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From "Shorter Chaucer Tales" (2006) The great labour of appearance Served the making of the pyre. But how Nor how How also How they Shal nat be toold Shall not be told. Nor how the gods Nor how the beestes and the birds Nor how the ground agast Nor how the fire First with straw And then with drye And then with grene And then with gold And then Now how a site is laid like this. Nor what Nor how Nor how Nor what she spak nor what was her desir Nor what jewels When the fire Nor how some threw their And some their And their And cups full of wine and milk And blood Into the fyr Into the fire. Nor how three times And three times with And three times how.

She holds a conversation with her ornaments, stray or contingent, heaped in patches darkly and then loosened onto the table to be consumed. Collect me, they seem to ask, into an assembly; construe us like any morning onto any day. Bring us forward notch by notch into a paradigm of comfort to be clasped: any cup will do. Any dance? Take a seed and blow it toward the curtain which, like a bright shield hugging breasts into radiance, is seen and spoken of and desired. Will any silence fit? So many columns of air are held upright in inebriated passage, so many paper stacks brittle under the weight of what was news to attentive readers as zones of holy strangers feed through tunnels their imported cares. Stare at us, they seem to say, we are windows propped up against the sky, quotations of light waiting to sail into your aperture, calling because because and now now now. And the good body is pulled over the original rapacious body like a huge sock, its cornucopia of sour wind and dust emptied into the firmament.

Now everywhere the pageantry of youth is on display: The squeal of bike chains spinning through the gray plays fugue to puddle-froth; The punctual blitz of hyacinths in April ushers spring with lavender dripped from the upturned wing of wind-swept Gabriel. A youngish pair walks wired at the arms— she casually ribbing him, he lightly brushing her breast, jibbing their step to spare the worms stranded along the road. Too soon, their laughter rises and goes drifting toward silence. And now the young man knows love’s not the song, but after— like the mute, remembered chorus of the rain that stains the walk long after falling, or the lifeless stalk still hoisting its head of grain. Uneasy now, she loosens from his hand. Their dark familiars stare back, reflected by the passing cars, with speechless reprimand. Before the chill, each chartered hell grows hotter, yet every burn will teach him how to run—and how to turn her wine back into water.

Self-interest cropped up even there, the day I hoisted three instead of the two called-for spades of loam onto the coffin of my friend. Why shovel more than anybody else? What did I think I'd prove? More love (mud in her eye)? More will to work (her father what, a shirker?) Christ, I'd give an arm or leg to get that spoonful back. She cannot die again; and I do nothing but relive.

(Jamestown 1957) It kissed us, soft, to cut our throats, this coast, like a malice of the lazy King. I hunt, & hunt! but find here what to kill?—nothing is blunt, but phantoming uneases I find. Ghost on ghost precedes of all most scared us, most we fled. Howls fail upon this secret, far air: grunt, shaming for food; you must. I love the King & it was not I who strangled at the toast but a flux of a free & dying adjutant: God be with him. He & God be with us all, for we are not to live, I cannot wring, like laundry, blue my soul—indecisive thing . . From undergrowth & over odd birds call and who would starv'd so survive? God save the King.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking larking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around. And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman  in  an  office park  in a  provincial town who has a job  cutting  and pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world's richest art star in space.  I am not writing  a book  called Kansas City Spleen.  I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch's Maldoror. I am not writing  a  book of  political  philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not writing a scandalous memoir.  I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I am not writing  a  memoir  about  poetry  or  love.  I am not writing a memoir about poverty,  debt  collection,  or  bankruptcy.  I   am  not  writing   about family court.  I am not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners and not  writing a memoir about  prohibitions of memoirs. When  I am not writing a memoir  I am also not writing any kind of  poetry, not  prose  poems  contemporary   or  otherwise,  not  poems made  of frag- ments,  not tightened and  compressed poems, not loosened and  conversa- tional poems, not conceptual  poems, not virtuosic poems employing many different  types of  euphonious devices, not poems with epiphanies and not poems  without,  not  documentary  poems about recent political moments, not  poems  heavy with allusions to critical theory and popular song. I am not writing "Leaving the Atocha Station" by Anne Boyer and certain- ly  not  writing  "Nadja"  by  Anne Boyer though would like to write "Debt" by  Anne Boyer  though  am  not  writing  also  "The  German Ideology" by Anne  Boyer  and not writing a screenplay called "Sparticists." I am not writing an account of myself more miserable than Rousseau. I am not writing an account of myself more innocent than Blake. I am not writing epic poetry although I like what Milton said about lyric poets drinking wine while epic poets should drink water from a  wooden bowl. I would like to drink wine from a wooden  bowl  or to drink  water from an emptied bottle of wine. I am not writing a book about shopping, which is a woman shopping. I am not  writing  accounts  of  dreams,  not  my own or anyone else's. I am not writing historical re-enactments of any durational literature. I am not writing anything that anyone  has requested of me or is  waiting on,  not  a  poetics  essay  or any other sort of essay, not a  roundtable re- sponse, not interview responses, not writing prompts for younger writers, not my thoughts about critical theory or popular songs. I am not writing a new constitution for the republic of no history. I am not writing a will or a medical report. I am  not  writing  Facebook status updates. I am not writing thank-you notes or apologies. I am not writing conference papers. I am not writing book reviews. I am not writing blurbs. I  am not writing  about contemporary  art. I am  not writing  accounts of my travels.  I am  not writing  reviews for The New Inquiry and not writ- ing pieces for Triple Canopy and not writing anything for Fence. I am not writing a  daily  accounting  of my reading, activities, and ideas.   I am not writing  science  fiction  novels  about  the  problem  of  the idea of the au- tonomy  of  art  and  science  fiction  novels about the problem of a society with  only  one  law  which  is  consent.  I am  not  writing stories based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's unwritten story ideas. I am not writing online dat- ing profiles.  I am not writing anonymous communiqués.  I am not writing textbooks. I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night.

