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No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing — Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."' O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

is doing her usual for comic relief. She doesn’t see why she should get on the boat, etc., etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread. Even God has had one or two great deadpan lines: Who told you(this was back at the start— the teeth of the tautology had just snapped shut)Who told you you were naked? The world was so new that death hadn’t been till this minute required.What makes you think(the ground withers under their feet)we were told? The woman’s disobedience is good for plot, as also for restoring plot to human scale: three hundred cubits by fifty by what? What’s that in inches exactly? Whereas all obstinate wife is common coin. In the beginning was nothing and then a flaw in the nothing, a sort of mistake that amplified, the nothing mistranscribed (it takes such discipline to keep the prospect clean) and now the lion whelps, the beetle rolls its ball of dung, and Noah with no more than a primitive double- entry audit is supposed to make it right. We find the Creator in an awkward bind. Washed back to oblivion? Think again. The housewife at her laundry tub has got a better grip. Which may be why we’ve tried to find her laughable, she’s such an unhappy reminder of what understanding costs. Ask the boy who cannot, though God know’s he’s tried, he swears each bar of melting soap will be his last, who cannot turn the water off when once he’s turned it on. His hands are raw. His body seems like filth to him. Who told you(the pharmacopoeia has changed, the malady’s still the same)Who told you you were food for worms? What makes you think(the furrow, the fruit) I had to be told?

I left you last evening without the usual privileges. A lot of what my body was was toxin, that held me aloft in idle price, far from the witless wood and Arcadia. There’s no more moon for birds to buss at over streetlamps. Urchins make their way in the mist, trolling for dinner rolls. How frugal my recent times were spent, the clocks keeping how stoned a content. There’ll be much better dawns than this forthcoming. Now—silver morning, body trussed across a sphere—what would Salome do?A certain Grace is coming toward you and xe is lovely. The troposphere might solder the iron we sought here, the sky is neither an abaude. What Portia lacks is not anatomical, but philosophical: ‘bitter is my sustenance, melancholy my food, sorry my wine.’ Expressive geometrics of the New York sissy—and with such a disfunctional phone! Portia tells her students get thee to a muhfuckery, where I’ll lay thee fool across my lap. P meets Sally’s longings, her shoes untied, and everything about her demonstrating a careless desolation, a blue eye and sunken.Take one step further and the Grace coming toward you is Beauty. The Grace turned away from you is Restraint. Hassan pleading for her life, fainting, having a bucket of water thrown on her, reviving. Nothing but a farce, we animate Wall and Moon. The art is cruxy to the love-juice. Once there was many a sight, but now they are wilting, poor lambs. Once a malapert downpour, uncharacteristic of the rains of this place. Next football, a hemistich. The belle lettrist’s idea of a billet-doux, the scientist’s idea of a sauna. What with their consummate barbeque wines, their tawdry dance moves, their go-go girls of yesteryear—we thought the Impressionists were trying to impress people. Fez—an impossibility the universe grew out of. Flaubert saying, Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Loeretta casting her lots.

We had to imagine you even then, Ramon, your star lost, a glimpse to die for, all the kids galloping to Westside Park where your gang was supposed to meet in open warfare those bitter skinny boys from Toonerville, well-armed, Lupe said. And when we got there, nothing, no armies, no chucos with long tails and zip guns, just the grass with its stunned look, as though it never really wanted all that light. City grass doesn't want much of anything, it's not out there trembling with desire, minds its own business, leeching slowly upward from busted pipe. And now nobody knows what you really wanted, Ramon, when the needle spun true north, or why that final rush of light, flat stare of lawn as you staggered by, seared your own throat shut. Tonight, I'm getting to the smallest place I know, dusk coming on slow, the moon half full of shade, so still it almost doesn't want to move, whispers a phrase to particles of blue. Same moon you knew with its white mind watching, same moon you walked beneath and were gone.

It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then, The words like distant stars that faintly grace The all-pervading dark of space, But not meant for the world of men. It's not what we forget But what was never known we most regret Discovery of. Checking one last cassette Among my old unlabelled discards, few Of which reward the playing, I find you. Some years after her death, but years ago, Hearing Gwen's voice recite "Suburban Sonnet," At first we could not focus on it, So jolted that the radio Should casually exhume From our shared memory the woman whom We knew and make her present in the room, As though in flesh, surprised to find that she Had earned this further immortality. Who ever thought they would not hear the dead? Who ever thought that they could quarantine Those who are not, who once had been? At that old station on North Head Inmates still tread the boards, Or something does; equipment there records The voices in the dormitories and wards, Although it's years abandoned. Undeleted, What happened is embedded and repeated, Or so they say. And that would not faze you Who always claimed events could not escape Their scenes, recorded as on tape In matter and played back anew To anyone attuned To that stored energy, that psychic wound. You said you heard the presence which oppugned Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion In your lost house. I scarcely need persuasion, So simple is this case. Here in the dark I listen, tensing in distress, to each Uncertain fragment of your speech, Each desolate, half-drunk remark You uttered unaware That this cassette was running and would share Far in the useless future your despair With one who can do nothing but avow You spoke from midnight, and it's midnight now.

