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Genus II. Lichen. On a scale of Lustrous to Sockeye, Fishscale to Fire-Dot. Not Ichthyosis: Lichen. Fruiting bodies in a calcareous spot. Goldspeck. Blushing. O the diffuse eruption of dazzling papulæ! Usher the Wild Lichen. Usher spring and the furfuraceous scurf recurs. The Brain-Scaled (the hairline cracked). The Blue-Blistered, the Earth-Wrinkled. Neither Strophulus nor stoppable. Like wildfire rash the crustose rush of successive crops. Tundra Sulphur, circumpolar, the snowy excoriations. So squats the Dog Lichen, the Freckle Pelt. Cobblestoned, chronic, the not contagious.

Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples draw the young men's rooster eyes where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth, breathing fire, holding for dear life. Green almonds in their shells: she knifes them open one at a time and hands him a slick teardrop, cool white tasting cool white. Nothing compares with such austerities, although the skull's honeycomb of bone will break their hearts, who need hearts like a bird's wishbone, to bend, unbend at every feathery beat—wishbone hearts, or something fleet and light as an ostrich's leg-bone, bearing him to where, panicked with grief, he can bury his head in sand. Papyrus light: a scarf with black parrots on it lifts in the breeze, and a real rare bird is about to fly—his head in the clouds, his life shrouded in daylight he keeps breaking.

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.” —H. Rap Brown, former Black Panther justice minister Thanks for the violence. Thanks for Walt’s rude muscle pushing through the grass, for tiny Gulliver crushed between the giant’s breasts. Thanks for Moby’s triangular hump and Ahab’s castrated leg. Thanks for the harpoons. Thanks for this PBS history of the automatic pistol. The good machine is simple, few moving parts, an efficiency of what’s preserved and what is wasted, so with each shot the recoil cocks the gun to shoot again, then recoil, cock and shoot again, recoil, cock, and so on till the target buys it, or your ammo’s spent. Thanks for the poem, which is really a little pistol: load and cock, point and aim, then the trigger, the hammer, the powder, the discharge, the bullet, the target, the recoil, the crime. No smoking gun, just ballistics, caliber, powder marks, the question why. My life is like a loaded gun, and when I aim it at you I hope to take off the top of your head, no safety on, no playing nice, just the spark, the flash, the damage, just red American cherry pie violence. So, thank you for the harpoon gun we aim at God and death and all the unknown world, and for the spear-stuck beast, rope ripping through torn hands, for what refuses to be caught and what we fathom only by riding the whale down into the deep, refusing to let go.

We danced to rancorous tunes on spiked ground and our knees sang with each puncture, so that several agouti colonies, melanic in our russet strengths, learned as wild rats to scurry or guard ourselves from skin-spite. Immune from nocturnal drowsiness we strong-bellied creatures assembled, campaigned; gyrated to blowed trumpets and cradled songs, but, us black rats with our rogue swagger that spoke of foreign ports, pranced our survival shuffle in night’s murky dance halls. Each step our single prayer, each jab our benediction. This tart sermon containered our septic hurts and lean swaggers. On the strike of dawn, we skittered from shadows, the redeemed walking day’s straight-road into warpland.

