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My crown. My room. Surrounding snow. These are not my hands, my winter shoes carried off by uncertain music. There was a meadow behind my house and if I should see myself there she would tell me there was never a meadow and then walk through me as if through a cloud and carry on in her own solitary direction. Crows still caw in her palace garden— tram rails, rain, stammering moon. Once lilacs bloomed their huge white knuckles breaking the winter of my room— it was a dream—French windows on a Viennese street. Every street I cross angling alongside smoggy postwar artifices branches scratch against my sleep. How my body was a branch in my sleep. And when I woke years later I peered down upon it leafless and stiff. No roosts left, no caw. No birds blooming in my dream’s green crooks. Afternoons alone are labyrinthine. I wander the city, searching for what? Friends, we knew where to find each other, tapping the window of the winter room. We were thinner then, younger than the chestnut trees. Everything has its seed much later and on the other side of time.

I. Tripartite schemes were all very well for the builders who held their blueprints firmly in hand beforehand. What did it matter if the two vertical poles didn’t touch, seemed so far apart, in fact, that no one who visited the site could believe the architect’s arrogant babble? Before they knew it, he’d bridged the two poles with a plank. I have hidden under these structures of synthetic comfort when the sky was overcast. I have even hired a claque of unemployed actors  to stand there with me. But speaking for myself, I find their tentlike charm diminishing. Over on the next hill is a line of poker-faced upright slabs, their bases deep in the dirt, their function something else entirely. II. I keep seeking this pleasure-giving eye mote; you fill your pew and my view with golden uncontrollable emanation and the music surges in response, a coded story of hope and disappointment decipherable to the few. Is it wrong to be overheated here, or not to have left my coat at the entrance? The only crime would be not to swoon, to see and ignore you, or brand you a brother in spotless devotion. Beneath the bleeding windows hearts must have heft, masses of skin become human tremors, to feel the force of the organ. On its own the rite is a starchy obligation; add intrigue and the altar ripples and ripples. III. Over the hub of the hill, a solid wall of silver leaves. Underfoot, soil without burrows. Blanketing soil and leaves, a scrim of hushed and unpunctured blue. Then all of a sudden, rumors of something about to happen; the night restless with its own unkeepable secrets, the very air strained and achingly electric. Because you are not here, nighttime behaves this way, calling for terms I’d long since put away: susurration, intrigue, reverberant. It is only in your magnanimous absence that stony surroundings can sing your praises so; I curse even as I gape to know that their raving requires your being anywhere else. The evening hums in compensation. IV. His beak is open as if in mid-worm or mid-sentence, his feet impressively sturdy as they straddle the street. What gives him away, though, is the magenta pool spreading rapidly under this otherwise unruffled stomach. Something ended this bird so suddenly that he never had time to strike a normal death pose. It would be overdone and untrue to say I am the bird, to paint myself in similar terms as stunted, irretrievably downed, forever rooted to unkind ground. It would smack of self-pity. We are partners instead beneath a general rubric of doom: an arrow descended and brought him, startled, to death, me screamingly to life. V. I loved a statue and watered it daily. Sooner or later it softened and let me break a vital part of it off; with my hard-won prize in my pocket I explored the streets with a secret, but before long the plundered piece was dust in my hands, and painful to look at. Now another effigy makes me shudder at its criminal threshold. More than ever I entertain a shameless urge to steal or caress it, but the facts of history tell me otherwise: you get what you pray for and the statue dwindles to rubble. VI. Although others lack the sharpened knives to be villains, they do what they can with blunter instruments. Sparring to kill time, falling to fisticuffs when eloquence evades them, they get their day’s entertainment from instruction manuals bought at auctions; when one utters his bored “Touché,” a gaggle of fans surround him. How much deadlier is your collection of swords with a history, scimitars that glint even when strung up and inactive. Although I would gladly lay a whetstone at your door for one blinding night of thrust-and-parry, you have no need of anything resembling aid: one twist of your weapon outstabs the meanest ranks of dullard soldiers. VII. The avuncular figure with grizzled beard, the bearer of balm for the stricken and abandoned, the craggy but spirited sickle-carrier paces the page of a long-forgotten book of days and never once frowns. There is no need to: our days may be