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Just because there is music piped into the most false of revolutions it cannot clean these senses of slow wireless death crawling from a slick mirror 1/8th it’s normal size . . . Marty was found dead by the man literally blue 12 hours after falling out at the foot of the Cloisters with its millions in rare tapestry and its clear view of the Hudson and even testing your blue pills over and over to reverse my slow situations I wind up stretched across the couch still nodding with Sherlock Holmes examining our crushed veins Richard Brautigan, I don’t care who you are fucking in your clean California air I just don’t care though mine are more beautiful anyway (though more complex perhaps) and we have white flowers too right over our window on 10th St. like hands that mark tiny x’s across infinity day by day but even this crumb of life I eventually surface toward continues to nod as if I see you all thoughtlessly through a carefully inverted piece of tainted glass shattered in heaven and found on these streets

A mayfly flies In May or June. Its life is over Far too soon. A day or two To dance, To fly— Hello Hello Good-bye Good-bye.

Mayor. Worldman. Historyman. Beyond steps that occur and close, your steps are echo-makers. You can never be forgotten. We begin our health. We enter the Age of Alliance. This is our senior adventure.

If we could only push these walls apart, unfold the room the way a child might take apart a box and lay it flat upon the floor— so many corners cleared at last! Or else could rip away the roof and stare down at the dirty rooms, the hallways turning on themselves, and understand at last their plan— dark maze without a minotaur, no monsters but ourselves. Yet who could bear to see it all? The slow descending spirals of the dust against the spotted windowpane, the sunlight on the yellow lace, the hoarded wine turned dark and sour, the photographs, the letters—all the crowded closets of the heart. One wants to turn away—and cry for fire to break out on the stairs and raze each suffocating room. But the walls stay, the roof remains strong and immovable, and we can only pray that if these rooms have memories, they are not ours.

1. Cogs & cogs that cannot turn to recognitions: such dogs in the dark noonday! As if the tongue told & tolled Among the melancholic arcades. Where the moods advance toward the modes. Time to try the knot, the Not Or to be caught Forever in nerve-traceries of Beauty . . . Unstrung, the structure is sound. 2. Detour to far fires. To be counted missing . . . in a toroidal space That mimics the shape of its container, speech. The passive of, the possessive of— Measureless intent,blue almost black, the picture below the voice. Less a name than a substance Coming to stillness, star-inhabited. Less a substance than a sigh. 3. Awaited, thou,unawaited. Divided here. O then Opened as earthen ring, cave-recorded. A mazed interior. Self-similar aisles of isles, pouring form from form. Lastness as device. Aligned as measurements (letters)— as sensitive, all-too-sensitive compass needles forever seeking the frozen pole, the zero. Caption: “An end-of-century sailing ship,Delirium held fast in sheets of ice.” 4. No atmosphere is sufficient. An embryo in the brain is not yet breathing. There, the labor Of the living rock, where an ache, or bruise-ember will be discovered. Scored for Theremin, or permanently scarred. Where shadows point:Mad lengthening to made, as unmade scaffolding. Thus, repetition, resisted is the register of thought. Now here, even as staves are falling, another story —intervallic—cannot be told—that is, besieged As the heart encaged in bone. The animal calls long long, disconsolate In its hollow mountain. 5. Neither nor nor neither, time builds Its twelve tones between round&ruined. —as the roots of the sunflower, arrayed over earthlight. Routes unreturning / term without terminus. Riding as reading Migrates underground. Writing as the righting Of fallen angles, of tangles of Accident— arrives riven, a body never to be / surveyed. Abandoned in a wintry field, the sum of its travels —its hunting the same as its haunting.

