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As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour before the house had woken to make sure that everything was in order with The Lie, his drip changed and his shackles all secure. I was by then so practiced in this chore I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye. Such, I liked to think, was our rapport. I was at full stretch to test some ligature when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore his gag away; though as he made no cry, I kept on with my checking as before.

Some bloodied sea-bird’s hovering decay Assails us where we lie, and lie To make that symbol go away, To mock the true north of the eye. But lie to me, lie next to me; The world is an infirmity. Too much of sun’s been said, too much Of sea, and of the lover’s touch, Whole volumes that old men debauch. But we, at the sea’s edge curled, Hurl back their bloody world. Lie to me, like next to me, For there is nothing here to see But the mirrors of ourselves, the day, Clear with the odors of the sea. Lie to me. And lie to me.

Half the women are asleep on the floor on pieces of cardboard. One is face down under a blanket with her feet and ankle bracelet showing. Her spear leans against the wall by her head where she can reach it. The woman who sits on a chair won’t speak because this is not her dress. An old woman sings an Italian song in English and says she wants her name in lights: Faye Runaway. Tells about her grown children. One asks for any kind of medicine. One says she has a rock that means honor and a piece of fur. One woman’s feet are wrapped in rags. One keeps talking about how fat she is so nobody will know she’s pregnant. They lie about getting letters. One lies about a beautiful dead man. One lies about Denver. Outside it’s Thirtieth Street and hot and no sun.

I made a posy, while the day ran by: “Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band.” But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away, And withered in my hand. My hand was next to them, and then my heart; I took, without more thinking, in good part Time’s gentle admonition; Who did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey, Making my mind to smell my fatal day, Yet, sug’ring the suspicion. Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent, Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament, And after death for cures. I follow straight without complaints or grief, Since, if my scent be good, I care not if It be as short as yours.

Animula, vagula, blandula. Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; And when, or how, or where we met, I own to me’s a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled, Where’er they lay these limbs, this head, No clod so valueless shall be, As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, And in this strange divorce, Ah tell where I must seek this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame, From whence thy essence came, Dost thou thy flight pursue, when freed From matter’s base encumbering weed? Or dost thou, hid from sight, Wait, like some spell-bound knight, Through blank oblivious years th’ appointed hour, To break thy trance and reassume thy power? Yet canst thou without thought or feeling be? O say what art thou, when no more thou ’rt thee? Life! we’ve been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; ’Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps ’t will cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good morning.

Life, like a marble block, is given to all, A blank, inchoate mass of years and days, Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays Some shape of strength or symmetry to call; One shatters it in bits to mend a wall; One in a craftier hand the chisel lays, And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze, Carves it apace in toys fantastical. But least is he who, with enchanted eyes Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be, Muses which god he shall immortalize In the proud Parian’s perpetuity, Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies That the night cometh wherein none shall see.

That the stars are adamant everyone understands— but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave or peace below every gray stone. If happiness never comes, what is a life? A lily withers in the sand and if its nature has failed? The tide washes the beach at night. What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web? What does a dayfly make of its hours? (Two wings creased over a hollow body.) Black will never turn to white— yet the perfume of our struggle lingers as each morning fresh flowers spring up from hell. The day will come when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse and all goes still— when nothing remains but the dayfly folded in a leaf. But no one knows it.