numbered, but . . . (and here his eyes mist over with comforting thoughts of gold and rainbows). His evil twin wants none of this waiting, this starry-eyed torpor. Hoping to scare eternity into submission, he too brandishes a sickle, but everything goes wrong: he pierces his own leg and must go on crutches. Before long, he falls into childish fits of self-pity, proffering sickle and leg to hirelings, saying “Lop it off, boys, and be quick.” VIII. During the first stages of frenzy, a glut of meaning descends on nature. As if to spite cynics who call dirt nothing but dirt, terrific breezes mere conveyors of pollen, something in the sufferer’s mind seeks out and finds corroboration in vast planets and puny insects; all are as prone to nervous tics, all whirring with badly kept secrets. Time passes, and the system turn on you. When all is sacred, nothing is safe: silent lampposts suddenly pipe up in irresistible  colloquy a tone too high, the sky calls you but does not want your replies, and water-bound birds decline pronouns in Latin. It is a hotbed that cannot stand the addition of an offending presence; it whispers until you are well on your way. IX. Before you came on the scene and blasted the image to bits, I thought of love as a spacious courtroom where evidence was presented graphically and up front, where deserving plaintiffs got what they wanted legally, and where judges beamed beneath picturesque wigs when they saw happy verdicts amicably arrived at. These days, law is something to be left at the door along with galoshes; I spend my nights in sinister mock-trial, playing all the parts. “Guilty or not?” booms our pot-bellied, exquisitely bored judge. I answer for you: “Not, your holiness; this harridan framed me.” And then I object. And then, hunched over in a corner of the courtroom, a juror suggests we all go out to lunch. X. It was a run of the mill journey until the windows seemed to have melted; outside the train, the foliage of early summer received an instantaneous drenching. Startled, I thought of you like a lovesick heroine out of an old romance: “Holding her heart, agawp at nature’s rages, she would watch the storm from inside, and secretly like it.” No longer dainty hand-to-the-head, the tragic meaningful stare out the window. No storm buffets alone; however stunningly leaves may shudder and press against the pane, it is a wasted downpour if nobody comes out soggy. Reaching my stop, I left my cap and trenchcoat inside a locker and headed for the wet jungle, hot on your heels. XI. Our meeting is as stiff as a long-dead thoroughbred. Like its former coat, we too are glossy and brief; no frizzy wire springs up that is not dutifully cropped; our every neigh is strictly by the book; place us in a lineup of similarly frozen stallions, and you will not know one rigor mortis from another and another. I could endure a salvo of kicking, a brutish uprearing nag, or a vicious race to the finish, over this wingless duo of moribund mares. I could even stand it if you leapt up and started poking holes in my horse metaphor. Anything other than the way our speech resembles the two extremes of stunted growth: gorgeous stillborns, cynical has-beens. This is no time for pleasantry! XII. I have been dreaming you into the picture when you bound, unseeing, past me. I tingle onward with knees of jelly, glad to be confirmed in my scheming: this walk is no hopeless ramble, but a perfect way of seeing and being seen. Fate, sensing my hopes, obligingly guides you outdoors. What rankles is the time it takes me to realize that you are truly, tangibly here. I have been holding so many secret meetings with you that this brief encounter, this perfect opportunity passes, doesn’t register. I see you in retrospect: you were here, jacket flapping in the noon breeze, and gone by the time I had presence of mind to grasp it. XIII. Explaining camouflage: a useful way of suiting yourself to your habitat so that you steal its features more than it steals yours; in war, a surefire method of avoiding skirmishes; in love, a vanishing act that lets you watch the object of your affection, in whose vagrant eyes you might as well be a pebble, a flaw on the leaf. Or, a ruinous self-effacement, brainchild of the timid, deserving to be trounced by the rustle in the trees which announces a vital presence, the force which, storming a fortress, subjects its tenant to a scrutiny of his most cherished beliefs, the stunning hybrid you look at once and cannot get out of your mind. XIV. Hearing you praised is enough to make my overbaked brain a warpath for feuding goddesses. Only instead of swords, their messages clash, each one a model of what I might do. On one side, Silence, stately in black, shows no sign of unrest: her only response to the beaming crowd is to nod. On the other side in see-through red, a goddess named Outrage deafens her rival with laudatory overdrive; next to her encomia both clean and unclean, the excesses of the laurel-throwers positively began to pale. It is her manner that somehow filters out; the walls start to rumble, the floorboards, feeble at keeping