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To wake when all is possible before the agitations of the day have gripped you To come to the kitchen and peel a little basketball for breakfast To tear the husk like cotton padding        a cloud of oil misting out of its pinprick pores clean and sharp as pepper To ease each pale pink section out of its case so carefully       without breaking a single pearly cell To slide each piece into a cold blue china bowl the juice pooling       until the whole fruit is divided from its skin and only then to eat so sweet a discipline precisely pointless       a devout involvement of the hands and senses a pause     a little emptiness each year harder to live within each year harder to live without

Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight, But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out.

What links are ours with orbs that are So resolutely far: The solitary asks, and they Give radiance as from a shield: Still at the death of day, The seen, the unrevealed. Implacable they shine To us who would of Life obtain An answer for the life we strain To nourish with one sign. Nor can imagination throw The penetrative shaft: we pass The breath of thought, who would divine If haply they may grow As Earth; have our desire to know; If life comes there to grain from grass, And flowers like ours of toil and pain; Has passion to beat bar, Win space from cleaving brain; The mystic link attain, Whereby star holds on star. Those visible immortals beam Allurement to the dream: Ireful at human hungers brook No question in the look. For ever virgin to our sense, Remote they wane to gaze intense: Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite The beating heart behind the ball of sight: Till we conceive their heavens hoar, Those lights they raise but sparkles frore, And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey To that frigidity of brainless ray. Yet space is given for breath of thought Beyond our bounds when musing: more When to that musing love is brought, And love is asked of love's wherefore. 'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought: Her gift, her secret, here our tie. And not with her and yonder sky? Bethink you: were it Earth alone Breeds love, would not her region be The sole delight and throne Of generous Deity? To deeper than this ball of sight Appeal the lustrous people of the night. Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails, It is our ravenous that quails, Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught. The spirit leaps alight, Doubts not in them is he, The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right: Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought, To feel it large of the great life they hold: In them to come, or vaster intervolved, The issues known in us, our unsolved solved: That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree, Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped. So may we read and little find them cold: Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped; Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified By day to penetrate black midnight; see, Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we, The specks of dust upon a mound of mould, We who reflect those rays, though low our place, To them are lastingly allied. So may we read, and little find them cold: Not frosty lamps illumining dead space, Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers. The fire is in them whereof we are born; The music of their motion may be ours. Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced. Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold The love that lends her grace Among the starry fold. Then at new flood of customary morn, Look at her through her showers, Her mists, her streaming gold, A wonder edges the familiar face: She wears no more that robe of printed hours; Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.