There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossom always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded by crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2%, like skin. A little milkfat, elastane even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poison like a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped — without mother there’s only art. To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, seventies lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybody’s animal. To float like water seeking its own, stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide. Face painted on torso on horsehair on chesty silk it’s a deathmask for the stigmata slash of the model’s body. • I don’t think I understand what studying is. I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that “studying?” Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed, hand-stitched. When concept perceived — a womanly gist, let’s say, or a curve of mind — is more than itself (surpassing, all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim. My eyes just drink the fabric that covers each surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. Everything’s inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted buses endless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way, vision’s a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar is poison to the occasional queen bee. Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutions to problems that are real problems, that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest. For without glasses, the eye better sees the wind, by feeling it and closing against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling, I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth time on the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infinite invertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like, at the seams. Anything could give. But no, just takes and takes and takes. • I’ve been trying to write the words, “I cried. Cried really and wetly, and for good.” Old-fashioned writing with intense excitement: the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying, what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various, not that mirage I thought I’d seen and can be held apart as unreal, too exterior, distinct from each other wildly as sparks to seaweed or flower to meteor. It collapsed, can’t draw it can’t cut it out of itself. There is no color but what’s already inside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I can’t see myself. I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skull and when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together like so: a newborn softened in its own mother’s milk. • I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet. I dreamed I already dreamed all the dreams I’d get. This morning I dressed in my last dress’s last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up well — airtight, would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet. Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where? I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse. Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clamp and sickened ears pulled, unskulled. Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow. To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Light’s so quiet. You’d think its cuttings, its edge-hole, those mousy children, would squeak at least a bit. They run like a stocking down the leg of the mind. Why not quieter then? There is no body without life. There is no mind without body. There is no without.

The fellow talking to himself is me, Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see Him every morning shave and comb his hair And then lose track of him until he starts to care, Inflating sex dolls out of thin air In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street! Completely crazy but not at all insane. He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain. He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool. He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul. But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on. He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone. It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn. A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die, Is not in pain so far, and she will try To palliate her death, is what her life is now. The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how? Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to. The moon and stars rapidly enter you While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun. You keep on writing till you write yourself away, And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun! Speaking of someone else for a change, not me, There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely, Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird Circled forever around us and then without a word Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there And you burst into tears. I was unaware That ten years before the same thing had happened just After your young daughter died and now it must Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak And receive the recognition we all seek.

Lots of contemporaries— but “me” is not my contemporary. My birth without “me” was a blemished offering on the collection plate. A moment of flesh, imprisoned in flesh. And when to the tip of this tongue of flesh some word comes, it kills itself. If saved from killing itself, it descends to the paper, where a murder happens. Gunshot— if it strikes me in Hanoi it strikes again in Prague. A little smoke floats up, and my “me” dies like an eighth-month child. Will my “me” one day be my contemporary?