secrets, murmur “Swear it.” XV. In the handed-down inventory of love’s habits we find images of lowering: down at the mouth, down on the knees, prostrate with the shock of the marvelous. Contact more than shame-faced with the elevated figure is therefore impossible; hazard more than a bow, and a trapdoor opens beneath you; offer a hand, and see love disappear. There is never a mention of the sudden boost the run-down ego receives when, flinging a jest from toad-high levels, it witnesses more than haughty approval. Nor is it told how the jest (some minor impromptu line) gets told and retold in the prolonged wake of the moment; seraphs laugh at it, trees love it; you see your dullness shine in another’s eyes. XVI. A dream straight out of a textbook: having been tied up and pointed at the wall by a swarthy, hairy- faced thug and her henchman, I hear the incredible shouts as an old babysitter is disemboweled. Severed organs flap to the floor like pancakes, but I do not think, “Me next,” fearing instead that it will fall on me to clean up the horrible mess. What can I do, on waking, but clench my stomach in sharp, instinctive need to keep it closed? In wars between the hirsute and the nurturing, nobody dares to cheer for the former, though her company, being moody, is hellishly more alive. Will this day or the next bring pearly surfaces to the brink of spilling over? (Somewhere the babysitter screams your name.) XVII. Once a day, you report to the resident loony for clues leading to the whereabouts of the author of a love letter you have received. She is mad but useful, delving as she can into alternate worlds; and as you grill her from the other side of the bars, a strange bond begins to form between you. She seems to have felt as you do. Little do you know that this sibyl is also a relentless self-promoter. She ladles out counsel (“You can tell she wants to be tracked down”) and misinformation (“I think I know where she lives”) like a watery broth that keeps you coming back for the meaty pay-off at the bottom. All this you realize and tolerate, never suspecting that she’s the one you want. XVIII. When you are within shouting distance it is no matter, or next to none, what you say or whether we speak at all. It is enough to see, and covertly to love, your bright array of colorful traits. They are no sooner parceled out than stored up, secret accounts to be gone over until the whole single-spaced ledger is memorized. But when you leave, ledgers cannot contain you; time passes and the beloved blurs, the riotous gestures faded in substance, though not in force. I cannot hear your voice if I try; and what do I do when a free-floating affection outraces its visible target? From your splendid outpost that dazzles merely by being yours, send photos. XIX. Abroad, you are a mass of extra shadow falling on all you see. On its own a square is stiff and formidable; walk in it and the arches tremble, the smells from the canal soften and linger. The red of the hills at evening is fit for a postcard home, until you step in the picture—and hand it back to the masters. It is straight out of a shoddy French novel to squeeze the continents into us/them categories and chapters—mold here, fruit there, stubble in places and wheat in others. Think me less a philistine when I say how little the steps of the journey frame you. It is you, torchbearer to shrouded lands, who flood them with living color. XX. When I call you to mind, you respond sluggishly if at all. It is as if, being busy, you send a very expensive mannequin in your stead, a robot who dresses and walks like you but cannot capture your puzzling essence. Memory loves paradox: the more I require a stand-in, the looser the seams, the phonier the puppet. But I do not know this until the unexpected happens. Sifting my horde of jewels and praising their cut, I come upon a diamond that puts them to shame; catching a glimpse of familiar patterns of color in the street, I realize the cheapness of the household dolls I have been thinking about, relieved that even now, surprises like this put you fleetingly back in the picture. XXI. It will be objected that in missing you I forfeit a key to the room reserved for bona fide lovers. There, an air of resolute calm prevails: it is always “Our minds are as one, and that is enough,” or “I saw him last night in the shape of a cloud,” or, harder still to believe, “Look at the useful machine I built instead of grieving.” They may brace themselves and speak of the salubrious sublime; they may grit their teeth and bear it; their tourniqueted hearts are as undone as mine. Away, you are no homing compass or dove, but a roving, ceaselessly altering scoundrel. To miss you is to miss the loot you add to your repository of noises. XXII. Horses, birds, babysitters and jails, shadows, churches and trains; one would think you’d sat up with me all night, filling out forms on what images you preferred, or at least been consulted in the matter. Failing that, one might suppose you to have stood on the sidelines in mounting horror as, one by one, strange pictures of you took flight. But you stumbled