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The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?” The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.” The King is a restless seeker. The Seer is a ruler and thief. I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves. They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing. Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches, which disappear when the tree reaches them. “Who are you?” the King asks. “It is not like that,” the Seer says. The Seer leaves the King alone in his throne room and starts walking to China, kicking up gravel, hurrying to find the next king. On the road between country houses, he stops to listen to trees digging the air for crickets. He wonders whether the King is mad now like the trees, or dancing and recounting the story without an end.

I’m an ol’ king bee, honey, Buzzin’ from flower to flower. I’m an ol’ king bee, sweets, Hummin’ from flower to flower. Women got good pollen; I get some every hour. There’s Lily in the valley And sweet honeysuckle Rose too; There’s Lily in the valley And sweet honeysuckle Rose too. And there’s pretty black-eyed Susan, Perfect as the night is blue. You don’t have to trust A single, black word I say. You don’t have to trust A single, black word I say. But don’t be surprised If I sting your flower today.

It is said that playing cards were invented in 1392 to cure the French king, Charles VI, of madness. The suits in some of the first card packs consisted of Doves, Peacocks, Ravens, and Owls. They say I am excitable! How could I not scream? The Swiss monk’s tonsure spun till it blurred yet his eyes were still. I snapped my gaiter, hard, to stuff back my mirth. Lords, he then began to speak. Indus catarum, he said,presenting the game of cards in which the state of the world is excellent described and figured.

—Hoooooooo Lay in an array of pixels Fat, simulated proteins Looks just like nutrition! Acts just like an avatar! I just wanted to give my body to A net of guarine Gingko-balboa azatine melamine Camphobacter phylacter nicotine Which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell, net of Vatic coughdropped hairball tells the future of Neural center where the straight lines hopped Like a hairline fracture on a bender jumps a Mulholland retaining wall and crashes the crinkled Vale of Food-for-thought Fruit for monkeys in a barrel, one fruit per monkey For a total of fortyseven monkeydays For a total of twelve hours at a clip The go-home-and-feed-the-baby milk of it That man is a mouth chased by ghosts Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in (And now I pause to remember How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling Where you cut your hair For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into Cuts as she cuts—) This machine makes its need louder and Invites me into its duct, unlike the baby Sleeping on the other edge of Pow’r, Eyes roll’d, mouth pinch’d shut Round Pow’r’s earthly sinks and shunts—

In memory of Nancy Tow Spiegel Before he put his important question to an oracle, Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers, Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi, Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon, So as to determine the accuracy of their words; His challenge: not to say anything of his future But rather what he was doing in his capital, Sardis (Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise, Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out). This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time: Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying, Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness, As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room. Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew, Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot. When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest, But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice: I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea’s depth; I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.

