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First all belief is paradise. So pliable a medium. A time not very long. A transparency caused. A conveyance of rupture. A subtle transport. Scant and rare. Deep in the opulent morning, blissful regions, hard and slender. Scarce and scant. Quotidian and temperate. Begin afresh in the realms of the atmosphere, that encompasses the solid earth, the terraqueous globe that soars and sings, elevated and flimsy. Bright and hot. Flesh and hue. Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Heavenly and bright. The day pours out space, a light red roominess, bright and fresh. Bright and oft. Bright and fresh. Sparkling and wet. Clamour and tint. We range the spacious fields, a battlement trick and fast. Bright and silver. Ribbons and failings. To and fro. Fine and grand. The sky is complicated and flawed and we’re up there in it, floating near the apricot frill, the bias swoop, near the sullen bloated part that dissolves to silver the next instant bronze but nothing that meaningful, a breach of greeny-blue, a syllable, we’re all across the swathe of fleece laid out, the fraying rope, the copper beech behind the aluminum catalpa that has saved the entire spring for this flight, the tops of these a part of the sky, the light wind flipping up the white undersides of leaves, heaven afresh, the brushed part behind, the tumbling. So to the heavenly rustling. Just stiff with ambition we range the spacious trees in earnest desire sure and dear. Brisk and west. Streaky and massed. Changing and appearing. First and last. This was made from Europe, formed from Europe, rant and roar. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright. Crested and turbid. Silver and bright. This was spoken as it came to us, to celebrate and tint, distinct and designed. Sure and dear. Fully designed. Dear afresh. So free to the showing. What we praise we believe, we fully believe. Very fine. Belief thin and pure and clear to the title. Very beautiful. Belief lovely and elegant and fair for the footing. Very brisk. Belief lively and quick and strong by the bursting. Very bright. Belief clear and witty and famous in impulse. Very stormy. Belief violent and open and raging from privation. Very fine. Belief intransigent after pursuit. Very hot. Belief lustful and eager and curious before beauty.Very bright. Belief intending afresh. So calmly and clearly. Just stiff with leaf sure and dear and appearing and last. With lust clear and scarce and appearing and last and afresh.

The eyelids glowing, some chill morning. O world half-known through opening, twilit lids Before the vague face clenches into light; O universal waters like a cloud, Like those first clouds of half-created matter; O all things rising, rising like the fumes From waters falling, O forever falling; Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished, The snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves Downdrifting age upon age through milky oceans; O slow downdrifting of the atoms; O island nebulae and O the nebulous islands Wandering these mists like falsefires, which are true, Bobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing Through the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing As we pass into the memory of women Who are passing. Within those depths What ravening? What devouring rage? How shall our living know its ends of yielding? These things have taken me as the mouth an orange— That acrid sweet juice entering every cell; And I am shared out. I become these things: These lilies, if these things are water lilies Which are dancers growing dim across no floor; These mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun; This blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors; Fluorescence into which we pass and penetrate; O soft as the thighs of women; O radiance, into which I go on dying ...

Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent.  The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes to gases.  Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me: ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully? I am all you never had of goods and sex. You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ So I look at others, what they do with theirs: They certainly don’t keep it upstairs. By now they’ve a second house and car and wife: Clearly money has something to do with life —In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire: You can’t put off being young until you retire, And however you bank your screw, the money you save Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave. I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