into this mess of blocks like the bumbling idiot in a screwball comedy. Center stage contained in cardboard boxes you tripped over before smiling and wandering on, in your madcap way, to new scrapes. Meanwhile, the whirligig thrives in your absence: booted cubes swoon for their muse, a poltergeist in a bowtie. XXIII. A spider loved a bee and, knowing that to trap him would be to kill him, devised webs just flashy enough to keep the insect guessing. And soon, seeing in the spider’s handiwork traces of his own flower-hopping, the bee came closer. Arachnid vapors wafted over them as the bee proposed to die in the spider’s service. “No!” screamed the latter, tightening up her floss, and the spurned bee flew on to more accustomed turf—roses and lilies next to whom (he saw) the spider was nothing. But she was not so lucky. The web she’d spun for him got tangled in her post mortem antenna-flailing, and finally wound around her neck and choked her. It was the end of the fable. XXIV. The more love grows, the bigger its sealed-off palace becomes, and the more pinched and dark its stoical keeper. Inside, sun breeds space: a ray that snuck past the keeper enters a room and lights it— only now there is not one room but many. Beams bright as lasers but gentler give away the safe behind the painting, the corridor under the rug. If only the keeper, hardened by circumstance, could learn from this endless illumination and turn the room inside out. Light would then seep through leathery skin, giving its secrets away in a gradually spreading glow, turning skin the orange of pure beatitude. But there are only two options for the keeper: to be charbroiled all at once or eternally silent. XXV. Then, any enterprise requiring new clothes was privately hissed, if openly hailed; too close to a floral militia thinking as one were the standard frills, the required rustles, and thinking myself a beacon among dark ladies, I called the clothes by their hidden agendas: ethical corsets, trusses of the spirit. Now I cry out for the colorful front of fancy dress, bow down in belated awe before silk and organza. It is not the delusion of being at my best, but the promise of further secrecy that thrills me; these veils only make unveiling all the stranger and wilder, and under my gown claw ghosts you’ll never see. XXVI. This sideshow of outlandish images is nothing like the main attractions of another time. Just after one picture clicks on and the eyes have adjusted, another, altogether different one takes its place, and another, and another. What in the world is going on? Did the projector gather together the uppermost slides on the pile? Nothing could be falser. It is only that the replacement of the reel calls for as many tricks and turns as possible to be an even passable substitute. Everything is its field; its lens is a gaping hole with a passion for things encyclopedic. This is the only way it can capture your many angles—small comfort, yet comfort still. XXVII. The next time our paths cross there will be none of this shilly-shallying, this bondage, like it or not, to fickle time, brute locale. The crossing itself will slow down the march of the passing moment with its own unstoppable steam, its tenebrous and sultry collection of vapors. It will be love in a bottle. But there is always a screw loose somewhere, a gap in the glass that lets in a limber array of interlopers. From the mutual friend who smells a levity and wants in, to the premature bonging of the hour, to the false confines of the walls of our houses, there is always a damnable flaw in the system . . . and incoming elves who taunt “Excuses, excuses.” XXVIII. What is it about this flame I label passion that burns the world and its newspapers to a crisp? How can I call myself hungry for the facts of one kind but wince at another? The lover’s room may be an all-white, tiny room with a view of woods, but why, if a well-meaning friend slides a special report under my door, do I look for tongs and a furnace? Because the flame is not only self-infatuated, given to burning documents for the sake of flaunting its own reds, but also in a state of permanent warfare; all worldly flare-ups, all currencies not its own, remind it that amid the worst incendiary horrors, it goes on stoking itself for want of a proper spark. XXIX. The catechism of the far gone: isn’t it too good to be coincidental that our eyes have looked at that billboard with the same unqualified disgust? Can we ignore the fact that you happened to witness the accident only minutes after I did? Is there more than just a flimsy link in a story jointly loved, a pastime avoided? No, yes, and by no means. These are the very traits which, observed in an enemy, get shelved or denied by their once proud possessor. I could pillage an igloo, travel to the torrid antipodes and produce thousands like you, featured like you, like you in raves and complaints. I was bedazzled by a ray of fool’s gold. XXX. Go, tyrant. In your heart will nest no more desperate slaves. Come again, days of productivity, nights of rest and no nightmares. I have spent so much time under the shade