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Nihilism, but not in a negative sense—such was his thought, what else to call it? Like snow inside a novelty snow globe, vague possibility descended from probability, descended from likelihood and certainty. Now not even air. Those great words discussed in college— truth, beauty, justice, which had come to embarrass him, like teasing bare-breasted girls in postcards sent from Polynesian islands that each year he had found less likely; absolutes faded like old shirts, as still he tried to create from stray thoughts as if out of wood- chips and mud, the old certainties he once loved, the believable lie.

The perfect satisfaction of wine, cigarettes, the sun at an afternoon angle passes through flesh as if flesh were a sieve to the direct point the soul of matter. Things fix time although the sun moves lazily, creating an image that seems like motive the wine transmutes and becomes blood cigarettes dissolve to blue threads and ash but the sun continues in constant repetition of its slow and rather boring dance.

Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over. His sister was riding high: nothing bridled her. Her light was falling, shining into woods and rivers. Wild animals opened their jaws wide, stirred to prey. But in the human world all was sleep, pause, relaxation, torpor. One night, in an April which had just gone by, The likeness of my love stood beside me suddenly. He called my name so quietly. He touched me gently. His voice was drowning in tears. It failed completely. His sighs overwhelmed him. Finally, he could not speak clearly. I shuddered at his touch. I felt the fear of it. I trembled as if I knew the true terror of it. I opened my arms wide and pressed him against my body. Then I froze: I was ice, all ice. My blood drained into it. He had fled. Here was my embrace—and there was nothing in it. Fully awake now, I cried out loudly: "Where are you fleeing to? Why are you rushing away? Wait, wait for me. If you want, I can enter there. Because the truth is, I want to live with you forever." But soon I regretted it—that I had spoken out this way. And all the time, the windows of the terrace had been wide open. The light of the moon poured down; its beauty, its radiance. And I grieved and grieved. I grieved for so long. The tears flowed down my cheeks: tributaries of tears. It was a whole day before I could stop weeping.

Let the bird of loudest lay On the sole Arabian tree Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey. But thou shrieking harbinger, Foul precurrer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, To this troop come thou not near. From this session interdict Every fowl of tyrant wing, Save the eagle, feather'd king; Keep the obsequy so strict. Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right. And thou treble-dated crow, That thy sable gender mak'st With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st, 'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go. Here the anthem doth commence: Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the Turtle fled In a mutual flame from hence. So they lov'd, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seen 'Twixt this Turtle and his queen: But in them it were a wonder. So between them love did shine That the Turtle saw his right Flaming in the Phoenix' sight: Either was the other's mine. Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same; Single nature's double name Neither two nor one was called. Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded; That it cried, "How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love has reason, reason none, If what parts can so remain." Whereupon it made this threne To the Phoenix and the Dove, Co-supremes and stars of love, As chorus to their tragic scene: threnos Beauty, truth, and rarity, Grace in all simplicity, Here enclos'd, in cinders lie. Death is now the Phoenix' nest, And the Turtle's loyal breast To eternity doth rest, Leaving no posterity: 'Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity. Truth may seem but cannot be; Beauty brag but 'tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be. To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

“That all these dyings may be life in death” I was living in San Francisco My heart was in Manhattan It made no sense, no reference point Hearing the sad horns at night, fragile evocations of female stuff The 3 tones (the last most resonant) were like warnings, haiku-muezzins at dawn The call came in the afternoon “Frank, is that really you?” I'd awake chilled at dawn in the wooden house like an old ship Stay bundled through the day sitting on the stoop to catch the sun I lived near the park whose deep green over my shoulder made life cooler Was my spirit faltering, grown duller? I want to be free of poetry's ornaments, its duty, free of constant irritation, me in it, what was grander reason for being? Do it, why? (Why, Frank?) To make the energies dance etc. My coat a cape of horrors I'd walk through town or impending earthquake. Was that it? Ominous days. Street shiny with hallucinatory light on sad dogs, too many religious people, or a woman startled me by her look of indecision near the empty stadium I walked back spooked by my own darkness Then Frank called to say “What? Not done complaining yet? Can't you smell the eucalyptus, have you never neared the Pacific? ‘While frank and free/call for musick while your veins swell’” he sang, quoting a metaphysician "Don't you know the secret, how to wake up and see you don't exist, but that does, don't you see phenomena is so much more important than this? I always love that.” “Always?” I cried, wanting to believe him “Yes.” “But say more! How can you if it's sad & dead?” “But that's just it! If! It isn't. It doesn't want to be Do you want to be?” He was warming to his song “Of course I don't have to put up with as much as you do these days. These years. But I do miss the color, the architecture, the talk. You know, it was the life! And dying is such an insult. After all I was in love with breath and I loved embracing those others, the lovers, with my body.” He sighed & laughed He wasn't quite as I'd remembered him Not less generous, but more abstract Did he even have a voice now, I wondered or did I think it up in the middle of this long day, phone in hand now dialing Manhattan