Sunday, 12 May 1833 The clouds are marshalling across the sky, Leaving their deepest tints upon yon range Of soul-alluring hills. The breeze comes softly, Laden with tribute that a hundred orchards Now in their fullest blossom send, in thanks For this refreshing shower. The birds pour forth In heightened melody the notes of praise They had suspended while God’s voice was speaking, And his eye flashing down upon his world. I sigh, half-charmed, half-pained. My sense is living, And, taking in this freshened beauty, tells Its pleasure to the mind. The mind replies, And strives to wake the heart in turn, repeating Poetic sentiments from many a record Which other souls have left, when stirred and satisfied By scenes as fair, as fragrant. But the heart Sends back a hollow echo to the call Of outward things, — and its once bright companion, Who erst would have been answered by a stream Of life-fraught treasures, thankful to be summoned, — Can now rouse nothing better than this echo; Unmeaning voice, which mocks their softened accents. Content thee, beautiful world! and hush, still busy mind! My heart hath sealed its fountains. To the things Of Time they shall be oped no more. Too long, Too often were they poured forth: part have sunk Into the desert; part profaned and swollen By bitter waters, mixed by those who feigned They asked them for refreshment, which, turned back, Have broken and o’erflowed their former urns. So when ye talk of pleasure, lonely world, And busy mind, ye ne’er again shall move me To answer ye, though still your calls have power To jar me through, and cause dull aching here. No so the voice which hailed me from the depths Of yon dark-bosomed cloud, now vanishing Before the sun ye greet. It touched my centre, The voice of the Eternal, calling me To feel his other worlds; to feel that if I could deserve a home, I still might find it In other spheres, — and bade me not despair, Though ‘want of harmony’ and ‘aching void’ Are terms invented by the men of this, Which I may not forget. In former times I loved to see the lightnings flash athwart The stooping heavens; I loved to hear the thunder Call to the seas and mountains; for I thought ‘Tis thus man’s flashing fancy doth enkidle The firmament of mind; ‘tis thus his eloquence Calls unto the soul’s depths and heights; and still I defied the creature, nor remembered The Creator in his works. Ah now how different! The proud delight of that keen sympathy Is gone; no longer riding on the wave, But whelmed beneath it: my own plans and works, Or, as the Scriptures phrase it, my ’inventions’ No longer interpose ‘twist me and Heaven. Today, for the first time, I felt the Deity, And uttered prayer on hearing thunder. This Must be thy will, — for finer, higher spirits Have gone through this same process, — yet I think There was religion in that strong delight, Those sounds, those thoughts of power imparted. True, I did not say, ‘He is the Lord thy God,’ But I had feeling of his essence. But ‘’Twas pride by which the angels fell.’ So be it! But O, might I but see a little onward! Father, I cannot be a spirit of power; May I be active as a spirit of love, Since thou hast ta’en me from that path which Nature Seemed to appoint, O, deign to ope another, Where I may walk with thought and hope assured; ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!’ Had I but faith like that which fired Novalis, I too could bear that the heart ‘fall in ashes,’ While the freed spirit rises from beneath them, With heavenward-look, and Phoenix-plumes upsoaring!

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French? Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves. However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh. My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep. Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?) St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse. Destroy yourself, if you don’t know! It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over. “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale. I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

it is essentially reluctance  the language a darkness, a friendship, tying to the real but it is unreal the clarity desired, a wish for true sight, all tangling ‘you’ tried me, the everyday which caught me, turning the house in the wind, a lovecraft  the political was not my business  I could not look without seeing the decay, the shit poured on most things, by indifference, the personal power which is simply that,     demanding a friend take dullness out of the world  (he doesn’t know his lousy emptiness)                      I slept in a fire    on my book bag, one dried wing of a white moth     the story is of a man who lost his way in the holy wood because the way had never been taken without at least two friends,  one on each side, and I believe my dream said one of the others always led     now left to acknowledge, he can’t breathe, the darkness bled the white wing,     one     of the body of the moth that moved him, of the other wing,     the language is bereft

