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When my brother died I worried there wasn’t enough time to deliver the one hundred invitations I’d scribbled while on the phone with the mortuary: Because of the short notice no need to rsvp. Unfortunately the firemen couldn’t come. (I had hoped they’d give free rides on the truck.) They did agree to drive by the house once with the lights on— It was a party after all. I put Mom and Dad in charge of balloons, let them blow as many years of my brother’s name, jails, twenty-dollar bills, midnight phone calls, fistfights, and er visits as they could let go of. The scarlet balloons zigzagged along the ceiling like they’d been filled with helium. Mom blew up so many that she fell asleep. She slept for ten years— she missed the whole party. My brothers and sisters were giddy, shredding his stained T-shirts and raggedy pants, throwing them up into the air like confetti. When the clowns came in a few balloons slipped out the front door. They seemed to know where they were going and shrank to a fistful of red grins at the end of our cul-de-sac. The clowns played toy bugles until the air was scented with rotten raspberries. They pulled scarves from Mom’s ear—she slept through it. I baked my brother’s favorite cake (chocolate, white frosting). When I counted there were ninety-nine of us in the kitchen. We all stuck our fingers in the mixing bowl. A few stray dogs came to the window. I heard their stomachs and mouths growling over the mariachi band playing in the bathroom. (There was no room in the hallway because of the magician.) The mariachis complained about the bathtub acoustics. I told the dogs,No more cake here, and shut the window. The fire truck came by with the sirens on. The dogs ran away. I sliced the cake into ninety-nine pieces. I wrapped all the electronic equipment in the house, taped pink bows and glittery ribbons to them— remote controls, the Polaroid, stereo, Shop-Vac, even the motor to Dad’s work truck—everything my brother had taken apart and put back together doing his crystal meth tricks—he’d always been a magician of sorts. Two mutants came to the door. One looked almost human. They wanted to know if my brother had willed them the pots and pans and spoons stacked in his basement bedroom. They said they missed my brother’s cooking and did we have any cake.No more cake here, I told them. Well, what’s in the piñata? they asked. I told them God was and they ran into the desert, barefoot. I gave Dad his slice and put Mom’s in the freezer. I brought up the pots and pans and spoons (really, my brother was a horrible cook), banged them together like a New Year’s Day celebration. My brother finally showed up asking why he hadn’t been invited and who baked the cake. He told me I shouldn’t smile, that this whole party was shit because I’d imagined it all. The worst part he said was he was still alive. The worst part he said was he wasn’t even dead. I think he’s right, but maybe the worst part is that I’m still imagining the party, maybe the worst part is that I can still taste the cake.

What can I tell you? It was a summer that seemed to be making history — their personal history — almost before it began, and they stood back slightly, still in it, but observing it, saying “the summer this,” “the summer that,” all the while it was going on. They became obsessed with a fountain, for example, one they walked past each day, how abundantly it would reach upwards and yet be pouring back down itself the whole time — all winter this fountain had been dry, not saying a word. What more can I tell you? Oh, everything — like how they would walk home in the evenings when the light was soft, anything bad sliding off them, and they would feel owned, completely owned, in a good way, by the air, which would touch them constantly, sometimes urgently, sometimes lightly, just to let them know it was there, and they would think maybe this is what being alive is, when they saw how complicated a tree was and how it wanted them looking at it and saying this, how the color of a particular flower at this particular moment was redder even than the life force, whatever that is, if you could open it up and get right down inside it, if you could put your mouth to it and become as red as that rose even, it was still redder than that, and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves so they wouldn’t do anything except listen to the songs in their heads which were sad ones like nearly all good songs and watch this feeling rolling in, sunshine or rain, we don’t know yet, it’s a good one, it’s the best one, though it has no name.

When I think of the dead, it means they’re thinking of me,

“No one cares less than I, Nobody knows but God, Whether I am destined to lie Under a foreign clod,” Were the words I made to the bugle call in the morning. But laughing, storming, scorning, Only the bugles know What the bugles say in the morning, And they do not care, when they blow The call that I heard and made words to early this morning.

A Montparnasse August with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones. We wake to it. Close curtains to it. Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light. Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long. We’re passing through, just passing through neat aisles of gray mausoleums. (From Paris. Send this postcard. This one. Calm water lilies. Water lilies. Nothing colorless.) It’s morning. Baudelaire’s tomb. Tree limbs casting shadow west. This, a lot of time under a looming sky. Nobody has time like this. (Time to go to Le Mandarin for coffee every day. We’re not complaining. They bring the milk separate. Watch the passersby on Saint-Germain.) Nothing to ponder. This is the plight. Pause by Pigeon in bed with his wife — both fully dressed. Pink flowers, pink flowers, just beneath de Beauvoir’s name. When she lived she lived two doors down. Went south in August. All of us smell of heat all the time. We are the living. Oh dear! There are the dead ones there. Their thoughts more familiar, though. Lives finished, nearly clear. And they make it possible for us to go on living as we do in their blue shade.

for JA I flutter in order to enter the phrase’s silver. Jackdaws have launched nearby this time, silk green and ripped, the movement a kind of chafing thinking. Oh he’s marking terrain right there— right there with his unmade song. The shadow kids whip fronds, froth air up into heat, pure and simple “violence of the eye.” Wild iris ink, wet in the margin’s stage. Well, hadn’t this testament begun to carry its chime in stripes? That’s when I knew he was going away from me, towards the sound. Like the ring on the table it can’t be decentered. Rim around the recent. Ashes, ashes, A bright tangled seeming.