[facsimile] He awoke, fully charged. You can bring water to a horse but you can’t make it ride. All poetry is conceptual but some is more conceptual than others. Ambient difficulty leads to poetic license. Poetry has no purpose & that is not its pur- pose. You have to get over be- in- g over. April is the cruelest month for poetry. And May is not much better, is it? Why write in prose what you could write as easily as poetry? The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with and throu- g- h it. Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or concepts. Poetry emasculates prose. The body: can’t live with it, can’t live without i- t. I want to be understood, just not by you. Last week’s weather is worth a pound of salt, just like the lot of  wives or the snowy pillars of  Danton. There’s not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds content. Yesterday’s weather is as beyond reach as tomorrow’s dreams. The move away from close reading often got drowned in the bathwater, even if   we could never find the baby. I wouldn’t  join a poetic tradition that would recognize me as a member. The wheel needs to be reinvented because we’re still stuck. I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocketbook and on the b- rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true innovation is God’s. Others pay cash. This is a lie and that’s the truth. Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun. The taste of madeleine ain’t what it used to be. (taint what it used to be) ... all alone and feeling ... Operators are on duty. Call now. As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead of night. Without product placement, poetry as we know it cannot sur- vive. Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology, or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even that. If  you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably not gnostic enough, for my money. I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason. The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere felt. There’s more to transgression than ritual, but not enough more. There is more to liturgy than doctrine, once in a blue m- oo- n. I left my purpose in my other pants. You’re not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck, letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab. Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original is an echo of what is yet to be. Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental. Beauty is the memory of the loss of time. Memory is the reflection of the loss of beauty. American poetry suffers from its lack of uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope for hope, no belief  in belief, no doubt of doubt. They say God is in the details. That’s because the Devil has the rest covered. God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as it turns its back on the world. God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether murder or martyrdom. I’ve got authenticity, you’ve got dogma  ...    proclaimeth the Lord. Saying one more time: It’s true but I don’t believe it I believe it but it’s not so. “My logic is all in the melting pot.” [wittgenstein] Better an old cow than a dead horse. Alzheimer’s: What’s that again? So it turns out I’m not a bull in a china shop but china in a bulls’ shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s- y- m- b- ol. In their gloom, the Jews go and come Talking of Bergen-Belsen. (I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.) My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river seven times full eighth empty. Zeno and Heraklitus are my father’s milk. I think with the poem not thr- ou- g- h it. Turns of phrase / my stock in trade. Negative capability: sure. But also positive incapacity. I always hear echoes and reverses when I am listening to language. It’s the field of my consciousness. When we stop making — manufacturing, imposing — sense then we have a chance to find it. A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds. I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a- s possible. Poets are the Pershings of the imaginary: piercing themselves as they perish in spite of native ground. I wish I was still in my pajamas. The unironized life is not worth living. When people tell that joke, three Jews four opinions, what they don’t say is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ... Ouzo something to me and it ain’t pretty. Absinthe makes the heart gro- w foreigner. “Throughout this prospectus, ‘object’ refers to the digitized file.” Yesterday is a stone’s throw from tomorrow & each new year a vast canvas of impossibility. Kalip in North Folk, you’re on the air. Stand clear of the clo- sing doors. • Too much is still not enough. • Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I Guileless as the toll of tidal tug There are no absolutes except this. It was a veritable bow across the shot. “Sacred means saturated with being.” [berssenbrugge] So does scared. So does scarred.

Across the road from where we nap under a dead elm dazzles the meadow where the partisans strung the traitors up, the meadow which their dangling shadows stain. Belly up in vines a blasted tank rusts flake by flake to lichened scrap iron while horseflies harangue the rippling green, July a limbo of quavering yellow... We wake to cattle lowing at dawn, grass overgrowing summer—so like us in love each hour with the noonday sun that neither toils nor spins, its brightness hovering, blinding us... What would the dead say if they could see us, lounging, talking, peering through brambles at cemetery photographs sunk beneath the undertow of milkweed shadows, death dates smoothing back into the stone? I think of Goya’s demon, old man flesh hanging from his bones, long teeth bared in an ass’s grin as he scrawls on a schoolboy’s slate, What more can be done? Nothing... while behind him a noose etched clean as the moon rises through the inkblot spiraling back into the hanged man’s mouth as if blackness poured from his throat: “When will you tire of us bogeymen, caricatures of your father’s war, our crimes half-forgotten, unforgiven? All future blotted out when they hauled us from our beds, our minds went dead to everything but fear: Nightshirts soaked in snowlight’s pall, we hunched in mud, each step loud, too loud beside the farmhouse wall, the seconds teetering till we drop... What our betrayals were we know with a knowledge intimate beyond revenge, history the needle’s eye you can’t squeeze through. The partisans cut us down, heaped us in a mass grave our relatives dug up: Yes, there were tears—even for us... Now, like aliens from space on your TV shows, we ravel into mist, surrounding you the moment your eyes close... Our pupils search out yours from behind the mirror with your father’s stares, fathers and sons melding in one mind— but who are you to call us traitors, an outsider judging through the smoke-haze of home: Each blow exact, our own neighbors beat us till the blood ran, beat us black and blue...Even now, would they dare take us back, older, wiser, necks broken by the yoke? Moving in time as to a dance we buzz and swarm across the meadow, dissolving and glinting like fireflies in the hedge, blown like milkweed in the moon’s wall eye. But under your lids, you see us locked in cold, shattered wheatstraw flecked in ice: Chill as the night air on your sunburned neck our eyes like X rays pierce the frost, stalking every step the living take.”