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The first commotion stirred him to offend, forgivably, with friendly leaps and clutching; but soon too urgent friendliness was wrought by a new wave of guests. At last I complained to that one man that it was indecent of him to tempt the beast so, pressing his tweed knee against the furry brisket. But he smiled, and spoke with a Rhinelandish accent: Milady, your youth, as mine did me, tends you now to the younger beliefs of men, their naive symbols: cloudy animal heads to represent witless rampages of glands. Egyptian Hershef, Seth, Ra—the romance of anonymity above the neck and smooth humanity below—were gods of early hankering and youthful conscience. See how the shaggy thing turns back his ears; the straining mouth and eyes’ protuberance leave me my steady vision and clear speech and mind. The aegipans, surely the centaurs are truer concepts of the dual beast and a maturer Hellas sculpted them: potentially ironic man above and hairy vitality below the waist. No one, Milady, no lover on earth does other than what I am doing now, methodically tempting the brute, till from the dim sheath an eager lick of flame darts forth.

I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made robust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.

90th and Third, NYC We almost missed him, although his face, As blunt as a busy Picasso, all shifting Planes, was wedged in a picture frame. We almost missed him, the way one can stop Seeing hunched-over bodies along the street Or a favorite picture above the sofa In the living room, so familiar it seems Invisible, until it has drifted askew Or been removed.  "If only he had something More contemporary," my companion offered. The man in the frame extended his crushed Paper coffee cup, fingers hugging its Greek Pillars and statues, white and blue. "Spare any change?" he asked.  I brought Forth a quarter.  His eyes, brilliant, said I am a masterpiece.  This is where I live.

His blue guitar is lacquered so brightly when he leans a certain way into his song I can see my head in my hands reflected. And when he leans back into the emotion of another chorus his guitar returns to blue: the blue of unboiled lobsters fading to a general Biro-lid blue and with a patina of fine tiger stripes the color of sky midway towards a springtime horizon. I’ve had a long time to consider this. The man with the blue guitar has a little tin for his plectrums, with a cartoon pelican on its lid, standing on top of the words “Pelican Throat Lozenges.” Between songs he tells me that he found it in the abandoned house from the song. Which song? My next song. It’s called “The Abandoned House.” The man with the blue guitar reads his lyrics from a special leather book where he has written all his lyrics. Sometimes he forgets the words and searches the page as he plays, his face scrunching as he sings new noises in their place. I prefer the noises.This song is called Halloween Moon this song is called Lovesick Bougainvillea this song is called Bourbon Canal this song is called St. Michael’s Boots My Cousin’s Old Coat The Wrestler’s Arm The Old Arm Wrestler Dead Man’s Stetson Panama Morning The Skulls of the Cathedral Lawn Shadow in the Gully in the Foothills of My Youth My Heart Is a Love Letter the Folds Are Worn Through.

Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. —Genesis. Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave To have dominion over sea and land; To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; To feel the passion of Eternity? Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf There is no shape more terrible than this— More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed— More filled with signs and portents for the soul— More fraught with danger to the universe. What gulfs between him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest that is also prophecy. O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb Terror shall reply to God After the silence of the centuries?

like the lost car that a river knows like the heat of an ointment in pinpoints of breathing like the unknown western in mountains of tar like a knot in each word for comfort like a horse on a face with four hooves like the knives that a heart squirms into like the feel that the last day pushes, that a fire paints red like the shower that a plain divides in snakes like a frozen torso pining for food like the ammunition that a pair of wings makes dry like a shirt that plants seeds under worn out skin like the clouds of mistakes, pouring through sleep like the walls that crack open like a wake in a spin like the exits of oceans that a salmon knows like the dust that is written with number like a trust full of beacons of light like the negative shade of a fungus like the promise that a lie gives out like the pulse of a trap like the rainbow that cuts off a hand like a psychic intent full of negative calls like salt for the season that covers the fields with jail like the round word that a star pisser pulls like the plains that a crossed out calendar day will mourn like the fate of the wrong side of talking like hills under snow that a letter revolves like the husky reflections of leeches that writhe like a sword in Toledo like the animals growing a vent in a cage like the sequence of nights dropping straw for a cipher like the trade in the fair full of cycles and ends like the cattle that heat all the drains with green grass like the nipples of outdoor intentions like a wing on the door that a glass makes arise like the underground fluid of digitized words like the ice in a cavern like a ride through the green light of dying like the yellowish herd of relational cards like the face that a wallet becomes like the wrong line of radios making a rule like the crust on the last day of hunger like the rodeo riding the real for a cut like the cells in the spread of the fall like an ape for the circle of color like reflections that turn on a wheel like the freezer of sweethearts like a change for the current that makes a return like the pause on the shore full of rattles like the oxygen tent making holes in a lung the face of friendly fire is knotted for a smile deleted for a smile that saves the executioner the face intended jail, by rocking through the holes that fear the clear blue family of dots the face resembles next to nothing in the network full of incremental touches that a string intends to limit by the light the face of arctic evolutions, a hunt that people came to read instead of mapping all the flights of sleep without a sound the face of terrible returns will fade outside the pouring crowd of animal relation in the mineral of wealth the face of providence is making shores for surfers in the foam of magnifying eyes that are the opposite of winter calm the face is never there in each intention that the worst reliance knows to ask for heat the face is after every opening that makes a number count for all of what is good like a robot that falls and makes good for a switch like the breasts of a mop that soaks blood like a magnifying glass for the sun like the picture of radar in space like a misery flood on the phone like electrical laughter that the pointed shake like enemies held in a double embrace like extinctions returning like a handshake of style for the heat like the flower that bottles a fly for a mouth like the still dunes of dust on a beautiful girl like the crack in an oven like a moon that gets brighter with age

