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The ones too broke or wise to get parts from a dealer come here where the mud is red and eternal. Eight front ends are stacked on girders he salvaged too. Ask for Bruce, he said on the phone, and doesn’t crack a smile when you show up. Twenty-four fifty if we find one, sister. Bruce, it says on his coveralls, and Bruce on the ones his helper wears. The routine’s so good they’re keeping it. The taillight you can have. Except for the traffic, the wrong parts of Baltimore aren’t so bad: each house pulling its straightest face, the curbs and stoops lined up like a man inverting his pockets to show he’s got nothing to hide. Construction sites gone aimless and the detours feeling more like home. You know where to find a cheap lunch. Up front, a woman hears the list through twice before, as to a sweet and original prompting, she picks fried trout. Likewise the oyster shucker, pretending you’ve asked for a straw with your beer. He searches the counter above which reigns a picture of Washington Stokes, retired, who cleaned fish to order for fifty-nine years. A girl on a schedule deserves what she gets, and sometimes gets it kindly, earned or no. Untouched by heat of sun or city police, the fair-haired accommodate best by having everything to learn. But here comes your beer without a straw, as though good nature were common as thirst. Here’s Washington Stokes, who would understand the strategy that lets the fool go free.

When I learned I might have cancer, I bought fifteen white lilies. Easter was gone: the trumpets were wilted, plants crooked with roots bound in pots. I dug them into the garden, knowing they would not bloom for another year. All summer, the stalks stood like ramshackle posts while I waited for results. By autumn, the stalks had flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions, the cancer in my tongue a sprawling mass. Outside, the earth remained bare, rhizomes shrunken below the frost line. Spring shoots appeared in bright green skins, and lilies bloomed in July, their waxed trumpets pure white, dusting gold pollen to the ground. This year, tripled in number, they are popping up again. I wait, a ceremony, for the lilies to open, for the serpentine length of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue’s scar, a white path with one end leading into brilliant air, the other down the throat’s canyon, black and unforgiving. I try to imagine what could grow in such darkness. I am waiting for the lilies to open.

The Department of the Interior and Department of Homeland Security announced a joint enquiry into the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon on April 22. The us House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have also announced investigations. Last week bp launched its own investigation into the incident and has an investigation team at work in Houston, Texas. —bp.com, April 28, 2010 Beneath three thousand feet, the sea is wholly dark. The shuttle feeds hydraulics to the blind shear ram and represents a single failure point for disconnect. Recommendation: Declare selected points on earth invisible. Affected communities have been provided with limited quantities of powdered milk and other staples. Many questions remain. Some close their eyes under water instinctively. Imagination can create a sense of peril where no real peril exists. Safety equipment tests were necessarily imaginary; mechanisms in question were wholly inaccessible. A journalist sinking into the mud was told to toss his camera to a colleague and hold extremely still. In this sense, we are our own prisoners. Investigators have salt in their hair and sand in their teeth. The hotel pool is empty. Yet questions remain. Barbeque billboards depict grinning pigs in aprons and toques. Cleanup crews recover thousands of plastic milk jugs from the shallows. Do these images appeal to the death drive? Care should be taken to ensure the highest possible reliability from that valve. Thousands in affected communities have been evicted and live in tents. Demonstrators have prevented investigators from accessing hotel stairwells. 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrates an engine fueled by peanut oil at the Paris World’s Fair. The Vietnamese owner of Bad Bob’s bbq Buffet tells a journalist she last drank powdered milk in a refugee camp “a thousand years ago.” Items available only in limited quantities are found in Appendix C. Cleanup crews have stacked thousands of drums of dispersant in hotel parking lots. Dominant failure combinations for well control suggest additional safety mechanism diversity and redundancy provide additional reliability. Bank of America will offer limited foreclosure deferments in affected communities. Thousands of years ago, a pronghorn ram slipped beneath the surface of a tar pit, jerking its snout for air. Recommendation: Live at inaccessible elevations. Recommendation: Close your eyes. Recommendation: Prevent access to the invisible. Engineering reports noted required safety mechanisms were unlikely to function yet were required for safety’s sake. If the committee may offer an analogy, a blind surgeon is dangerous, an imaginary surgeon harmless. Still, questions remain. BP’s 2010 Q1 replacement cost profit was $5,598 million, compared with $2,387 million a year ago, an increase of 135%. Unlimited quantities of peanuts are available. However, care must be taken to ensure continued high reliability of the shuttle valve, since it is extremely critical to the overall disconnect operation. Phenomena not meant to be accessed or imagined are found in Appendix E. Cleanup crews are sometimes idled for lack of fuel. 1913: Diesel found dead, drowned under suspicious circumstances. The investigators’ hotel toilets won’t flush. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. In this sense, seabirds cloaked in oil are rich. Cleanup crews live in tents and are provided with limited quantities of barbeque and wear white canvas jumpsuits like prisoners on furlough. If the committee may offer an analogy, the death drive resides at wholly dark depths of imagination and fuel issues from a wound we’ve opened there.

You’re not dewy with sleep in the next room

Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma risen into native rock or the buried flow of old fires cooling in ocean beds. The damage has been memorized. Tool marks left by loose doubts dragged across a certainty. Tongues of river sediment slumped but still flickering in the eye. And how pale the surfaces are! From miles above what even to others is familiar, the erosion—tears that freeze and crack the heart, small habits a wind blasts against whatever’s exposed—seems apparent: all’s worn down, weathered, notched, seeping, yet eerily polished, as if at last defined. Your map of me? Let your pencil trace the old quarries and splintered outcrops, let it analyze the faults, describe their throes, let it reveal how the light is laid over them all.

