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For Rebecca You are the kind of  person who buys exotic fruits leaves them out on the counter until they rot You always mean to eat them       sometimes you rearrange them rousing over the bowl a cloud of tiny flies & How do they balance       the parrot who chews a walnut sideways       holding it up in his right foot the owl perched on a just-lit lamppost scratching behind its ear       like a big dog & Your pencil eraser wears down long before the point for every word you write       you rub out two & Where the slice of  toast rested       the plate is still warm a film of fog       little points of dew & Love is like velocity       we feel the speeding up and the slowing down       otherwise not at all the more steady       the more it feels like going nowhere my love I want to go nowhere with you & I cannot bring myself  to toss the cup of cold coffee you set down by the door on your way to the taxi all day I have sipped it       each time forgetting your two tablets of fake sugar       too sweet & Running down the street dodging between raindrops plump as cherries & The ground was feathered with wild strawberries I picked seven       as many as I could bear I ate two       I saved the rest for you       here hold out your hand       take them       taste how sweet & Please hold me the forgotten way the wall pleads spray-paint face and voice of a damned poet the darling damned poets       save them from themselves maybe it is us they need saving from

And whenever they couldn’t speak they looked at each other. How long should I look at the world before I go home? It’s a moody life like Debussy on a weekend and all the appointments and money and drinks they do go. So with our beautiful coats we went back to that mess and what happened? Someone found what they wanted by night, by mistake. In the car it felt like summer and we lived with no sun    . . .    just metals and leather. A lot of   Mondays. A lot of you in the grass I go to and touch. Oh and Los Angeles for its slow light. Rome for when it gets late. You. Not you, but you who are reading   . . . what won’t you ask for and want? Of course I remember it differently because I was broke and it feels like I’m broke still. The cabs lined up but no one took him where he wanted to go. Those months shared a face and the face of a dog on a street was the only thing that really saw you (for a long time). Then I heard you were traveling, I heard you were somewhere, I heard you were nowhere anyone looked for at all. French stationery. Construction. Sent then deleted. Missed you so sorry next time press yes to continue press now. And I stood on Barrow then Greenwich then Allen then all streets, every street, all the time, everyone. There was a check you used just to drive out there. There was a storm that brought a gold door in front of their shoes. You know, it doesn’t get easier with the lights on. It doesn’t get easier to watch the play with an end. On the way out someone said, what a terrible way to portray life. But about us. Hide all week then some place we go empty the dark in. In the dark with our vices and best shirts and history’s dress. Then you could find me anytime. And then there’s right now. Where wouldn’t we go to be no one and those people again?

for Ros Krauss Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.

Poor muse, north wind, or any god who blusters bleak across the lake and sows the earth earth-deep with ice. A hoar of fur stung across the vines: here the leaves in full flush, here abandoned to four and farther winds. Bless us, any god who crabs the apples and seeds the leaf and needle evergreen. What whispered catastrophe, winter. What a long night, beyond the lamplight, the windows and the frost-ferned glass. Bless the traveler and the hearth he travels to. Bless our rough hands, wind-scabbed lips, bless this our miscreant psalm.

Sullen, grimy, labouring person, As I passed you in my car, I could sense your muffled curse on It and me and my cigar; And though mute your malediction, I could feel it on my head, As in countless works of fiction I have read. Envy of mine obvious leisure Seemed to green your glittering eye; Hate for mine apparent pleasure Filled you as I motored by. You who had to dig for three, four Hours in that unpleasant ditch, Loathed, despised, and hated me for Being rich. And you cursed me into Hades As you envied me that ride With the loveliest of ladies Sitting at my dexter side; And your wish, or your idea, Was to hurl us off some cliff. I could see that you thought me a Lucky stiff. If you came to the decision, As my car you mutely cussed, That allottment and division Are indecently unjust— Labouring man, however came you Thus to think the world awry, I should be the last to blame you … So do I.

The pleasure of walking a long time on the mountain without seeing a human being, much less speaking to one. And the pleasure of speaking when one is suddenly there. The upgrade from wary to tolerant to convivial, so unlike two brisk bodies on a busy street for whom a sudden magnetic attraction is a mistake, awkwardness, something to be sorry for. But to loiter, however briefly, in a clearing where two paths intersect in the matrix of chance. To stop here speaking the few words that come to mind. A greeting. Some earnest talk of weather. A little history of the day. To stand there then and say nothing. To slowly look around past each other. Notice the green tang pines exude in the heat and the denser sweat of human effort. To have nothing left to say but not wanting just yet to move on. The tension between you, a gossamer thread. It trembles in the breeze, holding the thin light it transmits. To be held in that line of force, however briefly, as if it were all that mattered. And then to move on. With equal energy, with equal pleasure.

