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Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation, before me appeared Benjamin Franklin, who magnetized his French paramours at dinner parties as an amusing diversion from his most serious studies of electricity and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp and clap for the blue spark between them. I believe in an honest and forthright manner, a democracy of plain speech, so I have to find a way to explain I don’t care to have sex anymore. Once I was a high school teacher and there was a boy who everyday came in late, who only came to school at all to sell drugs out of his backpack, upon which he laid his head like a pillow and closed his eyes while I pointed at a chart diagramming the anatomy of a sparrow. The vice principal was watching and taking notes as I taught this class, so I slid the bag from under his cheek, as if not to wake him, wrapped his fingers around a pen. I was trying to be a gentle mother and also trying to show I was in control of an unstable situation. The boy, also trying to be in control of himself, walked so slow to my desk and we stood to watch him push everything—binders, piles of ungraded papers, a beaker of red pens to the floor. He was so calm.How do you like it when I touch your things. I do not like it. I live in a house with many blue mason jars, each containing a feather collection or starfish collection or vertebrae collection, and also there is a fully articulated fetal alligator skeleton. Each window is pressed by the design of a sweet-gum branch, all the little orange and red stars of its leaves, you can’t see the perfect geometry this close, just haphazard parabolas, but beneath the foundation the roots mirror the branching. I have a chart of this to pull down. The view is flat and so quiet on the inside. Have I been forthright yet? What I want to know is what happens if I decide to never have sex again? Or more precisely, can I decide to not have sex again and still be kind? And be a joy to others? I should mention I am a wife. I should mention I was told my sole purpose is to be joy to others. The sidewalks outside are very full of people and when I look at them I feel hopeless. Benjamin Franklin was so jolly with his kite and his key and his scandalous electricity. He was so in love with women and drink and democracy. Before I was this way, I was not a house, I was just a jar and what I wanted was to be broken. A cool trick you can do that I once showed a class is crank a wheel covered in felt against another felt wheel. Static bristles and sparks and makes your hair stand on end . But hook it to a Leyden jar and the electricity fills up in there, invisible as air. Becomes a glass battery, until you too much the thing, then wow! broken glass everywhere. I remember wanting that. Do I have to always want that? My house is blue and quiet. I can hardly hear the squirrel in my sweet-gum tree dancing like a sunbeam to sing his riddles: “A house full, a hole full, but you cannot gather a bowl full.” The air of everywhere is wet with electric fluid, you can’t even tell, but pop, whiz, everywhere. “In this field,” Ben says, “the soul has room enough to expand, to display all of her extravagances.” The sweet gum has 10,000 sticky, spiky seed balls. They start green but grow black and fall for want of a barren season. They look like sea urchins. I call them tree urchins and think it’s a funny joke. I don’t tell it to anyone, as I am tired of being told what is not. Such a secret, I know, is an extravagance, and I like best how it’s an extravagance so small you must keep it in a jar with others of its kind for it to ever mean anything at all.

(After Kipling) When the traveller in the pasture meets the he-bull in his pride, He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside; But the milch cow, thus accosted, pins the traveller to the rail -- For the female of the species is deadlier than the male. When Nag, the raging stallion, meets a careless man on foot, He will sometimes not destroy him, even if the man don’t shoot; But the mare, if he should meet one, makes the bravest cowboy pale -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. When our first colonial settlers met the Hurons and Choctaws, They were burned and scalped and slaughtered by the fury-breathing squaws; ‘Twas the women, not the warriors, who in war-paint took the trail -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say As to women, lest in speaking he should give himself away; But when he meets a woman -- see him tremble and turn pale -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male Lay your money on the hen-fight! On the dog-fight fought by shes! On the gory Ladies Prize-fight -- there are none so fierce as these! See small girls each other pounding, while their peaceful brothers wail -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. So in history they tell us how all China shrieked and ran Before the wholesale slaughter dealt by Mrs. Genghis Khan. And Attila, the Scourge of God, who made all Europe quail, Was a female of the species and more deadly than the male. Red war with all its million dead is due to female rage, The names of women murderers monopolize the page, The pranks of a Napoleon are nothing to the tale Of destruction wrought by females, far more deadly than the male. In the baleful female infant this ferocity we spy, It glares in bloodshot fury from the maiden’s dewy eye, But the really deadly female, when you see her at her best, Has two babies at her petticoat and a suckling at her breast. Yet hold! there is Another! A monster even worse! The Terror of Humanity! Creation’s direst curse! Before whom men in thousands must tremble, shrink and fail -- A sanguinary Grandma -- more deadly than the male!

Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think? Does Rhea think?

I don't want to be alive anymore. I don't want to be alive enough to want that. One is not meant to turn on one's creator with ferocity expendable in only one way. Or is that exactly how one is meant to turn to burn beyond the love that from beyond being has come to us: Christ's ever unhearable and thus always too bearable scream. In love and dread we learn to listen for beloved dread coming upon us like a whiplash rain we watch through a window. In pain we learn pain. Sometimes amid the rancid moonlight and mindlice of my insomnia there gleams a scalpel blade so clean with meaning so shaped and sharpened to interstellar blue that drawing it —in season due — across my own throat there comes not blood but an ancient answering starlight. Once upon a time in a pleasingly modern slaughterhospice with a view of sky-contempted skyscrapers and Lake Michigan's immaculate sewage my inner skin was skinned mouth to bowels, my soul —deadword, die to find it. For self-pity there must remain a self. Ah, but even shitting one's self one still finds one's self hastening to hide it all from the kind Ukranian nearly bearded night nurse. Fentanyl patches patching my stalactite thighs my diaphanous shoulders the very air eating me like a late leaf that once I would have flourished for a perishable lover or lonelied like some catpiss poignancy into a poem. Dead brain, living will, little pills entangling pain with adoration of it, morphine machine whose little beep (heavenly bell) conjures me to the suddenly more tolerable hallways of hell . . . Lovely Leila, so unsurgically curved, disclosing as she leans to clean my lines a bit of icelace undergarment like the very last trace of a glacier. The brain the brain the brain flickering electrically in and out, in, out— not the mind in which I love my wife whose tightwound nightmind conjures Christ in diapers, for instance, filthy infant, or later, in a mist of adolescent bad weather, bored of wood, dogdead Judea, squawk-box God, some restless absurdity of earth, she says, through which the rest of heaven can come. Once upon a time I walked through the chemical glamour of a night refinery sparking dangerously without and within for beside me under her underclothes undulated an incarnation of creation's finest failure: moonskin to make a young man wince coupled with stifling innocence. Still, we managed. And over the wrought-iron railing of the country club to which neither of us could possibly belong, in the moonskinned pool that seemed both to embody and imbibe her, we improved. And later, out on a green (to be sixteen!) when the starshower I thought was mine was mining me for sweat, muscle, memory to make its own death shine unceasingly inside of me, even unto hell, we excelled. Can it be that her last name was really Key? So much life in this poem so much salvageable and saving love but it is I fear I swear I tear open what heart I have left to keep it from being and beating and bearing down upon me • What rest in faith wrested from grief What truce with truth in bowing down not to the ground of being but simply to the ground Affliction flickers distant now like a structure on fire Love's reprieve moves through me like a breeze But antlike existence crawls all over me Lord and I cry out if you call this vise quiet a cry this riot of needs and genes an I Feelingly among the bones and nerves of sounds I make my scathing way Failingly in church or in the parked car before work I try to pray What might it mean to surrender to the wonder nothing means Not to end with a little flourish of earth Not to end • Love is the living heart of dread Love I love you unto the very edge of being Dead • Something in us suffering touches, teaches first to find little coves in our loves: blank nothings wherein we are what we always were — blank nothings — but changed or rearranged as atoms in the random kingdom of things: hand, we say, or eye, or hair, as if to make ourselves — to stake ourselves — truly there Knowing now not to move in time we are moved by tiger-striped tails bloodfine fins some natureless cerulean one would say thinking oneself out of nature Something in us, suffering, touches, torches, so we may saunter seeingly through an altogether other element, as once in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago I floated    a moment with my love and the two new lives borne from us who loved best the eensy green almost unfish more like the stars when you close your eyes and whirl open to the whirling grains so freed from things you fall down laughing at the havoc For me for a long time not the minnows mattered but the pattern after: miraculous I didn't think to think: all those mite-eyes and animate instants answering at once to my need and to nothing as if my very nerves worked in finally a saving sense Something in us touches suffering touching us like the constellations of kinetic quiet that bound us beyond us as right to the wall the girls pressed their still-forming faces through which the wild new schools flew almost too green too blue to stand And I held your hand.