After she left the first thing Ahmad Jamal played was a bridge: he fingered water falling over a cantilever & made a dark blue truth transparent. I try to suspend belief across a span of hand- written notes. At noon, I cross myself over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh, sauntering from Station Square to Smithfield St haunted by a smell along the Monongahela. These streets cobble stone memories, work overtime in my olfactories. Once, my piano-playing girlfriend fingered daisies waving in a breeze. Then in love with her Noes I began sniffing everything. But the florid truth is that I gave her a ring of rust on her windowsill. A heart broken like a line in a poem. My girl left me, & Ahmad Jamal was playing “Wave” on my iPod. It’s probably not smart to admit this, but what he didn’t play came across loudest. I only saw her hands say goodbye because of the beauty in my earbuds. Then I nosed a wine- bottle blue scarf she’d left on the right arm of a chair. Be honest, would you have sniffed it? What song doesn’t long for the long fingers of a pianist? A cantilever here only holds up meaning. I smelled farewell in a coffee shop as she high-heeled east. Sunlight buttered loafing pedestrians, shadowed crossing things as I wondered whether Jamal’s main fault was living too long and weathering, if his main technique was to cleave themes or to refrain. As he plays, the heart gives out a rapid repeat. A piano bench pines to be dusted with notes, can it buckle up such wont? Maybe there are facets of bridges one will always truss, something phonic and unforgettable about how they allow us to cross. A wave of daisies in a vase — how they ravel aromatic in the mind. Ahmad Jamal waving across the room: me damned, & roiling underneath like a river. Maybe I dreamt this. But when I licked my fingertips to turn the page, they became daisies pushing between bricks on a twilit bridge.

or Poem for Eighties Babies (~also for T. P., 1950-2010) If it's Teddy singing it—don't leave me this way—it isn't the arrangement your parents spun themselves through, becoming another strobe-lit dervish. Listen as it pounds. Think of them instead not dancing but stilled in a corner, buttressed by their own sweat and clairvoyant uncertainty. Every plea, every atonement that reaches sweet and hard from Teddy's vocal folds, is ambivalent toward their present, its travails—the night humid, reduced to tissue paper's fragility. It's June 1976, years before code like mother and father—before either is prepared to admit they could not imagine the uphill slope of love after disco's tongue licked the vinyl unfurrowed and the babies —babies that began as mere pheromone exchanges on a dance floor— began falling into their young laps. It isn't your fault. You did not stop the music. Or if you did, it was Thelma Houston's cover, not this bearded prayer of negative capability— the pleaseplease under each pace your parents took beyond the cusp of realizing nothing so good could stay that good so long.

“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming, linoleum flecked with flame, a thick coat of wax that flashed down a corridor and led to a room, a place where I curled up a few innocuous inches off the floor. Straps—word out of strophe, the restraints of line and stanza— straps hung in loops on closet hooks. On the nightstand a basket with peanut butter crackers, a vivid and unnatural orange, a crinkly wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked with icy juices, foil boxes, straws glued on. A female voice next door claimed she was still a human being, though I could not hear the reasons. When it was my turn, I answered right away, saying I knew where I was and why. No, I would not harm myself, surprised to be asked as I had never had the thought. Yes I knew where I was going next. Out the window and through shadow and streetlight, I saw how this building connected to the next. I was to follow a stripe painted on the wall. Someone would walk with me as well. I felt fine I said, and it was sort of true. Actually I felt nailed by one wrist to a desire to flee and by the other to a sincere longing for sleep. I was not in pain. Thank you. I felt like the very last note in a concert, the one that hovers as if it wants to linger, but is already over.”