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A Tick-Where-Appropriate Template It begins with unspecified “you” and “we” raising fists of defiance to the void, the morning we opened the obituary, a pun on “decompose” you’d have enjoyed. These crocodile tears shed in rhyme, in an age too commercial to care, recall how we met the first time and the feisty old trooper you were, you were, what a feisty old trooper you were: the snook you cocked at convention; writing only when the muse was near your solitary published collection, Parnassus — A Calling Not a Career , we reviewed and/or said we admired: its allusions to myth, its classical power we found “inspiring” if not “inspired” and “important” as a euphemism for “dour,” for “dour,” important to find euphemisms for “dour”; your committee work; your taste in shoes; your alcoholism and/or love for jazz; your appetite for social issues that none of the young crowd has; your impatience with those smart alecks who expect to have and eat their cake, and some daringly inverted syntax the occasional end-rhyme to make, to make, occasionally an end-rhyme you’d make; your insistence upon a thing called “craft” (perhaps you meant margarine); how establishment critics originally laughed at your pamphlets from the Slovene; how you very nearly popped your clogs as we fought to get your name cleared; you were our stag set upon by dogs, indestructible in duffel coat and/or beard, your beard, the indescribable duffel coat and/or beard; your years of silence and/or second wife whose whereabouts remain uncertain; a paean to your flowering late in life in some council flat in Suburbiton and your dab hand with a hoover seasoned with the odd gratuitous clue (much as we champion your oeuvre) that we’re better writers than you, than you, we’re better writers than you; the valedictions when last we met— “Shut the door, comrades, adieu”— however innocuous when said, now seem prophetic: you knew ; your despair and/or your courage; a warning for our planet and times culminating with a rhetorical flourish that pans out along these lines, these lines, that pads out along these lines: Something something something world , something something something grope . Something something something unfurled , something something something hope . Something something something dark , something something something night . Something something something lark , something something something light .

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars as in kings. Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords; The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is in the fewest words; The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love: True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.

A longish poem about wallpaper. A short lyric about discouragement in white. A medium-length thesis of uncertain importance. Another sonnet, about scholarship. A couplet of olives. A long narrative about the exaggeration of your absence. Several quatrains about candle stubs. That old sestina on Isaiah. Palindromes about Scots presbyters of the 18th century. Some rock lyrics from Benares. A nature poem about committees. Seven heroic couplets about Art Murphy. Several more heroic couplets on Murphy’s Law. A ballad about studying Latin in Latium. A masque for Mercedes and her Benz.

After love discovers it, the little burn or birthmark in an odd spot he can neither see nor reach; after the internist's downturned mouth, specialists leaning over him like diviners, machines reading his billion cells; after the onslaught of insight, cures crawling through him like infestations, so many surgeries a wrong move leaves him leaking like overripe fruit; after the mountain aster and ice wine, Michigan football,Canes Venatici and the Four North Fracture Zone shrink to a room where voices grow hushed as if at some holy place, and even in the kindest eye there lurks the eternity to which he's been commended; after speech, touch, even the instinct to eat are gone, and he has become nothing but a collection of quiet tics and twitches as if something wanted out of his riddled bones, the carious maze of his brain; as the last day glaciers into his room, glass and chrome so infinites- imally facet- ed it seems he lives inside a diamond, he breaks into a wide smile, as if joy were the animal in him, blind, scrabbling, earth- covered creature tunneling up from God knows where to stand upright, feasting on distances, gazing dead into the sun.

At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. And though they seem to cling together, And form “associations” here, Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether, And through the depths of space career. So we who sat, oppressed with science, As British asses, wise and grave, Are now transformed to wild Red Lions, As round our prey we ramp and rave. Thus, by a swift metamorphosis, Wisdom turns wit, and science joke, Nonsense is incense to our noses, For when Red Lions speak, they smoke. Hail, Nonsense! dry nurse of Red Lions, From thee the wise their wisdom learn, From thee they cull those truths of science, Which into thee again they turn. What combinations of ideas, Nonsense alone can wisely form! What sage has half the power that she has, To take the towers of Truth by storm? Yield, then, ye rules of rigid reason! Dissolve, thou too, too solid sense! Melt into nonsense for a season, Then in some nobler form condense. Soon, all too soon, the chilly morning, This flow of soul will crystallize, Then those who Nonsense now are scorning, May learn, too late, where wisdom lies.