The children are eating lunch at home on a summer weekday when a man comes to the door and asks their mother if she has anything that needs fixing or carrying or any yardwork he can do. They chew their food a little dreamily as, with her back straight and her voice carefully polite, she says No, thank you, I’m sorry, and the man goes away. Who was that, Mama? they say. Oh, no one, she says. They are sitting down to dinner but they have to wait because the doorbell rings and a thin young boy begins to tell their father about a Sales Program he’s completing for a scholarship to be Supervisor, and he holds up a filthy tattered little booklet and lifts also his desperate guile and heavily guarded hope, and the children’s father says, No thank you, sorry but I can’t help you out this time, and the boy goes away. The children start to eat and don’t ask anything, because the boy was just a boy, but their father acts irritated and hasty when he sits back down. Once a glassy-eyed heavy girl who almost seems asleep as she stands outside their door offers for sale some little handtowels stitched by the blind people at the Lighthouse for the Blind and the children are in the folds of their mother’s full skirt listening to the girl’s small voice and their mother says, Well, I bought some the last time. She buys the children school supplies and food, she pays the two boys for mowing the yard together and weeding her flower bed. She gets a new sewing machine for her birthday from the children’s father, and she buys fabric and thread and patterns and makes dresses for the girls, to save money. She tells the children each to put a dime or quarter into the collection plate at Church, and once a month she puts in a little sealed white envelope, and the ushers move slowly along the ends of the pews weaving the baskets through the congregation, and the organist plays a long piece of music. Whisk brooms, magazine subscriptions, anything you need hauled away, little league raffle tickets, cookies, chocolate candy, can I do any yard work again and again, hairbrushes, Christmas cards, do you need help with your ironing one time, and more, came calling at the front door while the children were sometimes eating, sometimes playing. Their faces would soften with a kind of comfort in the authority of mother or father, with a kind of wonder at the needy callers. Their father left for work every day early, and came home for dinner, and almost always went again on Saturday; in his car. Their mother opened a savings account for each child and into each put the first five dollars. The children felt proud to see their names in the passbooks, and wanted to know when they could take the money out. But they were told they had to save their money not spend it. They felt a kind of pleasure in these mysteries, to know that there were things you would understand later when you grew up and had your own house and while your children were eating their dinner and making too much noise the way you did, you knew it was true, the doorbell would ring, the familiar surprise of it, who would it be, and someone would be holding a little worn book or a bundle of dishtowels or once an old man, but perhaps he only looked old, with his beard, came with bunches of carnations, white, red, and pink, and he too was turned away.

Women want to save you or want you to savage them. Men want to see what is under your towel. The dollar bills they throw into your cage are all you need to care about because you aren’t dancing in a cage to entertain them. You dance in a cage to make money. I open my towel to the right then whip it back toward midline just as I open to the left: I show them nothing. But I have them convinced I will show them something. There is a difference between men and women— you must look women in the eyes and, if possible, look hurt; with men, you must avoid looking at them altogether, you must focus on moving your hips, which is close to what they are actually watching. Suspended in a cage above the far end of the dance floor, I was not attainable; I made myself seem attainable. These are just the basics. Wearing nothing but a towel, my greyish wings extended to full wingspan, my chest shaved— the clubbers believe I am wearing a costume. It is amazing what people believe. The music is cheaper than a Budweiser. The air is smoke and the smell of smoke mixed with sweat, and your job is to convince each of them you are dancing for no one else. When my shift is over and I pull on some jeans, tuck my wings and bandage them down, pull on two shirts, I can almost pretend I never entered that cage in the first place. Outside on Lansdowne Street, there are people standing in one line or another waiting to get in to clubs. Night after night, the same thing: the waiting never ends.

The Wrecking Crew was just the cream of the "you pay — we'll play" LA session pool, that crack squad of 50 or 60 musicians...who played on Pet Sounds and Smile and probably half the records in your collection. They didn't just play the chops. They invented them. — Rob Chapman, MOJO Money is also a kind of music. I don't mean the slight sleigh bell of a pocketed change purse or an old-time till's single tap of triangle, ringing up sale, or even the percussion of post-pillage coffers filling up, plink by plink. I think I mean that current of classically trained breath certain amounts of currency can call forth and blow through brass. I mean the mean current of electricity Carol Kaye's bass drew from Capitol Records in the sixties, the timesheets that took their toll and exchanged it for four / four time kept without fail by the brain of drummer Hal Blaine, worth its weight in scale.

I wake to money, and take my money slow I watched for money, lights turned low One must have a mind of money . . . Money that is not there and the money that is The art of money isn't hard to master . . . The money surrounds us . . . Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet money Money on a wet, black bough Do not go gentle into that good money The pure products of money go crazy Money sweeping out from us to disappear Oh Money! My Money! our fearful trip is done I myself will die without money Money, Money, you bastard, I'm through.

You’re rich, lady, hissed the young woman at My mother as she bent in her garden. Look at what you’ve got, and it was Too much, the collards and tomatoes, A man, however lousy, taking care of the bills. This was the reason for the early deaths My mother was to find from that point on, Turned dirt and the mock of roots, Until finally, she gave her garden up. You can’t have nothing, she tells us, Is the motto of our neighborhood, These modest houses That won’t give an inch.

Up the dog bounds to the window, baying like a basset his doleful, tearing sounds from the belly, as if mourning a dead king, and now he’s howling like a beagle – yips, brays, gagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless, that’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you, both of you, mother and daughter, my wife and child. All week he’s curled at my feet, warming himself and me watching more TV, or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow, who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose smearing the panes, having heard another car like yours taking its grinding turn down our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk, that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog, companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog I told you once and for all we should never get.