of your massive umbrella that I will draw it shut for a minute to see what I once saw, and what I have missed since seeing you. Eyes, look unchained around you. It is a landscape of moldering stones and bones. When the eyes are free to roam, they are not so much free as useless—I see a sky of fledgling clouds and do nothing to help them, peer into the living record of a severed oak and can decipher nothing. Return, dark glasses, come again, morbid parasol; only in shade do mountains have features. XXXI. In the final tally of divine overseers who will be ours? Suppose we claim the moon, whose bottomless bag of stardust enchants a forest of two, softens and shrinks the volume of venomous air between us, and lovingly coats all former fears with beams of forgetful, nourishing light? Our watcher is the moon, but only after a brutal shake-up is through with her. She has never learned the knack of lighting two people at once; instead it is always me illumined, you off in the bushes, you posed in your halo, me waist-deep in darkness. And she is a clumsy goddess for the reason that she borrows (poor moon) what light she has from me. XXXII. Though you are by definition a slippery freedom, if forced to freeze you in a single image I would call you a beam of light with hidden powers to strike and alter forever. Here is a room: regard its monotone grimness. Enter your incandescent highness: gladly around you objects sparkle, knowing a beam when they see it. Next to your flawless arc I am a damaged bulb in a fleabag hotel, clattering on to reveal paintings on velvet and objets trouvés(but where?), rattling off to plunge the run-down room into dark desuetude. What if we pooled our forces? Would we stand together like heartless neon sculpture or deck ourselves in loving chiaroscuro? XXXIII. Perfect, you say? It is enough to make me perform operations on myself in order to test your love: taking in the wreckage, you would be forced to say “Yes, gouging out one eye makes the other shine all the brighter; the smell of your fungus reminds me of summer; your leprous stump is a modish charmer since, after all, green is my favorite color.” And yet, for all our tirades against deception, how easily do we succumb to the lover’s flattery, and with what treachery. If I am perfect, it is only by being perfect that you, myopic, dependable you can keep me; so go on, keep on calling me faultless, come on, hurry up with my supper, leave me, and come back at midnight, but don’t come back if you hear a noise in the room. XXXIV. Still the inveterate skulker, the ghost of chaos past, I have come back to the place where it all began, where leaving, you gave me leave to see you wherever I went— in the home, in the wild, in the sky, in the gutter— and where columns, scribbled on and abandoned, took one look at my raving, and rose again. Strangest of all is that, given the chance to see my subject in the fabulous flesh at last, I would flatly refuse. These barren days when I heat my room by the fading coals of my goals, this ache for an ache is as good as it gets, so go on running; I will go on looking for you as the willow bends, as the stomach hunts for the ulcer.

The forest ended. Glad I was To feel the light, and hear the hum Of bees, and smell the drying grass And the sweet mint, because I had come To an end of forest, and because Here was both road and inn, the sum Of what’s not forest. But ’twas here They asked me if I did not pass Yesterday this way? “Not you? Queer.” “Who then? and slept here?” I felt fear. I learnt his road and, ere they were Sure I was I, left the dark wood Behind, kestrel and woodpecker, The inn in the sun, the happy mood When first I tasted sunlight there. I travelled fast, in hopes I should Outrun that other. What to do When caught, I planned not. I pursued To prove the likeness, and, if true, To watch until myself I knew. I tried the inns that evening Of a long gabled high-street grey, Of courts and outskirts, travelling An eager but a weary way, In vain. He was not there. Nothing Told me that ever till that day Had one like me entered those doors, Save once. That time I dared: “You may Recall”—but never-foamless shores Make better friends than those dull boors. Many and many a day like this Aimed at the unseen moving goal And nothing found but remedies For all desire. These made not whole; They sowed a new desire, to kiss Desire’s self beyond control, Desire of desire. And yet Life stayed on within my soul. One night in sheltering from the wet I quite forgot I could forget. A customer, then the landlady Stared at me. With a kind of smile They hesitated awkwardly: Their silence gave me time for guile. Had anyone called there like me, I asked. It was quite plain the wile Succeeded. For they poured out all. And that was naught. Less than a mile Beyond the inn, I could recall He was like me in general. He had pleased them, but I less. I was more eager than before To find him out and to confess, To bore him and to let him bore. I could not wait: children might guess I had a purpose, something more That made an answer indiscreet. One girl’s caution made