Only to hoot, to speak flitting blade in the dark, mouth able to sound verb for thing, him chicken eat. Not know gallop but for sound, stud but for knotting haunches, tipping its body, arching its head toward dirt. Chewing hay under a ranch that, bean-juice skin tight as saddle leather, neck stiff as a coffee can—as lanterns go out, stud fed and tied to post—Mangled piles up some hay, rests his bones for the long day of pounding tent stakes. — — — Ringmaster swigs moonshine from jar, stomps camp, looking for LuLu’s pudgy round face. Mangled wakes, remembers the switching, musky soil, the stud’s hooves sucking mud, LuLu moaning in the night. Stock of spade, thud of stakes drove in the dirt; the performers sagging in their bones, their breath spent breaking in frost-thick dawn, the trees swaying barer as the day wears on, wind carrying the red and yellow leaves across the fields. After the act, LuLu writes letters for Mangled, that he trots stud into the show, bullwhip in one hand, bridle the other. — — — She did not write about a scar that runs down his cheek, or the clown he stabbed near Tulsa. LuLu writes about his new square-toed boots and the creased-up Levi’s he bought at a mercantile in Lawrence, Kansas. She writes about his haircuts, how if he could, he would write letters himself, but signed with his throwing hand. Sometimes she reads him Westerns and Sgt. Rock comic books—she lies about what the stories say—that his skillet face ain’t so flat. — — — Him horse ride, LuLu throw with knife, fire cook meat. Him audience laugh make, headdress wear. Him horse smell snout, hooves scrape rock out, horse-apple chew hand. — — — Sundays LuLu and Mangled go to the Baptist church before the start of the show. They sing hymns, sometimes they walk down to the river with the congregation and watch the preacher dunk the pudgy babies into the bright-sparked current, Mangled thinks about the creek-bed soil, LuLu in her Sunday dress, her face painted blush, lips bright, glossy, shined for the show.

First, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote his paper on dwarf stars—“What happens to a massive star that burns out?” he asked. His calculations suggested that instead of collapsing it would contract indefinitely, under the force of its own gravity. The bright star would disappear but it would still be there, where there had been brilliance there would be a blank. Soon after, workers built Oak Ridge, the accumulation of Cemesto hutments not placed on any map. They built a church, a school, a bowling alley. From all over, families drove through the muddy ruts. The ground swelled about the ruts like flesh stitched by sutures. My father, a child, watched the loads on the tops of their cars tip. Gates let everyone in and out with a pass. Forbidden to tell anyone they were there, my father’s family moved in, quietly, behind the chain-link fence. Niels Bohr said, “This bomb might be our great hope.” My father watched his parents eat breakfast: his father opened his newspaper across the plate of bacon and eggs, his mother smoked Camel straights, the ash from her cigarette cometing across the back of the obituaries. They spoke little. Increasingly the mother drank Wild Turkey with her women friends from the bowling league. Generators from the y -12 plant droned their ambition. There were no birds. General Leslie Groves marched the boardwalks, yelled, his boots pressed the slates and the mud bubbled up like viscera. My father watched his father enter the plant. My shy father went to the library, which was a trailer with a circus tent painted on the side. There he read the definition of “uranium” which was worn to a blur. My father read one Hardy Boys mystery after another. It was August 1945. The librarian smiled sympathetically at the 12-year-old boy. “Time to go home,” the librarian said. They named the bomb Little Boy. It weighed 9,700 pounds. It was the size of a go-kart. On the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, “This is the greatest thing in history.” That evening, my father’s parents mentioned Japanese cities. Everyone was quiet. It was the quiet of the exhausted and the innocent. The quietness inside my father was building and would come to define him. I was wrong to judge it. Speak, Father, and I will listen. And if you do not wish to speak, then I will listen to that.

defunct list of common names proxy for the bearer nor’wester buffets gear reach into our canisters “Cassirer” drawn and sewn into my lapels assembly of illegal men peril will not know two Roman slaves rain the rage passes through our teeth into interior pneumatic doors my evening of moniker stamped upon boxes of envelopes blank ledger for you “Macquin” with tin and amber stockpiled you prince

Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body master snapping masts in half, absent winds’ workmanship: what window will I look you through, what brook, stream creaking past fretwork weeds, clouds in the context of cold? Lord knot to be untied, skiff hard alee ill winds: a hiss of wish and cinders and I am warm, crossing dazed oceans by hand to sow the doubtful sea with drought. Mine of rain and seize and sluice, you change your mind again, a rage for green waves’ open vowels, undrinkable. No talking to the weeds, no talking with the snow.