I went to my mother’s room at 13 past midnight, and told her I was dying. I’d wet the bed, I’d had this crazy dream, about a sexy neighbor I’d been spying on. Well, I didn’t tell her that. I mean, the day before she asked who I was eyeing when I didn’t want to go outside for ice cream. The truck was parked out front, and she was buying, but I couldn’t join the other screaming kids — not with Lance applying suntan lotion to his muscled teenage skin. Stretched out on a beach towel in his front yard, his body mystified me, while mine seemed happy to defy me. My dick would tent my cut-offs at the sight of him. I wore two pair of underwear, but even then I thought I’d burst right through the seams. So I didn’t dare tell mother what I’d dreamed, though she did think to ask me. I’d have been a fool to tell her that. She thought my blush was any boy’s, puzzling out his sexuality, but I swear it was as much because the fantasies were always other boys. some from my baseball team, some the roughnecks at school, but usually Lance. He was flying naked in the dream I had that night, the one that made me think that God was mad and killing me. I was lying (also naked — and hard as cinder block) on the beach towel I’d seen him lay across the grass the day before. I tried to understand the signs implying I might turn into some kind of freaky thing. But it would have been cruel to tell my mother that, especially when she was already crying, and trying not to laugh at the same time, when I showed her what came out of me. She apologized for throwing such a scene, said I was growing up to be a man, that’s all it meant, said it was normal for a boy my age’s thing to start uprising like a metal beam. She apologized again that I didn’t have my dad around to train an 11-year old boy in the ways of puberty. I was as stupefied as I’ve ever been. She never mentioned him. And I have never turned a deeper red than I did then, at 26 past midnight, when my mother helped me change my sheets, and said the next day she’d teach me to wash them. And then she said she’d ask the man across the street to talk to me. Would that be okay? Or would I feel more comfortable with someone younger, like his son?

In such a night, when every louder wind Is to its distant cavern safe confined; And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings, And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings; Or from some tree, famed for the owl’s delight, She, hollowing clear, directs the wand’rer right: In such a night, when passing clouds give place, Or thinly veil the heav’ns’ mysterious face; When in some river, overhung with green, The waving moon and the trembling leaves are seen; When freshened grass now bears itself upright, And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite, Whence springs the woodbind, and the bramble-rose, And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows; Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes, Yet checkers still with red the dusky brakes When scatter’d glow-worms, but in twilight fine, Shew trivial beauties, watch their hour to shine; Whilst Salisb’ry stands the test of every light, In perfect charms, and perfect virtue bright: When odors, which declined repelling day, Through temp’rate air uninterrupted stray; When darkened groves their softest shadows wear, And falling waters we distinctly hear; When through the gloom more venerable shows Some ancient fabric, awful in repose, While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal, And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale: When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through th’ adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace, and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear: When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls; Their shortlived jubilee the creatures keep, Which but endures, whilst tyrant man does sleep; When a sedate content the spirit feels, And no fierce light disturbs, whilst it reveals; But silent musings urge the mind to seek Something, too high for syllables to speak; Till the free soul to a composedness charmed, Finding the elements of rage disarmed, O’er all below a solemn quiet grown, Joys in th’ inferior world, and thinks it like her own: In such a night let me abroad remain, Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again; Our cares, our toils, our clamors are renewed, Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued.

My itinerary is the eternity of exile. Deferred is the trip back into domicile. My marching orders lost at sea; my papers shrouded in an immigrant's secrecy. Lamar Avenue in Austin, Texas is wide, long and it flows. Air-conditioned apartments allow for repose. My transports and attachments to the past, my dream-life, have an urgency that is never lost. An exile's ultimate treat, tonight's dreamlike score: a dinner with the Zaidis in their Islamabad home.

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's, Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays; The world's whole sap is sunk; The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh, Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph. Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not. All others, from all things, draw all that's good, Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have; I, by Love's limbec, am the grave Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood Have we two wept, and so Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow To be two chaoses, when we did show Care to aught else; and often absences Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) Of the first nothing the elixir grown; Were I a man, that I were one I needs must know; I should prefer, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; all, all some properties invest; If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light and body must be here. But I am none; nor will my sun renew. You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun At this time to the Goat is run To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all; Since she enjoys her long night's festival, Let me prepare towards her, and let me call This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

That scraping of iron on iron when the wind rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t quit with, but drags back and forth. Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just beyond the screened door, as if someone there squats in the dark honing his wares against my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing, nothing and anything might make this noise of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust, or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows that should not bend. Something stiffens that should slide. Something, loose and not right, rakes or forges itself all night.