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Mourning doves are not owls after a while away from the city      not because the country appears of a softer feather       less predatory you're thinking a sound more naturally friendly less edgy and dangerous than the subway but because the city city to city within itself so sharply details for you   actually walks you through a training in the amplitudes of form after a while that sharpness wipes the smile the natural had you putting on everything. Really owls       are so soft       their deadly accuracy of flight depending on it they are all but silent      a recognizable law nobody says shit you learn       the city has taught you to  pick up on     which wings bring the disk of their sun for around your neck each day and which take you out; and that your green act of good is natural in that it too depends on the weather.

—for Lynne McMahon In her bedroom, she set a convex mirror on a stand, so that when the visitor looked in expecting to see the familiar line of lip and brow, what appeared instead was the head up-ended— the mouth a talking wound— above the eyes, upside down, fluttering, like the eyes in the skull of a calf slung on the blood-hook— or a baby's lightning blink, dropped low in the bone cage about to be born Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse. Gem green paint restored from old scrapings. Here and there, a trifling, a lightening beyond the author's original intent, which was in the drawing room, positively spleenish. From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf's favorite color. The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain of Leonard's wireless next to the empty brass stalk with its single blossom: old black hat she wore like pharaoh gazing down the Nile-green Nile. That's her: the flat drainboard of a face set so fiercely against the previous owner's trompe 1'oeil beard and jug. The simpleton's request: a picture of her young— So the trees walk up burning, the birds speak Latin for the dull-witted, drenched palette the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond where their handfuls of ash drifted down and over the great mown meadow next door where the Rodmell August Fair is on. My daughter astride a steam engine, bored as any child with the past. Later makes an X (her favorite letter) with two sticks held up to the window of the great writer's garden study. But the mirror standing in the air a glass knot tying and retying itself would repolarize, and she, drawing near, reverse herself. A woman's rapt beautiful face drawn downward by gravity, sorrow, lit upward by the flame of age— could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic! Across the green from the bedroom window she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters— "and that became The Waves." The ladies sip and look. Vanessa, pregnant, laughing, crosses the garden. Two women walk among the hollyhocks with shears. The hedge dented by one's fluttering hands. Inside her sister's body: fluttering hands. Annie's white sweater catches on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms, unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic. The wind, up from the South Downs, blew the two women across the garden, their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters. One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl. Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall. She sat at this table eating mutton and bread. He was talking about the socialist initiative and she turned away: someone was knocking at the window. It was the French photographer we surprised on our way out, shooting the forbidden interior through the dark glass.

To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal— Ease me, a little ease, my song! By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees’ crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape.

For Bernadette Mayer Just one more vintage movie, Batwings tonight at the Bal Masqué — Another creature stuffed By distinguished pedigree. I get a lot of madcap ideas about sentience, How knowing has you put down in the book Forbidden speech recognition — Else why make such a face? And now it’s luck no longer mouth that moves When fastidious rummage whispers To divulge a surplus A clue if not the key. Prospect my question laps up for good — I lean to it. Knowing you, First-person dwindle. Tweet-tweet. Prick.

cheerful stoic epic cozy corporate convalescence hollow gold-brick rhetoric almighty and sleek

“If you work a body of water and a body of woman you can take fish out of one and children out of the other for the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good, both kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield, but the hard work and the miseries are killing; it is a good life if life is good. If not, not. You are out in the world and in in the world, having it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living combined, although you have to think about the weathers and the hard work and the miseries are what I said. It runs on like water, quickly, under the boat, then slowly like the sand dunes under the house. You survive by yourself by the one fish for a while and then by the other afterward when you run out. You run out a hooky life baited with good times, and whether the catch is caught or not is a question for those who go fishing for men or among them for things.”

Some years ago a procession of men calling themselves the sky-clad came to this district to build a hospital for birds that had been damaged by the rains. The landholders here my grandfather among them decided against it— it not being our way to intervene with monsoons which is why to this day the birds here grow so damaged & wise, or so our tutor said gravely before stepping out into the sun- washed coriander patch to watch droplets work down stems one by one, small storms suspended, while over the rooftiles came breakers of mist making our whole house to him drift back like the high prow of the viceroy’s steamship he watched sail off with his youth. Inside I still could not find the main verb the chariot wheel performed. I thought it was silver. It bore the king with 100 heads across a battlefield red with his wounded up to the end of the beginner’s workbook then blue-skinned Rama bent his bow then his raider’s arrow met the axle & then I could not stop laughing as through the doorway my mother scolded the aphasic houseboy who peed into our green watertank (black putti, untouchable) arcing the thin golden stream & singing ooo-ee ooo-ee at our ruin.