The column of the commander yielded to our first sweep. Even the water jar for our diggers we set on the south wall of the general’s tomb without knowing it. So we began. His armies retook Nubia, Libya, and the Levant, lost under the sway-bellied lantern-jawed Sun King. Overseer of all scribes, Overseer of the priests of Horus, Grain-giver to all lands, Royal chief of staff, Regent, the general had himself carried on his palanquin through the wailing processions to oversee the work on this place. And so carved, thus: one of his men punches a Nubian in the face. The general was low-born; everything had counted and he knew what counted most. His platoons lift open palms towards Tutankhamun. The general towers as a sway-girdled go-between at court for beseeching Libyans. Only the pearl-handled revolvers do not figure here, or the comeback challenge Nuts! in the Ardennes winter forest. He had himself carried beyond the busy streets of the dead in the city of the dead sloping back from the bluff to a higher, private terrace looking across to Memphis. But then he rose to Pharaoh. So he is not here. Instead his first wife lay here, and then his queen also. At his own royal tomb in the Valley, where the designs remained uncarved, sketching idea along stone, he does not rest either. The fine picklock hand got past Anubis and the reared serpents, and got to him, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt. It got past Truth with her high feather, which moved at the slightest disturbance. The general did deep obeisance to her. He is not here. What at last moves the heart? So much already moved, even in his own century, architects prying loose mud bricks of the core for new tombs. Cult funded in perpetuity gone in two generations. So Coleridge, who was indisposed that day, prudently remained in the circle of lime trees while his friends went off on their walk through the countryside. He followed them in his mind. That way no one would have to dismantle Horeheb’s outer court to secure bricks for the statuary room, and facing stones. He cast his mind outward, a net over his dear ones, sending them at pace through the middle distance of steeples, hill lines, and the murder of Lamb’s mother by his sister, a brief madness, thus through the appropriately middle distance where such things are built and performed in fact, no closer, no farther, then on out to the cleansing rim of apocalypse, evening in the bath of waning fire, one bird stitching the whole veil of showings tight along its upper hem— though he was not there, he could tell them that none the less he was next to his words and his word was with them, even unto the rim of their wandering and their turning back. One dome of air and fire. But he was not there. Nor I here. What removes the heart from what moves it? As if I were the lecturer before a congress of doctors, his clinching point approaching, when suddenly he stared out in silence, and at last said, Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, the only thing I can see at this moment inside my brain, such as it is, is a little white mouse chasing a little white ball.

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, Facing a sheer sky. Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike, Sun and reflection wheeled by. When the bare eyes were before me And the hissing hair, Held up at a window, seen through a door. The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead Formed in the air. This is a dead scene forever now. Nothing will ever stir. The end will never brighten it more than this, Nor the rain blur. The water will always fall, and will not fall, And the tipped bell make no sound. The grass will always be growing for hay Deep on the ground. And I shall stand here like a shadow Under the great balanced day, My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, And does not drift away.

The woman is daft. Invented her own sect. Has upside-down sex. With alternate species. You see her on the street. Corner of   Sansome and Pine: Morning rev up of sf financial types. Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat. Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle- Snake. Smiles like she’s got the shakes. Every cell in her seems to vibrate. Psst! Could you turn that to low? The gray-suited, heads bent to cement, pass. Edges of  her sleeves are threads; Her clothes mismatch. The shoes Are not a pair. She stands as you stare, Or better yet, ignore. You ask Her if she’s fine, and she replies, Fan- Tastic! As if  this were the day She’d finally learned to levitate, And her eyes are the doors To a holographic universe, And she looks right through you, As if  you too had won the lottery of the soul. And you look down at your shiny, perfectly symmetrical shoes, Like, Man, that’s more than I wanted to know. And — Didn’t anyone tell you you need a reason — A  house you own, matching clothes, Translucent skin, sheen of fashion, A pulsing bank account, like our galaxy always expanding — To feel so friggin’ over the moon? Who are you? How do you justify you? What made you you? What context gave you you? And on the curb you kick, swing, scuff your shoes. The woman is daft. Invented her own sect. Probably has no sex, or too much. With any species. She hasn’t yet learned That happiness is contingent — It depends upon The things aforelisted. She’s just riding on the being of   being. Hedonist. On her hand, a rock As if, eons ago, the glacier had swung by and deposited A boulder on her finger. The elemental pinned to her. The woman is daft, I tell you. Adrift. Steer clear. The glint In her — shield your eyes. Downcast. Don’t let it get to you. She will die Alone — while you, you’ll have — Have — Resist. Do not, I say, do not Long for that magic.

Love, meet me in the green glen, Beside the tall elm-tree, Where the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen; There come with me. Meet me in the green glen. Meet me at the sunset Down in the green glen, Where we’ve often met By hawthorn-tree and foxes’ den, Meet me in the green glen. Meet me in the green glen, By sweetbriar bushes there; Meet me by your own sen, Where the wild thyme blossoms fair. Meet me in the green glen. Meet me by the sweetbriar, By the mole-hill swelling there; When the west glows like a fire God’s crimson bed is there. Meet me in the green glen.