Bewailing in my chamber thus allone, Despeired of all joye and remedye, For-tirit of my thoght, and wo begone, Unto the wyndow gan I walk in hye, To se the warld and folk that went forby; As for the tyme, though I of mirthis fude Myght have no more, to luke it did me gude. Now was there maid fast by the touris wall A gardyn faire, and in the corneris set Ane herbere grene:—with wandis long and small Railit about; and so with treis set Was all the place, and hawthorn hegis knet, That lyf was none walking there forby, That myght within scarse ony wight aspye; So thik the bewis and the leves grene Beschadit all the aleyes that there were. And myddis every herbere myght be sene The scharpe grene suete jenepere, Growing so faire with branchis here and there, That, as it semyt to a lyf without, The bewis spred the herbere all about; And on the smalle grene twistis sat The lytill suete nyghtingale, and song So loud and clere, the ympnis consecrat Off lufis use, now soft, now lowd among, That all the gardyng and the wallis rong Ryght of thaire song and of the copill next Off thaire suete armony, and lo the text: "Worschippe, ye that loveris bene, this May, For of your blisse the kalendis are begonne, And sing with us, 'Away, winter, away! Cum, somer, cum, the suete sesoun and sonne!' Awake for schame! that have your hevynnis wonne, And amorously lift up your hedis all, Thank lufe that list you to his merci call." Quhen thai this song had song a lytill thrawe, Thai stent a quhile, and therewith unaffraid, As I beheld and kest myn eyne a-lawe, From beugh to beugh thay hippit and thai plaid, And freschly in thaire birdis kynd arraid Thaire fetheris new, and fret thame in the sonne, And thankit lufe, that had thaire makis wonne. This was the plane ditee of thaire note, And there-with-all unto my self I thoght, "Quhat lyf is this that makis birdis dote? Quhat may this be, how cummyth it of ought? Quhat nedith it to be so dere ybought? It is nothing, trowe I, bot feynit chere, And that men list to counterfeten chere." Eft wald I think; "O Lord, quhat may this be? That Lufe is of so noble myght and kynde, Lufing his folk, and suich prosperitee Is it of him, as we in bukis fynd? May he oure hertes setten and unbynd? Hath he upon oure hertis suich maistrye? Or all this is bot feynyt fantasye! "For gif he be of so grete excellence, That he of every wight hath cure and charge, Quhat have I gilt to him or doon offense, That I am thrall, and birdis gone at large, Sen him to serve he myght set my corage? And gif he be noght so, than may I seyne, 'Quhat makis folk to jangill of him in veyne?' "Can I noght elles fynd, bot gif that he Be lord, and as a god may lyve and regne, To bynd and louse, and maken thrallis free, Than wold I pray his blisfull grace benigne, To hable me unto his service digne; And evermore for to be one of tho Him trewly for to serve in wele and wo." And there-with kest I doun myn eye ageyne, Quhare as I sawe, walking under the toure, Full secretly, new cummyn hir to pleyne, The fairest or the freschest yonge floure That ever I sawe, me thoght, before that houre, For quhich sodayn abate, anon astert The blude of all my body to my hert. And though I stude abaisit tho a lyte, No wonder was; for-quhy my wittis all Were so overcom with plesance and delyte, Onely throu latting of myn eyen fall, That sudaynly my hert became hir thrall For ever, of free will; for of manace There was no takyn in hir suete face. And in my hede I drewe ryght hastily, And eft-sones I lent it forth ageyne, And sawe hir walk, that verray womanly, With no wight mo, bot onely wommen tueyne. Than gan I studye in my-self, and seyne, "A! suete, ar ye a warldly creature, Or hevinly thing in likenesse of nature? "Or ar ye god Cupidis owin princesse, And cummyn are to louse me out of band? Or ar ye verray Nature the goddesse, That have depaynted with your hevinly hand This gardyn full of flouris, as they stand? Quhat sall I think, allace! quhat reverence Sall I minister to your excellence? "Gif ye a goddesse be, and that ye like To do me payne, I may it noght astert; Gif ye be warldly wight, that dooth me sike, Quhy lest God mak you so, my derrest hert, To do a sely prisoner thus smert, That lufis yow all, and wote of noght bot wo? And therefor, merci, suete! sen it is so." Quhen I a lytill thrawe had maid my moon, Bewailling myn infortune and my chance, Unknawing how or quhat was best to doon, So ferre I fallen was in lufis dance, That sodeynly my wit, my contenance, My hert, my will, my nature, and my mynd, Was changit clene ryght in an-othir kynd. Off hir array the form gif I sall write Toward, hir goldin haire and rich atyre In fret-wise couchit were with perllis quhite And grete balas lemyng as the fyre, With mony ane emeraut and faire saphire; And on hir hede a chaplet fresch of hewe, Off plumys partit rede, and quhite, and blewe; Full of quaking spangis bryght as gold, Forgit of schap like to the amorettis, So new, so fresch, so plesant to behold, The plumys eke like to the floure-jonettis, And othir of schap like to the round crokettis, And, above all this, there was, wele I wote, Beautee eneuch to mak a world to dote. About hir nek, quhite as the fyre amaille, A gudely cheyne of smale orfeverye, Quhareby there hang a ruby, without faille, Lyke to ane herte schapin verily, That, as a sperk of lowe, so wantonly Semyt birnyng upon hir quhyte throte; Now gif there was gud partye, God it wote! And forto walk that fresche Mayes morowe, An huke sche had upon hir tissew quhite, That gudeliare had noght bene sene toforowe, As I suppose; and girt sche was a lyte. Thus halflyng louse for haste, to suich delyte It was to see hir youth in gudelihede, That for rudenes to speke thereof I drede. In hir was youth, beautee, with humble aport, Bountee, richesse, and wommanly facture, (God better wote than my pen can report) Wisedome, largesse, estate, and connyng sure. In every poynt so guydit hir mesure, In word, in dede, in schap, in contenance, That nature myght no more hir childe avance. Throw quhich anon I knew and understude Wele, that sche was a warldly creature; On quhom to rest myn eye, so mich gude It did my wofull hert, I yow assure, That it was to me joye without mesure; And, at the last, my luke unto the hevin I threwe furthwith, and said thir versis sevin: "O Venus clere! of goddis stellifyit! To quhom I yelde homage and sacrifise, Fro this day forth your grace be magnifyit, That me ressavit have in suich a wise, To lyve under your law and do servise; Now help me furth, and for your merci lede My herte to rest, that dëis nere for drede."