Because this is a monsoon poem expect to find the words jasmine, palmyra, Kuruntokai, red; mangoes in reference to trees or breasts; paddy fields, peacocks, Kurinji flowers, flutes; lotus buds guarding love’s furtive routes. Expect to hear a lot about erotic consummation inferred by laburnum gyrations and bamboo syncopations. Listen to the racket of wide-mouthed frogs and bent- legged prawns going about their business of mating while rain falls and falls on tiled roofs and verandas, courtyards, pagodas. Because such a big part of you seeks to understand this kind of rain — so unlike your cold rain, austere rain, get-me-the-hell- out-of-here rain. Rain that can’t fathom how to liberate camphor from the vaults of the earth. Let me tell you how little is written of mud, how it sneaks up like a sleek-gilled vandal to catch hold of your ankles. Or about the restorative properties of mosquito blood, dappled and fried against the wires of a bug-zapping paddle. So much of monsoon is to do with being overcome — not from longing as you might think, but from the sky’s steady bludgeoning, until every leaf on every unremembered tree gleams in the abyss of postcoital bliss. Come. Now sip on your masala tea, put your lips to the sweet, spicy skin of it. There’s more to see — notice the dogs who’ve been fucking on the beach, locked in embrace like an elongated Anubis, the crabs scavenging the flesh of a dopey- eyed ponyfish, the entire delirious coast with its philtra of beach and saturnine clouds arched backwards in disbelief. And the mayflies who swarm in November with all their ephemeral grandeur to die in millions at the behest of light, the geckos stationed on living room walls, cramming fistfuls of wings in their maws. Notice how hardly anyone mentions the word death, even though the fridge leaks and the sheets have been damp for weeks. And in this helter-skelter multitude of gray-greenness, notice how even the rain begins to feel fatigued. The roads and sewers have nowhere to go, and like old-fashioned pursuers they wander and spill their babbling hearts to electrical poles and creatures with ears. And what happens later, you might ask, after we’ve moved to a place of shelter, when the cracks in the earth have reappeared? We dream of wet, of course, of being submerged in millet stalks, of webbed toes and stalled clocks and eels in the mouth of a heron. We forget how unforgivably those old poems led us to believe that men were mountains, that the beautiful could never remain heartbroken, that when the rains arrive we should be delighted to be taken in drowning, in devotion.

I can’t get my head around it. How did we devise a concept like just war:the slain of the Lord are dung upon the ground. I know there are distinctions it is important to make and I don’t expect perfection but the chicanery of subtle thought . . . if I pick it all apart will anything be left to sew back into sense? Cleverer minds are reconciled. Cultured, poised, the government official (Should I give him spectacles? Should they reflect the light?) pauses and replies: The President regrets . . . but consider the alternative … would you offer succour… and I can almost understand. I sleep with reason as my lover, wake beside a monster in my bed. I fumble beneath the mask, shape my lips to the prospect of a kill, feel your thigh against my rump, your fingers at my throat. Oh, Rakosi, I’m still strumming on my lyre. Is there really so much wrong with that? I’m embarrassed by the flimsiness of my resolve, the silliness of saints and monsters, conversations with a being who can’t plausibly exist, this mockery of flagellation: this is my defective heart, this my amputated foot, this the bandage from around my head. A monster dies in the middle of his trial, another denies the power of the court, two more evade arrest: in politic’s parlour game, each day annuls the last. 9/11, I say, and Afghanistan, Bali and Iraq, but I can’t fix a year to each event, what is, what well might be, are steam against a bathroom mirror: I see bits, an eye but not its double, the other ear, a chin that lacks a jawbone for support.

It’s possible I misconstrued you, laid too much emphasis on the uniqueness of a birth, failed to acknowledge circumstance could corrupt, sustain; I indulged myself in accusations against an absolute. I don’t believe what I then believed. You are not responsible for Leibniz or the Lisbon quake, for the twenty-six-eyed and sixty-arsed box jellyfish, that the cosmos is shaped like a soccer ball; or for the dosido of right and wrong around the garden bed. You are not the monster I thought you were, not by definition or necessity the one immutable. You are a creator caught in a creator’s net, in fact a creature. Every horror has its own pathology, the disease infects the flock. Prey present as predators, the malefactors replicate even as the angels experiment with cures. Each encounter pulls against reductive story, says I will not, I am just (an instant, an instance), and reference skews on maps not drawn to scale. I know saintliness exists. It’s all around me. My next door neighbours in their simple modesty, the lady down the street who is always helping someone older than herself. Even the slow judicial process conceives it natural to be better than we are. I’m trying to shoo the gloomy birds away but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost when I was drawn from the womb?