Tell me no more of minds embracing minds, And hearts exchang’d for hearts; That spirits spirits meet, as winds do winds, And mix their subt’lest parts; That two unbodied essences may kiss, And then like Angels, twist and feel one Bliss. I was that silly thing that once was wrought To practise this thin love; I climb’d from sex to soul, from soul to thought; But thinking there to move, Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then From soul I lighted at the sex again. As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast, Who yet in closets eat; So lovers who profess they spirits taste, Feed yet on grosser meat; I know they boast they souls to souls convey, Howe’r they meet, the body is the way. Come I will undeceive thee, they that tread Those vain aerial ways, Are like young heirs and alchemists misled To waste their wealth and days, For searching thus to be for ever rich, They only find a med’cine for the itch.

The word penis is probably the most misattributed word in English, I think. Because almost nobody has a real one. The standards are made in Japanese or German factories. Womb/vagina sets are unusual too if genuine. Standards are from China; they are recycled sheepskin wallets. I was shocked too when I heard this. I do not have an actual either but they called me a genius when I figured it out about the fetal lamb/sheep skin. What else to do with all the wallets now that there’s no money? Only barter. I do not know what the inside of this thing looks like but I think it looks like a brain made of mozzarella cheese. Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant. An ocean weed and how it’s fitted is by body weight at birth which is why you shouldn’t smoke if you are pregnant, you will be blamed even though it’s complicated to know exact reasons as we all in the new world know better each day. They’ve made new lingo to go with the genuine penis. They say unicorn, I say wasabi. Apparently, almost everyone gets green horseradish with sushi. Wasabi takes several million years to grow, its taste is delicate. When I mentioned Japan earlier, I meant the motor city. When I say Wasabi near Japan; it’s island of slow unit dance or Remarkable Mask. When I say new world, it’s where the newly suited go. T-cell robots, we of lambs and plants and jellyfish that are in our eyes which are colored by their place in the ocean. Really, if you broke us down, you’d have quite a collection: resins from pine, precious stones, silver dust, and sea grass filaments, stalks, pig livers, skin, a milk protein. This is the equipment for the dominant standard penis holders of the unreal, and I would love to be one with a genuine but I have not the stomach to pull off the cunning necessary for the genuine purse/penis license. You barter for it; you lie. Don’t get me wrong, it must be nice to have options. But to get them dishonestly? It’s bothering. I know, I know! I have got to say goodbye to the babyhood phase. Learn to thrive! Nobody has a father or a mother. I know this means to thrive! To be one’s own lover. My sheepskin wallet is . . . What could a person say? Stuck in the past, tripped up by the concept of wallet? It’s not like anything gets taken out unless it’s rotten which it probably isn’t because I feel okay and you look alright. It’s that it wants to be ultimate although a new and genuine vagina/womb set from a biped has not been recorded in over 180 years which means billions of here/now moments. Which means forgotten a trillion times and remembered exactly one plus that. There’s not as much empty space as we thought in the old blueprints that made donuts in space—the halo, the Homeric lure. The one electron penis and the drone. I’ve been sick and found all this out because I couldn’t get out of bed and there was a diamond near my head. I was reading about moray eels, their hydraulics. How they practically fly-fish with agility. It’s the forward going. I’d like to go boldly. I’ve kept a card of energy. Wilderness saved from childhood. Of this secret, one must be silent so the sun can trust us. Kids need each other. Better they never get separated entirely. Contra this, I do want to fly fish. To cast off and plant it then go with the nylon line. Where to take off the old wallet and give it back to a lamb. I’ll be the promo homo making arrangements to go to the show where we trade our new pieces congenially and find others, depleted by scavengers, and get them up-and-running to better suns, not the promised land, exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite of anything promised.

Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

The horse in harness suffers; he's not feeling up to snuff. The feeler's sensate but the cook pronounces lobsters tough. The chain's too short: The dog's at pains to reach a sheaf of shade. One half a squirrel's whirling there upon the interstate. That rough around the monkey's eye is cancer. Only God's impervious—he's deaf and blind. But he's not dumb: to answer for it all, his spokesmen aren't allowed to come.