1 He got taken quick. Then he hung around. And anyway, he never really wanted to be anywhere he was—so why not? Then from out there and for years the prodigal wrote back to them—indolent letters, lying about jobs, a wife he found, kids they had. Things he used to hear people talking about. He never even bothered to make it up. Or tried to keep his stories straight. His wife? A harem of hair colors. Kids fizzed up like bugs, then fizzled out. Well, that’s the way his life was, in pieces. Sometimes his head flashed on something fat and beautiful. He watched it shoot by. Then he listened for the crash. Mostly, he was in the dark, drifting. And, within limits, less of a chump. He walked away from a lot of stuff. There were some things he did. This and that. Lucky, real dirty work never came looking. Once he dumped a woman. Later she dumped him back. That’s how the game was played out there, where he was. So that was that. Well, just say he was down on his luck. Or starting now to get it together. Or he was taking things one day at a time. Sure, one day at a time—for years on end. One more also-ran playing out the string. Or, staring straight ahead, out of the blue he’d tell whoever was drinking alongside him, Don’t look back, champ, your crap could be gaining. To which—years later—he took to adding, And don’t look up—you could be overtaking the next guy’s you-know-what . . . (Solo guffaws.) So, what did they think of him, out there? Joke. Embarrassment. Eyesore. Take your pick. But how could it matter what anyone said in that rasping, hissing, clanging tongue of theirs? To tell the truth, since he’d first come to their country he hadn’t heard a thing that stuck to his bones. Then every once in a while he sat down and wrote. 2 His words returned—in another’s hand: everyday things people put in their letters, and howlers only a mother would believe, and reassuring fluff about the weather, as if sun were sun, and his rain, like theirs, could fill the cistern and make green things grow. And here they were, grinning back at him, every pitiful, dumb phrase he wrote, copied over like a holy scripture in his mother’s homespun penmanship that made his snarled, uncontrollable scrawl round and plan and easy to read. Her ABCs were good enough to eat —bits of dough she’d squeezed, patted, baked slowly in the little oven of her hands and strung into necklaces of script. But if he read those letters at all, his eyes scribbled some glare before he fed the page, balled up, to the dark, muttering demon of trash chained in the corner, when, drunk or stoned, he plummeted straight down —with the bulb he never extinguished burning above his swollen, already aging face. 3 And then. And then. And then. And then no letter came back. And soon no letter went forward. Why listen now to people talking? The demon settled into self-consumption. And everything was still. Dust silted over the phantom children he’d never wanted anyhow; at the end of its rainbow his wife’s hair came to rest on red—forever; their house faded in the manuscripts. Though old now, he was still a son —though no one’s son. A promise, then, without witnesses anywhere to say if the promise had been kept or not kept. But didn’t he, having no lands, no house, no wife, no child, no works, didn’t he know what he had done with his heritage? Then let their silence mute the judgment, hush the accusation against him! And now this little corner where he sat need be no worse than any other little corner of the universe. 4 And then one day a witness came forward —from an old pair of pants, from the pocket. An old piece of paper. Wrinkled. Worn. Smudged with the dregs of big numbers. And under their blur, in palest blue —blue of the veins of a vanished wrist— his mother’s hand at its homework was being true to the words it found. But there, between the words, in the smeared void he saw his sentence spelled out. Of his waste life: pain. Of falsity: pain. It was a lash. A lifeline.His lifeline —flung out to him, laid on his hands,in his hand. With a pencil stub he traced the faint line of her letters across the yellowed page. As faithfully as she, as patiently —as if he need never reach their end and the words might now become his life—he wrote. He wrote the date. He wrote, “Dear Son.” He wrote, “We’re glad the children all are well again and getting A’s.” He wrote, “We’re also happy that you like your job . . .” He, too, was happy. He, too, was glad. He wrote.

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits, This average consumer of the middle class, Consumed in the course of his average life span Just under half a million cigarettes, Four thousand fifths of gin and about A quarter as much vermouth; he drank Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee, And counting his parents’ share it cost Something like half a million dollars To put him through life. How many beasts Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes Cannot be certainly said. But anyhow, It is in this way that a man travels through time, Leaving behind him a lengthening trail Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes, Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers. Given the energy and security thus achieved, He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course, The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting, And he worked for the money which was to pay For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera, But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded Steadily from the front of his face as he Advanced into the silence and made it verbal. Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime Would barely suffice for their repetition; If you merely printed all his commas the result Would be a very large volume, and the number of times He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,” Would stagger the imagination. There were also Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning “It seems to me” or “As I always say.” Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding Steadily out of the front of his face, the words Borne along on the breath which is his spirit Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

Will haul this gelatinous body, will lash forward this non-form, will push this organism of gas through the gray regions. A sour wind tears through the thin white hair. A wind of vinegar and henbane tears in the rustling, discarded bird-shells that were abandoned empty and fragile when the throbbing bird-boils moved on toward so-called life. Now I see the cunning needle-trees sling these clumps of heavy pouch-flesh back and forth between them: small feather-birds “fly” above my heads. I haul myself, I haul myself, I haul my dragging structure along the river furrow’s muddy, sloppily overlapping slopes. I am so bitter, so wet, so the mouth smears the inside with the sweetness of the chewed-up blood-chisel. Out of this blood I am going to suck my nourishment for some time. I haul, I urge my dissolved substance, slowly forward across the metal of calm stones, the hovering thread-glue’s suction toward a point in the distant middle of the perspective. Where the river’s banks will meet and like the thinnest needle of silver of liquid will drill its dark tunnel-water straight into the heart of the dying image, this moistly broken-up surface of paper to which we cling. I haul I haul I touch myself, touch the skin-rind with chafed-up viscous fingers. Little mermaid from ocean foam molded–I haul my long veils, layers of elastic cartilage, of slippery, shimmering membranes, chlorophyll. The gills shudder and glow deep down in this chasm of tissue–constantly rustling, squeaking, gasping for air. This whirling, howling, desperate lack of oxygen; the scream–if it had had enough oxygen to scream and a mouth with which to scream–the scream to swallow the entire lung full of clear wind. Lizards play, glitter green, blue, and red between the skin membranes of the body dress. Where does this mass end? I search inward through strata to find the core of my plasma wet from juices, to find the core of body-flesh despite the outer, surrounding flesh, the naked body’s stable surface, a kind of human here inside the bluing, plant-becoming. Something to hold on to behind the spread of the sickness of mud, fermentation. But there is nothing to grasp beneath this mantle of slippery webbed skin, burst through by a pounding net of veins. I now lick my tongue against the outer claws of the fingers to tear life into the ions, to make sores bitter in the tongue’s blue ventricles. A kind of pain therefore radiates against the inner glands, a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system’s last chance to communicate with the dying I. The mists smart, shimmer, the lumps of blue cobalt from the mustard gas corrode through the otherwise red shroud-clouds that drag their bellies against the river’s surface. In one of the skin-folds between the pockets of the genital dress, lizards gather in heaps of glimmering scales. But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me. That is why I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths. I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.