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Tired of his dark dominion ... —George Meredith It was something I’d overheard One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously Saying to a mutual friend, a woman Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me As being a city of the night ... ” Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant— Not simply because I love Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky, The whole mind of night that I know so well Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite, Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen To live when I grew tired of my ancient life As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness Was of the kind that consoles so many Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history Of falls ... No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of The She-Wolf—all the sequins above in sequence, The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians, A dark like the polished back of a mirror, The pool of the night scalloped and hanging Above me, the inverted reflection of a last, Odd Narcissus ... One night my friend Nico came by Close to three a.m. —As we drank a little wine, I could see The black of her pupils blown wide, The spread ripples of the opiate night ... And Nico Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look ... ,” And deep within the pupil of her left eye, Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging Lantern rocking with the waves, I could see, at the most remote end of the receding, Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway, At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil, A tiny, dangling crucifix— Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain ... Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid Kaleidoscope washing over her—the way any naked, Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly Love of sexual sincerity ... I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents, Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves; The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling ... Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere, Then forever ... Into the mind of the Roman night.

"They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard." I love that moment. And I love the moment when I climb into your warm you-smelling bed-dent after you've risen. And sunflowers, once a whole field and I almost crashed, the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation, I love you. Dividing words between syl- lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter- section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD of some guy with 15 different guitars in his shack with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy! Mexican animal crackers! But only to be identified by what you love is a malformation just as embryonic chickens grow very strange in zero gravity. I hate those experiments on animals, varnished bats, blinded rabbits, cows with windows in their flanks but obviously I'm fascinated. Perhaps it was my early exposure to Frankenstein. I love Frankenstein! Arrgh, he replies to everything, fire particularly sets him off, something the villagers quickly pick up. Fucking villagers. All their shouting's making conversation impossible and now there's grit in my lettuce which I hate but kinda like in clams as one bespeaks poor hygiene and the other the sea. I hate what we're doing to the sea, dragging huge chains across the bottom, bleaching reefs. Either you're a rubber/ gasoline salesman or like me, you'd like to duct tape the vice president's mouth to the exhaust pipe of an SUV and I hate feeling like that. I would rather concentrate on the rapidity of your ideograms, how only a biochemical or two keeps me from becoming the world's biggest lightning bug.

The loop of rusty cable incises its shadow on the stucco wall. My father smiles shyly and takes one of my cigarettes, holding it awkwardly at first, as if it were a dart, while the yard slowly swings across the wide sill of daylight. Then it is a young man’s quick hand that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall, his white shirt open at the throat, where the skin is weathered, and he chats and daydreams, something he never does. Smoking his cigarette, he is even younger than I am, a brother who begins to guess, amazed, that what he will do will turn out to be this. He recalls the house he had when I was born, leaning against it now after work, the pale stucco of memory, 1947. Baby bottles stand near the sink inside. The new wire of the telephone, dozing in a coil, waits for the first call. The years are smoke.

Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all, How well pleasant it were your liberty! Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall. But they that sometime liked my company: Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl. Lo what a proof in light adversity! But ye my birds, I swear by all your bells, Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.

Ever imagining the dire, the sudden the menace with no thought of the gradual, the lingering itch of whatever. That was my sister. A stomach ache had to be diagnosed. “Oh, come on, it’s no big deal.” “How do you know? You aren’t me.” At the doctor’s office she waited. He reached for his stethoscope, held it to her back and put it away in his pocket. Then, leaning across his desk, he asked importantly, “How long have you been eating your hair?” She couldn’t answer. After surgery they came into the recovery room where she had just wakened. “You are a lucky lady. We found nothing.” She had an incision and several visitors. Besides, she was so lucky (incisions heal) and not a little disgusted. “Me, eating my hair.”

