night and many nights,      transcendent. I felt heat changing me.                    The word for this is transdesire, but in extreme cases                 we call it transdire

Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay, from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets I take to work. The front yard of roses — did I write their names down correctly? — Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale. Q31 bus, among the words I hear are Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated, Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not physically well, a poor man, arrested on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose, on the street, held, choked, left unconscious, still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death, according to the autopsy report, a homicide — rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins, by employees of the Agency’s contractor, isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence explains, but, merely, legally justified means of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house. He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace, the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual. In what place, the Federal Reserve’s monetary spigots and banks’ access to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce the market’s decline — in what places, violations of which forms of which eternal laws? Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place? On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike, in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.