were copped from Gramophone. cassettes jammed into a factory- issued stereo deck of the hoopty i rolled around in. a bucket. bass and drum looped with some string sample, fixed. a sliver of perfect adjusted. the scrapes of something reconstituted. there was so much space to fill. an invitation to utter. Iqra- Allah said to the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon Him). a- to b-side and around again. a circle a cipher. i’d drive down and back in my mom’s Dodge for the latest volumes of sound. i’d stutter and stop and begin again. lonesome and on fire. none. no one i knew rapped. i’d recite alone on Clark St. free, styling, shaping, my voice a sapling, hatchling, rapping my life, emerging in the dark of an empty car. • there was a time when hip-hop felt like a secret society of wizards and wordsmiths. magicians meant to find you or that you were meant to find like rappers i listened to and memorized in history class talked specifically to me, for me. • & sometimes you’d see a kid whisper to himself in the corner of a bus seat & you asked if he rhymed & traded a poem a verse like a fur pelt/trapping. some gold or food. this sustenance. you didn’t have to ride solo anymore. • Jonathan was the first kid i met who rapped. he was Black from a prep school, wore ski goggles on top his head & listened to Wu-Tang which meant he was always rhyming about science and chess. his pops made him read Sun Tzu. his mans was Omega a fat Puerto Rican who wrote graffiti and smoked bidis. & they’d have friends & the backseat would swell & the word got passed/scooped like a ball on the playground. you’d juggle however long your mind could double Dutch. sometimes you’d take what you were given/lift off like a trampoline rocket launch. sometimes you’d trip & scrape your knees. tongue-tied, not quick. words stuck on loop, like like words, stuck, like that. but break thru, mind, knife sharp, mind darts polished & gleaming we’d ride for the sake of rhyming. take the long way home or wherever the fuck we were going cruise down Lake Shore & back, blasting blazing. polishing these gems. trying to get our mind right.

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake. I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take? Leathery toad that ruts for days on end, Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend, Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat, Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat: Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea. What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me. These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof. Into what bulk has method disappeared? Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared. The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature. My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature That bites through anything, root, wire, or can. If I was not afraid I’d eat a man. Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine. Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine. I root and root, you think that it is greed, It is, but I seek out a plant I need. Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly: Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot, From milky flower to the black forked root. From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin And human title, putting pig within. I push my big grey wet snout through the green, Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

a tiny blue metal race car grandma gave to me when I was 32.  There’s an obelisk now in Skeleton Canyon. Maybe you’re too close to the speaker. Tell the Arthur Lee of Love confrontation story. The tender does not approve of our vulgarity. Double vocal for airports, weekends and holidays. Numb grids that represent human inaction. An incidental arrival? Why that landing? The speaker of the poem seems baffled to be in his/her time continuum. Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, playing together on the street corner. Turn down the harp and make it feel more distant. The next few minutes could hardly be identified as words. A few fireman later, the benefit of a lifelong love was clear. A locus Of abnormal sensation. Harder to keep an indiscriminate man from slaughter. Off state extemporaneous crushed weight. Consulting the at-bats for ideas of speed. I will be home when my shirt is too dirty to wear.

After “She was the song of my dark hour,” a photograph by Paul Tañedo I woke up and I was old— It’s hard to judge if this new country was worth its costs— Fil and Eileen educated themselves— They blessed me with their happiness— Roy and Glen lost themselves to a car accident and something worse (that I will not reveal even for a poem)— When I see myself reflected in a mirror I turn away to hide both my eyes, all of my self— when half of your children are destroyed the half who flourish cannot compensate exactly as if a heart breaks exactly down the middle.

At the moment of my mother’s death I am rinsing frozen chicken. No vision, no rending of the temple curtain, only the soft give of meat. I had not seen her in four days. I thought her better, and the hospital did not call, so I am fresh from an office Christmas party, scotch on my breath as I answer the phone. And in one moment all my past acts become irrevocable.