When he read in the obituary section that he was dead, the famous author was at first amused and flattered.They love me so much, he thought,they have imagined me dead because they fear the loss of my genius above all else. So he put on his hat, combed his goatee to a waxed point, and sauntered out of his flat to attend his own funeral.How literary, he thought,like Huck Finn, and Everyone will be weeping. He was perturbed, however, when he found that the funeral home was in a bad section of town, next to a tattoo parlor named The Desultory Slut. He walked in past the unmanned front desk, to a back room of frayed velvet and gilt columns, where his coffin was on display, a faux mahogany monstrosity with painted pewter handles. The only people in attendance were four young professors from the local college, with leather patches on the elbows of their ill-fitting tweed jackets and long cruel faces of foxes and rats. He recognized one of them, a gangly fellow with pimply cheeks who had shaken his hand after his last reading and reverently asked for his signature. Do you have one of my books to sign? the author had asked. Oh no, the young professor had cried, baring his hairless chest,can you please sign here? Now the pimply fellow was sitting in a pew, whispering loudly to his neighbor,Isn’t it great, he said,The old bastard finally kicked. His neighbor nodded silently. Deeply disturbed, but well aware of the dramatic potential of the moment, the author took this as his cue to step boldly into the room, with a loud Ta daaa! For some reason, the professors ignored him, and continued their whispering. For a moment, he was afflicted with a strange vertigo, and stood like a clay golem, without a will of his own. Then a sudden rage took him, and the author snapped out of the spell and strode to the front of the room, waving his arms.Wait, I’m not dead at all. Here I am. It was all a mistake, he cried. But the professors did not see him. In fact one walked right through him, as if he were merely a ghost or spirit, and rushed up to the coffin.Do you realize what this means? the professor cried,This means we’re free, and he grabbed the body in the coffin and dragged it to the floor. The shocked author saw in the body his own likeness, lips and cheeks rouged into a grotesque semblance of life. He’s dead, he’s dead. Our enemy is finally dead, they chanted in a frenzy and the professors began trampling on the corpse, weeping with joy and relief.

The Greeks are sitting on the beach wondering what to do when the war ends. No one wants to go home, back to that bony island; everyone wants a little more of what there is in Troy, more life on the edge, that sense of every day as being packed with surprises. But how to explain this to the ones at home to whom fighting a war is a plausible excuse for absence, whereas exploring one’s capacity for diversion is not. Well, this can be faced later; these are men of action, ready to leave insight to the women and children. Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased by a new strength in their forearms, which seem more golden than they did at home, some begin to miss their families a little, to miss their wives, to want to see if the war has aged them. And a few grow slightly uneasy: what if war is just a male version of dressing up, a game devised to avoid profound spiritual questions? Ah, but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens. There on the beach, discussing the various timetables for getting home, no one believed it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca; no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable affliction of the human heart: how to divide the world’s beauty into acceptable and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy, how could the Greeks know they were hostages already: who once delays the journey is already enthralled; how could they know that of their small number some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure, some by sleep, some by music?

On a small lake off the map of the world, two swans lived. As swans, they spent eighty percent of the day studying themselves in the attentive water and twenty percent ministering to the beloved other. Thus their fame as lovers stems chiefly from narcissism, which leaves so little leisure for more general cruising. But fate had other plans: after ten years, they hit slimy water; whatever the filth was, it clung to the male’s plumage, which turned instantly gray; simultaneously, the true purpose of his neck’s flexible design revealed itself. So much action on the flat lake, so much he’s missed! Sooner or later in a long life together, every couple encounters some emergency like this, some drama which results in harm. This occurs for a reason: to test love and to demand fresh articulation of its complex terms. So it came to light that the male and female flew under different banners: whereas the male believed that love was what one felt in one’s heart the female believed love was what one did. But this is not a little story about the male’s inherent corruption, using as evidence the swan’s sleazy definition of purity. It is a story of guile and innocence. For ten years the female studied the male; she dallied when he slept or when he was conveniently absorbed in the water, while the spontaneous male acted casually, on the whim of the moment. On the muddy water they bickered awhile, in the fading light, until the bickering grew slowly abstract, becoming part of their song after a little longer.

Extract the juice which is itself a Light. Pulp,   manna,   gentle Theriasin, ergot like mold on flame, these red leaves bursting from mesquite by the side of dry creekbed.         Extract the tar, the sticky substance heart of things (each plant a star,        extract the juice of stars by circular stillation smear the inner man w/the coction till he burn like worms of light in quicksilver not the false puffballs of marshfire,      extract the heart of the empty heart it is full of the star soul that paces fierce in the deeps of earth the Red Man, healer in furs who carries a club who carries the pale homunculus in his belly. For you are angel, you call the soul from plants or pearls of ambergris out of the grudging sea. Extract arcanum.  Separate true Archeus from the false the bitter is not less potent—nor does clarity bespeak truth. Out of the heart of the ineffable draw the black flecks of matter & from these the cold, blue fire. Dry water.   Immerse yourself though it be but a drop. This Iliaster flowers like the wind. Out of the ash, the Eidolon of the world Crystalline. Perfect.