She stepped into the tub at dawn and turned on first the radio and then the tap. The Predator operators of Nellis afb have as much or more ptsd as pilots who fly. Down the hall and oceans distant I listened to her work to wash events away as quickly as they accumulated. A sort of race. I thought of where the soap was going. Targets glowed on monitors in the base’s trailers near Las Vegas and operators in full flight suits drank coffee from paper cups and adjusted altitude as I stroked myself beneath the blankets. I don’t like to take chances and haven’t been to Vegas in years. The pilots call people who run for cover, black sperm writhing across their screens, “squirters.” Near my finish line she tugged up the puckered rubber no-slip safety mat. The sound should remind you of a time a doctor took hold of your arm for comfort or leverage and tore the bandage off. If nothing like this has happened to you, imagine it. The haberdasher in Diderot who stole his wife’s dowry (long story) plans to leave Paris for Geneva, sensing distance will make him less guilty. She wasn’t coming back to bed. She may already have left. Villagers call the drones, which make a buzzing sound, “wasps.” The radio reported to an empty room. “An assassin,” writes Diderot, “if transported to the shores of China, will lose sight of the corpse he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.” Asia’s always such a great place to hide, but Geneva’s obviously more convenient. Say she expected her husband to return from duty in a month. Would anything we did between now and then make us any more or less wretched than we were? The drone returns to Bagram without the missiles it left with and a soldier restores its complement. Either his name is Dan or else imagine that. And that a cuckold’s rage can snuff a bomb. I came into either a tissue or my fist. This was weeks or months ago, and I can’t recall. When de Castañeda and his men clambered down into the Grand Canyon in 1540, they found the boulders which had looked as tall as a man from the rim in fact stood taller than Seville’s La Giralda. They must have marveled at distance’s power to deceive and to wake deception’s twin, oblivion. Their women and homes forgotten. You can’t hear their screams from here, but they’re there.

1 Against the low, New York State mountain background, a smokestack sticks up and gives out its snakelike wisp. Thin, stripped win- ter birches pick up the vertical lines. Last night we five watched the white, painted upright bars of steel in an ancient, New York jail called Herkimer (named for a general who lost an arm). Cops threw us against the car. Their marks grow gaudy over me. They burgeon beneath my clothes. I know I give my wound too much thought and time. Gallows loomed outside our sorry solitary cells. “You are in the oldest of our New York jails,” they said. “And we’ve been in books. It’s here they had one of Dreiser’s characters arraigned.” The last one of our company to be hanged we found had chopped her husband up and fed him to the hungry swine. They nudged the wan- ing warmth of his flesh. Each gave him a rooting touch, translating his dregs into the hopes of pigs. And now with their spirited wish and with his round, astonished face, her changed soul still floats about over their small farm near this little New York town. 2 The door bangs shut in the absolute dark. Toilets flush with a great force, and I can hear the old, gentle drunk, my neighbor in the tank, hawk his phlegm and fart. In the early day we line up easily as a cliché for our bread and bowls of gruel. We listen, timeless, for the courthouse bell, play rummy the whole day long and “shoot the moon,” go to bed and jack off to calm down, and scowl harshly, unmanned, at those who were once our friends. The prison of our skins now rises outside and drops in vertical lines before our very eyes. 3 Outdoors again, now we can walk to the Erie Locks (“Highest Lift Locks in the World!”) The old iron bridge has a good bed— cobbles made of wood. Things pass through this town everywhere for it was built in opposite tiers. Two levels of roads on either side the Canal, then two terraces of tracks and higher ranks of beds: roads where trucks lumber awkwardly above the town— like those heavy golden cherubim that try to wing about in the old, Baroque church. The little town—with its Gothic brick bank, Victorian homes with gingerbread frieze and its blasted factories (collapsed, roofs roll- ing back from walls like the lids of eyes)— has died and given up its substance like a hollow duct, smokestack or a pen through which the living stuff flows on. 4 So we walk the long, dead-end track along the shallow, frozen lake where the canal forms a fork (this time of year the locks don’t work). And now and again we look back, for the troopers haunt the five of us out the ledges toward The Locks. (We know they want to hose our bellies and our backs. Or—as they said— “Play the Mambo” on our heads.) We do not yet feel quite free— though the blue and yellow, newly painted posts for ships bloom gaily in the cold, and the bulbs about their bases bulge for spring. Soon the great, iron gates will open out and the first woman-shaped ship, mammoth, silent, will float toward us like a god come back to make us feel only half afraid. Until then, though my friends will be gone from this dry channel of snow and stone, I’ll stay here among the monuments of sheer, brown and gray rock where you can read the names of lovers, sailors and of kids etched in chalk, and in this winter air still keep one hand over my aching ear. Buffalo, March 1967

Yes, nonsense is a treasure! I love it from my heart; The only earthly pleasure That never will depart. But, as for stupid reason, That stalking, ten-foot rule, She’s always out of season, A tedious, testy fool. She’s like a walking steeple, With a clock for face and eyes, Still bawling to all people, Time bids us to be wise. While nonsense on the spire A weathercock you’ll find, Than reason soaring higher, And changing with the wind. The clock too oft deceives, Says what it cannot prove; While every one believes The vane that turns above. Reason oft speaks unbidden, And chides us to our face; For which she should be chidden, And taught to know her place. While nonsense smiles and chatters, And says such charming things, Like youthful hope she flatters; And like a syren sings. Her charm’s from fancy borrowed, For she is fancy’s pet; Her name is on her forehead, In rainbow colors set. Then, nonsense let us cherish, Far, far from reason’s light; Lest in her light she perish, And vanish from our sight.

Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine? Or are fruits of Paradise Sweeter than those dainty pies Of venison? O generous food! Drest as though bold Robin Hood Would, with his maid Marian, Sup and bowse from horn and can. I have heard that on a day Mine host's sign-board flew away, Nobody knew whither, till An astrologer's old quill To a sheepskin gave the story, Said he saw you in your glory, Underneath a new old sign Sipping beverage divine, And pledging with contented smack The Mermaid in the Zodiac. Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?