Lucky day still spent wrestling the private problems and obsessions encountered first in your youth but played out now within the spectacle of public aging (tho, strangely, as you age you feel less & less seen by the young, a citizen active in frequencies of light waves increasingly invisible—not even boring to 15-year-olds). Of course, some problems you once had really have vanished—you can sense that as your daughter lays out the tactics crucial to "pre-gaming," her teen friends setting out to get toasted or stoned before house parties, parties at which they've been warned not to drug or drink— no longer a worry for you (except as relates, of course, to your daughter)—you can drink & drug somewhat "it would seem" to your heart's content. Not your style, you say? Not any longer? Still, the urge to lift or get lifted from self-conscious woes hasn't gone away totally, has it? Wanting to be free of your self has always been a mission big in your church—evangelically so! You got in a way (the wrong way) your wish— your skin certainly got looser on you—baggy, rounder, wrinkled—prescriptions for departure—the rigging's untuned, & no milk bath full of rose hips can compensate (so your friend likes to say), no fish oil omega-3 in gel capsules manufactured by entrepreneurial ex-hippies no wifely fruit smoothies or mod boots will cure jowls now or allow for glamour without the costume.

Be large with those small fears. The whole sky has fallen on you and all you can do about it is shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears. They dance a number now: consequence without sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot. Not so small after all, we micro to macro, swelling to the horror shows lifted from the sly ways of life. You, both scorched and shining in the terror of the equivocal moment, its box of cheeky logics rattling cold certainties out of bounds and into the plaits of a girl’s desirous ends. A little debauched, the flirt in a freckling, wondering spun to falling comes to this pert contract of a paradox: saying things because they will do no good, ringing change in frumpy mono-determination, fruity and fruitless. Exploded out of shelter, the tides come roaring in. Let in the hoarse Cassandras and the dull pain of the storyteller. You’ve needed those eyes all along. We thought them disconcerting at first, but it’s the only way. You live here now having exchanged etiquette for energy. Don’t be clever, don’t be shy! Participate today. Yesterday you say everything for their own sake, and soon enough, tomorrow, you learn a lot from them.

when i was 7, i hoped rocks would whisper the secret to being hard. fascinated by Keisha’s skin so soft, i seduced her into humping even though she was five years my senior and my babysitter—click of the light covers snatched away like a magic trick reveal i could hear Keisha wail one floor up through the radiator pipes—i was the victim. at 7, i decided i should’ve been born a boy, a he, a him. blamed my mama for her mistake. prayed for a penis and practiced peeing standing up until it came: aim, angle of lean, and straddle were crucial. toilet seat up, knees clamping the cool rim i let go of the golden flow feeling the warm wet trickle down my legs darkening my dungarees a new shade of blue. at 7, i was never afraid of putting things in my mouth: i chewed my fingernails till they bled, chewed pencils till the yellow paint flaked me a crusty mustache, chewed pen caps into odd sculptures, chewed pens until the inky cylinders leaked a Rorschach on my face kids pointing as i ran to the bathroom oooh a butterfly! no, a thundercloud … i wore my iron-on Bruce Lee sweatshirt till his face cracked and faded invisible. still, i felt invincible when i wore it kicking lunch tables with my shins. karate-chopping pencils in two. forever trying to impress the skirts with my awkward brand of goof. punching my arm to make lumps rise out of the bony sinew. at 7, i knew how to make a girl cry.

Lucretius grabbed my arm and led me to the spot where he went nuts. I watered little drums right away and entangled the Sava River with knitting needles. I putrefied a small soup, dismembered seven towels. There, He — The Terrible — burnt on the stake, squatted, too. My god, I beat him up his ass. Puff, puff, but no one had heard a thing. Now here, I’m flooded with flowers by cumin. Even Tarkovsky appears. Now I will suck you with my thumbs, mold you like clay with my horns, till he’d vaporize and see into what and where I’ve traveled to. Into honor. Into white birch trees. Into the pouch used for bread. I hung around the world a lot, frothily crushing the mountain range. With no avail, with no day’s pay, sticky are my laws. I protected an elephant as much as I could, stared at the back of the horse. Joshed the others now, too, tested spring mattresses. Kept gulping nirvana. Loosened feathery leaves, wrapped the emperor into a roll. To not let my senses perish, to gallop without a break.

An inch from the curse and pearled by the evening heat       I shake my polo neck and a cool draught buffs my chest. What rises is my animal aroma             the scent of blue-ribbon stock      the sort a starred chef would ladle from a zinc-bottomed pan    to soften and savor the hock he has sawn and roasted for the diners out front who sip at shots of pastis and gnaw around the pits of kalamata olives. My head sits in his fridge: stooping for herb butter, our eyes meet and he touches my cotton-cold face      just as once I stroked your cheek in a dream you suffered in a room above the river.