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Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee! Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand, And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend, Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend: To tell her glories with a faithful tongue, Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song. Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies, Till some lov'd object strikes her wand'ring eyes, Whose silken fetters all the senses bind, And soft captivity involves the mind. Imagination! who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? Soaring through air to find the bright abode, Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God, We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, And leave the rolling universe behind: From star to star the mental optics rove, Measure the skies, and range the realms above. There in one view we grasp the mighty whole, Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul. Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise; The frozen deeps may break their iron bands, And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands. Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign, And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain; Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round, And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd: Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose, And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose. Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain, O thou the leader of the mental train: In full perfection all thy works are wrought, And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought. Before thy throne the subject-passions bow, Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler thou; At thy command joy rushes on the heart, And through the glowing veins the spirits dart. Fancy might now her silken pinions try To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high: From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise, Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies, While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies. The monarch of the day I might behold, And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold, But I reluctant leave the pleasing views, Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse; Winter austere forbids me to aspire, And northern tempests damp the rising fire; They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea, Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

After being humiliated one continues the manuscript of identity. Activities, diseases, doldrums, the crony affair after the situation, the one where one faces how one is the undertaste, how one isn't the neighbor, the piebaker, a white folk. How one isn't a gorgeous dream wrapped up in tireless affection, primped for wider screens. So there one grew, in the coffee sickness, the dictionary browsing in a fury for the word entitlement to spill— After convulsing with rage, one continues in the aftermath of no friends on Tuesdays or shouting fiercely when nothing sobered to the eleventh hour and the tide shrunk to its sense of privacy where it had nothing to do with shores or moons, and humiliation sat on its lover's knee, greeting the eccentric rich and the hourglass with such force the rage enameled like fine paint to a sheen of deep blue. Restless in the way that stirs the crowd to its feet to claim the encounter for the intentions of personal gain without the empire, without the embarrassment of shaking one's head, of resting it underneath the ground, to live sanctioned in the migrancy with an ugly plate for the economy but working ever so hard. So unplanned, so beyond what one did before the lack of dignity sang an opera. And organized all the ideas, before rage shot a bird that had once watched effortlessly all the comings and goings.

Proxies—pertinent, prominent, proximate— impose war, sustain it. The Empire ever absent and seemingly elsewhere— evasive, persuasive, pervasive. Things are this complicated.

All our roads go nowhere. Maps are curled To keep the pavement definitely On the world. All our footsteps, set to make Metric advance, Lapse into arcs in deference To circumstance. All our journeys nearing Space Skirt it with care, Shying at the distances Present in air. Blithely travel-stained and worn, Erect and sure, All our travels go forth, Making down the roads of Earth Endless detour.

And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies; your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk, to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord wonders.You will never be whole. The voices.His voice, broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window, pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust, with its own murky gravities.You will fail. You have not made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider:your lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine. Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence. Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder. Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass, a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons. You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing out thought according to the malnourished algorithm some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever. There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold- leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you should take up yoga

The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint. You should never see it coming. And you should never hear the end of it.

Because I gazed out the window at birds doing backflips when the subject turned to diamonds, because my eyes glazed over with the slightly sleepy sheen your cake will wear, never let it be said that I’d rather be firing arrows at heart-shaped dartboards or in a cave composing polyglot puns. I crave, I long for transforming love as surely as leaves need water and mouths seek bread. But I also fear the colder changes that lie in wait and threaten to turn moons of honey to pools of molasses, broad front porches to narrow back gardens, and tight rings of friendship to flimsy things that break when a gold band brightly implies Leave early, go home, become one with the one the world has told you to tend and treasure above all others. You love, and that’s good; you are loved, that’s superb; you will vanish and reap some happy rewards. But look at the birds.

The my becomes a the, becomes the state’s the coroner’s, a law’s, something assignable, by me, alone, though it will not be the I I am on leaving it, no longer to be designated human or corpse:cadaver it will be, nameless patient stored in the deep hold of the hospital as in the storage of a ghost ship run aground — the secret in it that will, perhaps, stir again the wind that failed. It will be preserved, kept like larva, like a bullet sealed gleaming in its chamber. They will gather around it, probe and sample, argue — then return it to its between- world, remove their aprons and gloves and stroll, some evenings, a city block for a beer, a glass of chilled white wine. Even there, they will continue to speak of it, what they glean from beneath the narrative of scars, surgical cavities, the wondrous mess it became before I left it to them with what’s left of me, this name, a signature, a neatened suture, perfect, this last, selfish stitch.

Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic of the mopped floors and wiped-down doorknobs. The freshly soaped necks and armpits. Your teacher means well, even if he butchers your name like he has a bloody sausage casing stuck between his teeth, handprints on his white, sloppy apron. And when everyone turns around to check out your face, no need to fush red and warm. Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom is one big scallop with its dozens of icy blues and you will remember that winter your family took you to the China Sea and you sank your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars the size of your outstretched hand. And when all those necks start to crane, try not to forget someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes for the first day of school. Think of their pencil cases from third grade, full of sharp pencils, a pink pearl eraser. Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.

I In a detachment cool as the glint of light on wet roads through wet spruce, or iced mountains hailed from the sea in moonfill, or the sea when one horizon’s black and the other burning; the gulls are kissing time in its own flowing over the shell-scraped rock   a coming and going as of glass bees with a bubble of light in each running errands in and out of the sunset. Over the road and the spruce wood, over the ice, and out the picture of my picture window, the exorbitant separation of nature from nature wheels, whirls, and dances on itself. Now damn me for a moral. Over and out, over and in, the gulls drift up afire, screaming like hinges in the broken air of night and day like two smokes on the sea. And I do nothing. A shadow three feet under my window in the light, I look at light in one of the years of my life. This or another. Or all together. Or simply in this moment. II Lead flags of the sea. Steel furls of the surf. Day smoke and night smoke. Fire at the smoke’s top. A passion from the world in a calm eye. A calm of the world in the eye of passion. The day that sank birdless from staring Calvary was another. And only another. And no other than the clucking calm of Eden fussed to rest from the black bush afire in the first eye. A calm-in-violence like Aegean time. Day smoke and night smoke over the palled sea tensed for a clash of tridents. Far ashore, a staring army camped beside a temple, the base of the temple black with powder stains, the pediment flashing wild in light above. —A day of the world in which a part of the world looked at another, two parts of a mist. At Cassino the dusty German wetting his lips, his eyes crashed in his face like unhatched birds’ eggs splashed from their nest, looked East from the burning night. There was no West. Light came from nowhere behind him, slanted, flowed level, drained. He looked out, waiting. Where had it come from, the light of his terrible patience? A dead man waited to die on the shell-scraped stones of another God, dust of the stones caked to his body, rivers of blood within him ran to their dusty sea beside the world. Calm in his changes, risen from his changes, he looked his life out at the smoking world. III I have no more to do than what I wait for under the changing light and the gulls afire in rays of rose-quartz. Holy ghosts of the sea, they rise in light from behind me. The light lifts long from the edge of the world and juts away over the top of the dark. My life sits visible to itself; and I sit still in a company of survivors and the dead. Jew. Greek, German, man at the edge of himself in the long light over the worlds he ran to to save unsaved. I practice the man in all, clutching the world from the world to praise it.