For a long time the Spanish from Spain Who came here became slightly insane In a special way and just a little. You can try this yourself. Walk farther than you can into the forest in New York So it’s a toss-up whether or not you know the way back. For you there’s going to be a smidge of confusion, a glow of fear That smells like burning rye toast, And the illusion that you are the only person alive On the earth. You will probably have the second illusion That no one likes you, which doesn’t jibe with the first illusion Of no other people. This was about the extent of it, for the Spanish, They felt all that just a few hours a week, but every week at home, Living in, say, small San Francisco, Which made thinking slow and hard at these times, But if you try this yourself in the deep woods You’ll see you can still think enough And you’ll remember your way back to the loving arms Of your wife, husband, or mother, in Rochester. (Yes, You could try it as a child, but please don’t.) The Spanish had a purpose to walk east inland to the Sierras, the gold. The Indians said there were five hills and two mountains Entirely of gold and you had to wear ferns dangling before your eyes Like sunglasses when you got near the mountains. The hills, they said, were not so bright. The Spanish thought this was bullshit But were having trouble with the coast (where They truly believed the gold was) which was that boats Could not travel north and south even as fast as people walking Because the Pacific coast was opposing currents (you made Half a mile an hour in the water with biggest sail). An expedition of thirty Spaniards from Spain (living In small San Francisco) walked east inland toward what’s now Mariposa. It means butterfly. In that place, the shivering feathery Insects rose from the ground and blacked out the sun. The sky had no room for more butterflies so the leftovers attached to the trees, Making the trees appear like ragged trees. Look up the other way, the explorers said to each other, but That way, when they did, was no blue sky but darkness of orange insects That did not fly in clouds but were the sky, So any forward motion by the thirty men seemed, not seemed Did make the sky covered each inch With the thin trembling insects, brown or green or orange, But as a whole a black ceiling with little light between them and the men, Who thought slow and hard but did think, and so returned To small San Francisco where no one believed them but understood The illusion because when they asked the thirty men What such an encounter with butterflies felt like, the men described Feeling the way all the colonists and explorers and priests and women Felt a few hours each week at home— Fear making the olfactory illusion of burning rye toast hand In hand with the illusion of being the only one And the simultaneous but contradictory illusion That no one likes you. How could everybody hate you If there was no everybody? Or even anybody. Well there was a way to fix this And we use it now around here (I Mean in New York and California and Nevada and Hawaii, Not just in my house) which is to wrap our loving arms Around each other. It works very well And I know you’ve tried it. The Spanish from Spain brought virtuous women Over for that purpose only (you don’t think the virtuous babes looked For gold, did you?) and it worked very well Except the women were worse, I mean much worse, Not just specially a little insane and needed The loving arms much more than the men. They needed longer sessions and more sessions. What’s more, if the expedition of thirty butterfly Illusionists had gone six miles further, They would have seen silver sticking out of the ground Like glass after a four-car accident on a street in Rochester. But for many decades the promise of the waiting loving arms, Versus the unacceptable illusion of the butterflies Forming the entire black sky, kept them near the coasts. When you put down this book, you could decide For yourself if it is true that wrapping loving arms around Somebody is as temporarily powerful as I’ve made it Out to be or is possibly permanently powerful or is an illusion Like the massed feathery insects which were absolute.

my father said, again and again, shaking his head in disbelief at any ostentation; the neighbor's gold- plated knocker (we still banged fists) or my own lust to own the autographed edition or the waxed bronze bust. It is not only the idea—which should hold all of the pleasure— but the poet's pencil marks on paper which we treasure above the memorized poem. And so I fan my flushed face, signaling the fast-talking auctioneer, who has traced the provenance, and picks up the pace, multiplying offers. And who now does my father's bidding? Heaven's coffers, perhaps, are for the destitute; but why did he have to die to escape the shitty, crime-ridden, never-t0-be-gentrified neighborhood of both our births? The cost of living, he would argue, is not the worth of being alive. But still he checked each lottery ticket which littered the empty lot next door, praised their silver latex glitter, praying to the beautiful unscratched, like little gods. Money talks, he taught me. But nobody beats the odds.

