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I have a perfect life. It isn't much, But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive And happy in a vague way: no disappointments On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt; Looking forward in anticipation, looking back In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day. I heed the promptings of my inner voice, And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance For my own powers and innate superiority—the fake Security of someone in the grip of a delusion, In denial, climbing ever taller towers Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom With a secret smile, while all the while Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful And strong becomes an object of indifference Reaching out to no one, as later middle age Turns old, and the strength is gone. Right now the moments yield to me sweet Feelings of contentment, but the human Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name To be forgotten soon, as the things I know Turn into unfamiliar faces In a strange room, leaving merely A blank space, like a hole left in the wake Of a perfect life, which closes over.

ou plutôt les chanter Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised, Or, even better, sing them. Common speech Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized In poetry. He had much more to teach, But first he taught that. Several poets paid Him heed. The odd one even made the grade, Building a pretty castle on the beach. But on the whole it’s useless to point out That making the thing musical is part Of pinning down what you are on about. The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art: All this is patent to the gifted few Who know, before they can, what they must do To make the mind a spokesman for the heart. As for the million others, they are blessed: This is their age. Their slapdash in demand From all who would take fright were thought expressed In ways that showed a hint of being planned, They may say anything, in any way. Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they? Nothing to study, nothing to understand. And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme And reason is a technically precise Response to the confusion of a time When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice. It isn’t that their deafness fails to match The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch. No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice Of idle talk. Always a blight before, It finds a place today, fulfills a need: As those who cannot write increase the store Of verses fit for those who cannot read, For those who can do both the field is clear To meet and trade their wares, the only fear That mutual benefit might look like greed. It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange Of showpiece and attention that has been There since the cavemen took pains to arrange Pictures of deer and bison to be seen To best advantage in the flickering light. Our luck is to sell tickets on the night Only to those who might know what we mean, And they are drawn to us by love of sound. In the first instance, it is how we sing That brings them in. No mystery more profound Than how a melody soars from a string Of syllables, and yet this much we know: Ronsard was right to emphasize it so, Even in his day. Now, it’s everything: The language falls apart before our eyes, But what it once was echoes in our ears As poetry, whose gathered force defies Even the drift of our declining years. A single lilting line, a single turn Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn, Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.

1 The perfect mother lets the cat sleep on her head. The children laugh. Where is she? She is not carefully ironing the starched ruffles of a Sunday dress. What does she say? She does not speak. Her head is under the cat and like the cat, she sleeps. 2 But her children are in a marsh! Bogged, they have gone wild. Yet, no one should worry. See, they are there, in a sunny kitchen. They drink cups of soup and wipe their faces with yellow napkins. What does it matter if they are hatching plots, if in their waking dreams the poor cat is trapped its hair standing on end? 3 Where shall we go? We ask the perfect mother. What do you want of us? She is no where to be found. Not in the cookie jar we have broken to bits not under the shiny kitchen floor not on our lips. Here we are transfixed, mourning the perfect mother, and she is caught in the trapped cat of her children’s dreams.

"F. . . the oven is an F" Samantha Foggle, age 3 Oh, to hear the world with such clarity. Such surety. To know the note of your breakfast chat is B-flat minor. That the ’57 Chevy stalled outside the garage is a D. To recognize the Apricot kitchen paint for what it is: F-sharp. To understand the way you feel for him is G, definitely a G. And as you watch him descend the scale of the front steps to his car for work, the house quiets to an A. The arpeggio of last night’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor still ringing in your ears.

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me: Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear me: I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect. I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds—peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions are enrolled and registered. Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued. Here days and night are divided into seasons of conduct and governed by rules of blameless accuracy. To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one’s nudity, and then to be weary in due time. To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when the clock strikes the hour. To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon. To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to destroy a sound with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then to wash the hands when the day’s work is done. To love according to an established order, to entertain one’s best self in a preconceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly, to intrigue the devils artfully—and then to forget all as though memory were dead. To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be happy sweetly, to suffer nobly—and then to empty the cup so that tomorrow may fill it again. All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method. And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are marked and numbered. It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God’s garden, the master-thought of the universe. But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet? Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?