A character representing sound. Or. A machine invented by Thomas Edison by which noise is recorded and reproduced. And. An instrument capable of being attached to pianofortes and organs by means of which they are rendered. Melographic. Capable of writing any music played upon them. For. If the instrument makes probable this oral hahucination, you spin the record of your reddened choice. Or. You mimic the melody and its blank harmony. You accompany the symphony with a tenor of all tomorrows. While I, lost in the Maze of Mirrors, ask you to tell me again the story. You say, First. You say, Make. First, make your mouth make a sound. Speak into the mouthpiece and cause the tremors in the thin diaphragm. Then. The steel point makes tracings upon the hard wax. Fix the thing upon a spinning cylinder. And. By means of the tracings, the diaphragm will repeat with perfection your original voice. Or. The echoes in the mountains of your lamentations. As. Cries in a haunted brothel. Or. Whispers in a ghostly tavern. The instrument has spoken in our hearing. Listen. It is a natural outcome of the telephone. Listen. The old man's laugh comes to us as out of a phonograph. I say, Perfect. I say, Yet. This instrument warbles. And. This record is warped. And. The tongue of this snake. Has scratched this disk. For. Your voice is skipping. And. As I put the conch to my same hear, I listen to the echo of. I listen to the echo of. The raspy susurrations of your adieu. Applied to a person or thing that exactly reproduces the utterances of another person or thing. Hence, the transitive verb. To report in Pitman's phonograph. As. It is a great loss to me that your song was not phonographed and preserved. And. Whether it be so, it is phonographed in the mind of the mindful God. All out of sync.

I'm going to put Karen Prasse right here in front of you on this page so that you won't mistake her for something else, an example of precocity, for instance, a girl who knew that the sky (blue crayon) was above the earth (green crayon) and did not, as you had drawn it, come right down to the green on which your three bears stood. You can tell from her outfit that she is a Brownie. You can tell from her socks that she knows how to line things up, from her mouth that she may grow up mean or simply competent. Do not mistake her for an art critic: when she told you the first day of first grade that your drawing was "wrong," you stood your ground and told her to look out the window. Miss Voss told your mom you were going to be a good example of something, although you cannot tell from the way your socks sag, nor from your posture, far from Brownie-crisp. This is not about you for a change, but about mis-perception, of which Karen was an early example. Who knows? She may have meant to be helpful, though that is not always a virtue, and gets in the way of some art.

Once when I was harmless and didn’t know any better, a mirror to the front of me and an ocean behind, I lay wedged in the middle of daylight, paper-doll thin, dreaming, then I vanished. I gave the day a fingerprint, then forgot. I sat naked on a towel on a hot June Monday. The sun etched the inside of my eyelids, while a boy dozed at my side. The smell of all oceans was around us— steamy salt, shell, and sweat, but I reached for the distant one. A tide rose while I slept, and soon I was alone. Try being a figure in memory. It’s hollow there. For truth’s sake, I’ll say she was on a beach and her eyes were closed. She was bare in the sand, long, and the hour took her bit by bit.

Groundbreaking Ceremony, City of South Miami, Sunset Drive Improvements And so it began: the earth torn, split open by a dirt road cutting through palmettos and wild tamarind trees defending the land against the sun. Beside the road, a shack leaning into the wind, on the wooden porch, crates of avocados and limes, white chickens pecking at the floor boards, and a man under the shadow of his straw hat, staring into the camera in 1914. He doesn't know within a lifetime the unclaimed land behind him will be cleared of scrub and sawgrass, the soil will be turned, made to give back what the farmers wish, their lonely houses will stand acres apart from one another, jailed behind the boughs of their orchards. He'll never buy sugar at the general store, mail love letters at the post office, or take a train at the depot of the town that will rise out of hundred-million years of coral rock on promises of paradise. He'll never ride a Model-T puttering down the dirt road that will be paved over, stretch farther and farther west into the horizon, reaching for the setting sun after which it will be named. He can't even begin to imagine the shadows of buildings rising taller than the palm trees, the street lights glowing like counterfeit stars dotting the sky above the road, the thousands who will take the road everyday, who'll also call this place home less than a hundred years after the photograph of him hanging today in City Hall as testament. He'll never meet me, the engineer hired to transform the road again, bring back tree shadows and birdsongs, build another promise of another paradise meant to last another forever. He'll never see me, the poet standing before him, trying to read his mind across time, wondering if he was thinking what I'm today, both of us looking down the road that will stretch on for years after I too disappear into a photo.

New York grows Slimmer In his absence. I suppose You could also title this picture Of Miles, his leathery Squint, the grace In his fingers a sliver of the stuff You can’t get anymore, As the rest of us wonder: What was the name Of the driver Of that truck? And the rest Of us sigh: Death is one hell Of a pickpocket.