According to a report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico project, 138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006. They call it the corner of heaven: a laboratory, a foot at the throat of an empire. Before the holy dirt, the woman with the feline gait waits with tangled hair, mouth agape — the letter X marked on what’s left of her breasts and face.Nuestra Belleza Mexicana

Soon the ambassadors from the Netherworld Will begin Their jet-like descent. Death, Disguised inside me, already, As sleaze. Grime and her magnificent seed. Brother Rainer Clutching his Bible, hallucinating helicopters. Brother Rainer, child-like and wrecked. Infamy, and the cosmology of chronic Raveling and unraveling. Or, Displaced insanity. Dirty Cindy, little Glitter of her father’s Spit: invisible, androgynous, a fragment of His, found at the bottom of his dream chest. Draped in my black cape of smut glue and Subterranean, they mistake me for A man in drag in my nasty Boots. Why just look: a manifestation Of stars. Or, appoint me hustler of Brutal Rainer and his kinky noir Scheme: me, at thirteen, on the beach In a candy-striped bikini. In time or out of time, Glamorine. Groom of the Underworld, please Come with me To the discotheque at the end Of the world. Piss- Elegant at the halfway House for the trashed and gone galore. Meet me in the love- Burned orchard Where the beautiful doomed Meet at last.

In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening. Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical, acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”— hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite, a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all. Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered. When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed, seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old. By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed. A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm (Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s, that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones, while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments, a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry- eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised just then to have invented anything so fancy, later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed. In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then dead silence) later, she could not have said how many spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden, how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery; a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow through landscapes of untended memory: ardor illuminating with its terrifying currency now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.

1 What does not change / is the will to change He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat. He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat, I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now?” His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone, ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened, he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought “The pool    the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth    why did the export stop?” It was then he left 2 I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere” but the kingfisher de l’aurore” but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous! he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun! The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous. But not these things were the factors. Not the birds. The legends are legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters. It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There, six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds. On these rejectamenta (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born. And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass Mao concluded: nous devons nous lever et agir! 3 When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive Or, enter that other conqueror we more naturally recognize he so resembles ourselves But the E cut so rudely on that oldest stone sounded otherwise, was differently heard as, in another time, were treasures used: (and, later, much later, a fine ear thought a scarlet coat) “of green feathers    feet, beaks and eyes of gold “animals likewise, resembling snails “a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots, and worked with tufts of leaves, weight 3800 ounces “last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills gold, the feet gold, the two birds perched on two reeds gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds, one yellow, the other white. “And from each reed hung seven feathered tassels. In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields. 4 Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law Into the same river no man steps twice When fire dies air dies No one remains, nor is, one Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up many. Else how is it, if we remain the same, we take pleasure now in what we did not take pleasure before? love contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use other words, feel other passions, have nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue the same? To be in different states without a change is not a possibility We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and / or control, both involve the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses it This very thing you are II They buried their dead in a sitting posture serpent    cane    razor   ray of the sun And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying “Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!” with her face to the west Where the bones are found, in each personal heap with what each enjoyed, there is always the Mongolian louse The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough as long as it was necessary for him, my guide to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look and, considering the dryness of the place the long absence of an adequate race (of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other tore the eastern idols down, toppled the temple walls, which, says the excuser were black from human gore) hear hear, where the dry blood talks where the old appetite walks la piu saporita et migliore che si possa truovar al mondo where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk but under these petals in the emptiness regard the light, contemplate the flower whence it arose with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor pejorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below III I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage. And of course, no Roman: he can take no risk that matters, the risk of beauty least of all. But I have my kin, if for no other reason than (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and, given my freedom, I’d be a cad if I didn’t. Which is most true. It works out this way, despite the disadvantage. I offer, in explanation, a quote: si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères que pour la terre et les pierres. Despite the discrepancy (an ocean    courage    age) this is also true: if I have any taste it is only because I have interested myself in what was slain in the sun I pose you your question: shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? I hunt among stones