me sore, Too indignant even to greet That other had we chanced to meet. I sought then in solitude. The wind had fallen with the night; as still The roads lay as the ploughland rude, Dark and naked, on the hill. Had there been ever any feud ’Twixt earth and sky, a mighty will Closed it: the crocketed dark trees, A dark house, dark impossible Cloud-towers, one star, one lamp, one peace Held on an everlasting lease: And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s; No difference endured between The two. A dog barked on a hidden rise; A marshbird whistled high unseen; The latest waking blackbird’s cries Perished upon the silence keen. The last light filled a narrow firth Among the clouds. I stood serene, And with a solemn quiet mirth, An old inhabitant of earth. Once the name I gave to hours Like this was melancholy, when It was not happiness and powers Coming like exiles home again, And weaknesses quitting their bowers, Smiled and enjoyed, far off from men, Moments of everlastingness. And fortunate my search was then While what I sought, nevertheless, That I was seeking, I did not guess. That time was brief: once more at inn And upon road I sought my man Till once amid a tap-room’s din Loudly he asked for me, began To speak, as if it had been a sin, Of how I thought and dreamed and ran After him thus, day after day: He lived as one under a ban For this: what had I got to say? I said nothing, I slipped away. And now I dare not follow after Too close. I try to keep in sight, Dreading his frown and worse his laughter. I steal out of the wood to light; I see the swift shoot from the rafter By the inn door: ere I alight I wait and hear the starlings wheeze And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight. He goes: I follow: no release Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.

How to get close without going over. How to feign lust for whatever’s on offer. How the largest possible quantity of anything is a lifetime. A lifetime of oat bran. A lifetime of timing belts. A lifetime of saying, sure, why not, i’m only on earth x number of years , and not knowing what to make x. Sometimes I pick a number I’ve already passed. I remember the gambler’s credo — when you only have fifty bucks left in this world, you’d better get rid of it fast; the last thing you want is money around, reminding you every day of the money you lost. The recommended retirement plan is arabesque, then leap and smash on the seawall. We made a promise not to catch each other.

They slept and ate like us. Feral they were not. The intricacy of their handiwork bespoke a fineness we’d be taught. Yet we wiped them out. It was eerily easy to do, although they knew we were coming and knew we knew they knew. Not only did they not resist our guns like bloody hacking coughs in their libraries and hospitals, their bedrooms and their schools— they would not acknowledge us. We felt like fools. There was no keening. Even the children did not cry. It was as if meaning inhered so deeply in their daily lives we could not touch it; nor would they quit living to be slaughtered, it was so inviolate.

In Exodus Moses is hidden in a cleft, behind God’s hand, begging, and he sees — rushing past him — God’s back, diminishing. Moses stops begging. God’s back is black fog. I know. He, we guess, means to do it, to do all of this. The brute center part of an iridescent moth. The carnation against the man.

Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain. To paint half a man on a half a horse. To paint a dolphin in a forest. To color feathers on a beast. To grant a maid a fish's waist. To graft or to wax, whether clay, whether nether. As men graft their gods upon empires. Then we build mirrors to better understand ourselves, to better understand our souls, and we ask ourselves reflectively, Where? then Who? Woe unto us, we are building our city from our urine. Maintaining it with our fardels and with facts. The burbs we raise to the ranks of birds. Then we furnish them with words that wilt, like oak and elm and ash. Busily we build our city. Toilsomely we lay the bricks. Men of the six-clock give way to those of nine, those of the nine to the generation of twelve, and those of the twelve tend to disappear, making room for the more fashionable folks who make the two-o-clock noon in the middle of day by the greedy ill will of pills. Toilsomely we build our city. Burdensomely we tow the line. Those ministers who refuse to tow we quickly omit. Then, when the city is complete, we sit back in the stadium bleachers and wonder how the generated world can be so excellent. How the emulated world can be so grand. How the phone pole stands in for its form. How matter is glued to the elements of ideals. Then, when the city is complete, we sit at the edge of our great new void, like frogs at edge of a pond, like birds whose nests are littered with knots. Here, we live here in the syllables of our screams where vowels hang like fish hang on hooks. Out of the water. Like consonants with their scales scraped off. And because we fear our world is growing weary, we fill our homes with booty