Because a lie is not a lie if the teller believes it, the way beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness, of our wholeness, is not quite a lie. Beautiful things believe their own narrative, the narrative that makes them beautiful. I almost believed it until the new mother strapped her infant to her chest, opened the eighth-floor window, and jumped. My daughter tells me, after her preschool field trip to the Firefighter Museum, about the elephant mask, its hose like a trunk, and the video of a man on fire being smothered in blankets. She asks me if she knows anyone who got dead in a fire, anyone who got fired. When will I die? she asks. When I was a child, I churched my hands, I steepled my hands, and all the people were inside, each finger a man, a woman, a child.When I die, will you still love me? she asks. The mother cracked on the pavement— how did the baby live? Look, he smiles and totters around the apartment eight stories up. Beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness: each child sliding down the pole into the fire captain’s arms. But what’s whole doesn’t sell itself as such: buy this whole apple, this whole car. Live this whole life. A lie is not a lie if the teller believes it? Next time the man in the video will not ignite. The baby will open like a parachute.

The Bergman image of a game of chess with Death, though not in a dreamscape black-and-white as melancholy films clanking with symbols, but in a garden in Provence with goldfish in the fountain and enormous palms whose topmost fronds cut into the eternal blue of sky above the Roman ruins and the dusty streets where any door may lead to life’s most perfect meal: that is what I think of when I remember I have AIDS. But when I think of how AIDS kills my friends, especially the ones whose paths through life have least prepared them to resist the monster, I think of an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink that sticks to every living branch of flower its rank fur brushes as it stalks its prey. I think of that disgusting animal eating my beautiful friends, innocent as baby deer. Dwight: so delicate and vain, his spindly arms and legs pinned down with needles, pain of tubes and needles, his narrow chest inflated by machine, his mind lost in the seven-minute gap between the respirator’s failure and the time the nurses noticed something wrong. I wrapped my limbs around that fragile body for the first time seven years ago, in a cheap hotel by the piers, where every bit of his extravagant wardrobe—snakeskin boots, skin-tight pedal pushers in a leopard print, aviator’s scarves, and an electric- green capacious leather jacket— lay wrapped in a corner of his room in a yellow parachute. It's hard enough to find a parachute in New York City, I remember thinking, but finding one the right shade of canary is the accomplishment of the sort of citizen with whom I wish to populate my life. Dwight the dancer, Dwight the fashion illustrator and the fashion plate, Dwight the child, the borderline transvestite, Dwight the frightened, infuriating me because an anti-AZT diatribe by some eccentric in a rag convinced him not to take the pills with which he might still be alive, Dwight on the runway, Dwight on the phone suggesting we could still have sex if we wore “raincoats,” Dwight screwing a girl from Massapequa in the ladies’ room at Danceteria (he wore more makeup and had better jewelry than she did), Dwight planning the trip to London or Berlin where he would be discovered and his life transformed. Dwight erased, evicted from his own young body. Dwight dead. At Bellevue, I wrapped my arms around his second skin of gauze and scars and tubing, brushed my hand against his plats, and said goodbye. I hope I’m not the one who loosed the devouring animal that massacred you, gentle boy. You didn’t have a clue to how you might stave off the beast. I feel so confident most days that I can stay alive, survive and thrive with AIDS. But when I see Dwight smile and hear his fey delighted voice inside my head, I know AIDS is no chess game but a hunt, and there is no way of escaping the bloody horror of the kill, no way to bail out, no bright parachute beside my bed.