More sky please push open the apartment shutters crowbar the paint factory’s broken window frames rip tar paper from the caving roof push it back crack it open blast an airshaft through the neighboring buildings snap it back expose the bird-ridden drafts the wren’s been busy here mornings year-round churr and chip golden open-throat yodel smack in the sleep cycle soldered to feeder suet in ivy like titmouse chickadee refusing to shift it back Carolina Canada climate haywire more sky please rik tik tik break open more light all the way past oil tank farms creosote docks the Kill Van Kull slide by kingfisher flap past cormorant incongruous flights parallel and merging plunge into slap out of tidal pools the Fresh Kills beak full of killifish and silversides crayfish and krill tarp past the salt grass and bridges fly Pulaski Skyway Bayonne’s silver buildings blank tower blocks sky wide as the river mouth more sky more please push it back past tankers and tugboats the last hulking cruise ship lasers fired across a spinning disco ball wobble bass and echo chamber dancing on deck past clanging buoys waveless channels to deepest basin all things even terns drop away sea and sky opened wide and empty

(1942) To Denis Devlin I Again the native hour lets down the locks Uncombed and black, but gray the bobbing beard; Ten years ago His eyes, fierce shuttlecocks, Pierced the close net of what I failed: I feared The belly-cold, the grave-clout, that betrayed Me dithering in the drift of cordial seas; Ten years are time enough to be dismayed By mummy Christ, head crammed between his knees. Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke— Remove it and there’s not a ghost to fear This crucial day, whose decapitate joke Languidly winds into the inner ear. II The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go, Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying; Get up and once again politely lying Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow. How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago! Then hang this picture for a calendar, As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly For the cold martial progress of your star, With thoughts of commerce and society, Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing, The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring. III Give me this day a faith not personal As follows: The American people fully armed With assurance policies, righteous and harmed, Battle the world of which they’re not at all. That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall, His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed: “You may be President”), was not alarmed Nor even left uneasy by his fall. Nobody said that he could be a plumber, Carpenter, clerk, bus-driver, bombardier; Let little boys go into violent slumber, Aegean squall and squalor where their fear Is of an enemy in remote oceans Unstalked by Christ: these are the better notions. IV Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend, Your ghosts are Plato’s Christians in the cave. Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave Gives back the cheated and light dividend So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you’ll spend Flesh for reality inside a stone Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone, Dead or still living, will not break or bend. Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister And put off like a dog that’s had his day, You will be Plato’s kept philosopher, Albino man bleached from the mortal clay, Mild-mannered, gifted in your master’s ease While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.

The first lily of June opens its red mouth. All over the sand road where we walk multiflora rose climbs trees cascading white or pink blossoms, simple, intense the scene drifting like colored mist. The arrowhead is spreading its creamy clumps of flower and the blackberries are blooming in the thickets. Season of joy for the bee. The green will never again be so green, so purely and lushly new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads into the wind. Rich fresh wine of June, we stagger into you smeared with pollen, overcome as the turtle laying her eggs in roadside sand.

I’ve stopped asking: ¿Why? I’ve let a man whistle from the table for more beer, & brought it to him with a smile. I’ve slapped a man & ran while he laughed — atrevida. I’ve had a miscarriage. I’ve let a man kiss me after an abortion & comforted his hot tears. I’ve done these things, while other girls work in maquilas piecing together Dell computer boards, while other girls work in brothels, & cake foundation across their bruised arms, while other girls ride the bus home alone at night, every night, while other girls are found wearing clothes that don’t belong to them, or no clothes at all. I’ve done all of this while other girls are found with puta written in blood across their broken bellies. My mother used to cover my eyes when we’d walk by girls working the corner, & say: See how lucky you are, not to have to work like they do? I have been muy puta, have been called puta. Yes, I’d say,very lucky.