There is no audience because there is no audience. So if you speak only to imagined beings what does "only" mean? -------------------------- This building formerly a restaurant . . . this small room has been scraped of its paint and denuded of most former furniture: but also it has grown in size—can a building be enticed to grow? Because it is now as big as an airplane hangar. -------------------------- Your beautiful face unbloodied beneath flies Mother of flies your beauty to turn to. If only the audience could see how you are peaceful and the flies languid, glossy But the audience will still bring its own feelings to these words not seeing you not seeing what I am present for. -------------------------- Who has left me here, I have. Who are your familiars Come into the enlarging page if you dare -------------------------- Because he invented your shape I do mean structure because he invented you badly everything is still hidden. -------------------------- I was to impale myself on a quadrangular steel rod, with a blunt end with a blunt end which would make puncture more difficult and I tried—it's too hard. I can't Okay said the voice. I can't Okay then I was weeping But it's blood! I'm crying blood! I screamed That's part of it said the voice. --------------------------- I think this is hard. (That's part of it) How they prefer him must go. I think this is difficult singing Length and repetition create power If this voice can return like a body It resembles something that's already been, Changing. ------------------------------ Chestnuts broken autumnal fungi so you will remember, that it's fall outside falling. you'll go down this is no story for the puling social classes No not at all it's for us my familiars say who let me weep blood on their ground.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it. It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women. At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table. This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun. Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory. We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here. At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Before boys, Susan drove me to work, for teriyaki takeout on Manchester past Lincoln Boulevard. Inseparable, we planned winter and Easter vacations. In the stairwell, I tried to talk. She cut me off. Her echo was loud when she said you can’t see yourself. We went to see Purple Rain. That fall, I had dinner with a boy. Susan was angry and told me I was wrong. I felt it was true. Was it that boy? That he had once dated someone Susan knew? We stopped talking. We were eighteen. A decade later, I turned a corner coming out of a bookstore and heard Susan laugh.I know that, I thought, remembering how she’d saved me from saying who I was. I circled back. She answered as she had before we fell out. She answered with shame.Do you remember how things ended, she asked , because of boys?

What are my friends? Mouths, not eyes for Bitterest underflesh of the farewell. I was a man and suffered like a girl. I spoke underneath to where the lights are Pretty, pretty, pretty whence they came to tell One God gets another. My friends are Mouths for God, tearing me. In such a world Broken only daughter opens to splendor. My first thought was that dying is a deep well Into the image of death, a many of one girl. Later it meant to smile with no face, where Mirrors are mouths. Cupid and Psyche wore Blindfolds made of glass, which explains why girls Get to heaven early mornings Adam fell. Gods after gods we go. Still later, Friends shouldered high mountains to the lee shore. Gashed, and the gash a fountain of waters, The landscape defames a single flower: Amaranth. Magic hides an island world Of boys and one daughter. I buried a pearl In God’s eye. And yet He sees her, Defames her, considers His time well Spent imagining a continent of flowers Whose final climate is a broken girl. Bells of a Cretan woman in labor Hurled from a tower, flesh realer Than the ground she somehow upwards curled Into the bloom of her groin where bells Are bees. I am an old man with a new beard. I am the offspring of my child sprung from hell. Shipwreck makes peninsular metaphor Out of my hatred, her rape, and one bell tower. Confusion suicides the poems, heaven I heard Where the juice runs from stone-struck flowers. At the end of the world I must use proper Violence. Nothing is more true to tell. Tell the taut-strung higher calendars I’ve a margent in mind and new words Hope to say, catastrophe to hear, Old confederates and inwood apples Where apples never shone. Also tell Of mountains shouldered underneath one flower Called amaranth. They tired of the world Who made the world this way. God never Did, never will. If you were to call From the bottom of the ocean, the words, Every one to me a living daughter, Would shout wild mercy as never was before.

it doesn’t matter when I cross. two seconds and they’re gone. the ferry facing Ulus. the trees that spanked of green. the narrow bags of temples. beyond that – just – these Peri scenes when the human body sweats the skin produce an oil when Peri bodies sweat it does not produce the oil the ropes fall to the pavement their waters slap me still their green glow sweats into the pavement waters slap me still – I could curl among the roses I would make an aqualung we will reach the edge of this walk soon. all lights torn out for fuel. move my fingers in the dark awoke without a start. Peri here – my name is Peri – my name is Perihan