and with loot. Then our big city crawls into the country, dragging its mountains right along with it. Like death that extends itself with golden planks, we hang ourselves by silk, by twine, by telephone cords. The religious tongue becomes the last supper that we swallow greedily and without chewing. Like death. That is the supreme fortune of man. This is a studied and digested truth. A couple of hours later, we find ourselves at the junction of shanties where prairies host the sprawling city of Denver, that long lost city of long lost ghosts who haunt the long lost plains, that lifeless and wifeless city, in contrast, of course, to the Big Apple, that city of violated treaties, that wailing city set for the protection of infinity, so like the city of the seven gods, so like Rome, so with its epithets, with its alphabetical locomotives. There, only dogs can find the grisly burbs where the grisly grass slowly grows. Where savage canoes now blossom into lilies. Montgomery says it's not a place of roof and of walls, it's more like a company, it's more like a corporation. But what is the city but its steeples and domes? What is a city but its spires and its clocks? Time, the people of the city. Time, the bluntest eye, the lion's padded paws. Sea dreams and my flowering germander eyes droop at the factoried gloom. Bank rates are a codex to the cross. This is the religious box body. This is the largest corporation in the world. This, with a sprinkling of poetry and a poetic moat. Sea dreams, a new born clerk, all raised and bred. A maze of cuneiform streets spread like a spider's web. Not dapper, but cricket-like. Not coned, but molded. The lot is posted for the dock. Violets are sold at a hundred a piece and marshals ride on horseback while Homer makes his slow way home.

Pure gaze, you are lightning beyond the last trees and you are the last trees’ past, branching green lightning of terminal brain branches numened densely with summer’s hunter color, as night comes on, the ocean they conceal gone berserk, wind still rising. Pure seeing, dual vortex doors to the blue fire where sex is burned away, and all is as it was and I am being offered in your eyes, as in cupped hands, the water of to never thirst again. Again I turn away, and the future comes, all at once towering around me on every side, and I am lost. Pure looking, past pain (this is promised): we must have wed on poverty’s most hair-raising day delighting, flashing risk, risk unfailingly lighting the way, anything possible in that dissolving of seam between minds, no more golden time— each step I took the right step, words came to me finally and finding the place you had set for them, once again wrote themselves down. Till true word’s anvil ring, and solid tap of winged blind cane come, I wish you all the aloneness you hunger for. That big kitchen table where you sit laughing with friends, I see it happening. And I wish that I could not be so much with you when I’m suddenly not; that inwardly you might switch time, to sleep and winter while you went about your life, until you woke up well, our conversation resumed. Ceaseless blue lightning, this love passing through me: I know somehow it will go on reaching you, reaching you instantly when I’m not in the way; when it is no longer deflected by all the dark bents, all I tried to overcome but I could not— so much light pulled off course as it passed within reach, so much lost, lost in me, but no more. October

What might all songs lean into? You scramble eggs one moment, and in the next minute you're eating them with dry toast and black coffee in silence. On a day like any day, your voice is not your own: the grass clippings disrupt a robin too large to fly from worm to worm. We don't know why we speak, but yet our voices persist, even when void of substance— like a dream you'd like to recall throughout the day, but you don't or you can't and after a week, it's gone forever. Of course our voices evolve years before our bodies— our vocal cords vibrate like a heartbeat, senselessly. No explanation needed. Eventually all languages converge. Each thought falls into all others. And what thought resists being built by words? Perhaps fear placed us here in this room together: a fear of fire at one point turned into a fear of God. After that, a fear of godlessness, a room where a word before another word and another word after the first was all we had, all we could imagine. Somehow an image means more than the object itself but not because it's made of words. Most likely it's because the act of creation sets the mind down like a bird in a field where the speed of the invasive cannot exist.

On the death of my sister Cecilia—the last of five members of the family, who died successively. Our family tree is in the sear And yellow leaf of life; Branch after branch, year after year, Yields to death’s pruning knife. First, youngest born, as if ’twere meet, The sacrifice should be, “The last of earth,” the first to meet Th’ unknown eternity. ’Twas God who gave, ’twas He who took, His voice let us obey, So that in his eternal book, Our names shine bright as day.