The cold earth slept below; Above the cold sky shone; And all around, With a chilling sound, From caves of ice and fields of snow The breath of night like death did flow Beneath the sinking moon. The wintry hedge was black; The green grass was not seen; The birds did rest On the bare thorn’s breast, Whose roots, beside the pathway track, Had bound their folds o’er many a crack Which the frost had made between. Thine eyes glow’d in the glare Of the moon’s dying light; As a fen-fire’s beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there, And it yellow’d the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind of night. The moon made thy lips pale, beloved; The wind made thy bosom chill; The night did shed On thy dear head Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will.

In the sad November time, When the leaf has left the lime, And the Cam, with sludge and slime, Plasters his ugly channel, While, with sober step and slow, Round about the marshes low, Stiffening students stumping go Shivering through their flannel. Then to me in doleful mood Rises up a question rude, Asking what sufficient good Comes of this mode of living? Moping on from day to day, Grinding up what will not “pay,” Till the jaded brain gives way Under its own misgiving. Why should wretched Man employ Years which Nature meant for joy, Striving vainly to destroy Freedom of thought and feeling? Still the injured powers remain Endless stores of hopeless pain, When at last the vanquished brain Languishes past all healing. Where is then his wealth of mind— All the schemes that Hope designed? Gone, like spring, to leave behind Indolent melancholy. Thus he ends his helpless days, Vex’t with thoughts of former praise— Tell me, how are Wisdom’s ways Better than senseless Folly? Happier those whom trifles please, Dreaming out a life of ease, Sinking by unfelt degrees Into annihilation. Or the slave, to labour born, Heedless of the freeman’s scorn, Destined to be slowly worn Down to the brute creation. Thus a tempting spirit spoke, As from troubled sleep I woke To a morning thick with smoke, Sunless and damp and chilly. Then to sleep I turned once more, Eyes inflamed and windpipe sore, Dreaming dreams I dreamt before, Only not quite so silly. In my dream methought I strayed Where a learned-looking maid Stores of flimsy goods displayed, Articles not worth wearing. “These,” she said, with solemn air, “Are the robes that sages wear, Warranted, when kept with care, Never to need repairing.” Then unnumbered witlings, caught By her wiles, the trappings bought, And by labour, not by thought, Honour and fame were earning. While the men of wiser mind Passed for blind among the blind; Pedants left them far behind In the career of learning. “Those that fix their eager eyes Ever on the nearest prize Well may venture to despise Loftier aspirations. Pedantry is in demand! Buy it up at second-hand, Seek no more to understand Profitless speculations.” Thus the gaudy gowns were sold, Cast off sloughs of pedants old; Proudly marched the students bold Through the domain of error, Till their trappings, false though fair, Mouldered off and left them bare, Clustering close in blank despair, Nakedness, cold, and terror. Then, I said, “These haughty Schools Boast that by their formal rules They produce more learned fools Than could be well expected. Learned fools they are indeed, Learned in the books they read; Fools whene’er they come to need Wisdom, too long neglected. “Oh! that men indeed were wise, And would raise their purblind eyes To the opening mysteries Scattered around them ever. Truth should spring from sterile ground, Beauty beam from all around, Right should then at last be found Joining what none may sever.”

Oh: I am analytic & 0-1 in a given region (unloved/ labial) and such unlikeness in a most minor foot : signs suggest : an ampersand. To be old is to be ode. To be qualified is a stipulation : a slope on the sycamore : a day when pancakes are the middle of a week. Ode to weakness, whatever I am: the situation inside the marriage (phonetic notation). (situation) to the rodeo. The fleece demeans the contribution. Pajamas. It would be impractical (lateral tap) to explain impoverished speakers. In English: to pronounce sounds. I care if I am kissed. My father came back floral (Augmentations in Audio) and floral is a door. Oh: middle low IPA key. Rhyme the half long phones. Oh half in the past. Oh. And again. Oh.

We meet midway to walk white cobbles under a fish-flesh gray sky. Europe is collapsing; we are collapsing always and again no matter how hard we love one another. I don’t understand our failure, where the feed loops back and spits us into another country, another junior suite reenacting this same, same beat of   a scene that begins, rises, never ends,always ends — Our intentions don’t meet, their courses set differently by a force you don’t believe in, could be as simple as life. I want to be the wife you don’t want. You won’t let go of my wrist. I resist, threaten, bully, acquiesce. We write the next act of The Alchemist in New York, Lisbon, a beach, a bar, star-crossed maybe from different galaxies. You approach, I retreat. You retreat, I reproach. The manic two-step jitters over North Africa’s dunes farther than our hero, Santiago, can see. I rise in the night to find the sharp knife that came with the pears as a courtesy.

Listen. Put on morning. Waken into falling light. A man’s imagining Suddenly may inherit The handclapping centuries Of his one minute on earth. And hear the virgin juries Talk with his own breath To the corner boys of his street. And hear the Black Maria Searching the town at night. And hear the playropes caa The sister Mary in. And hear Willie and Davie Among bracken of Narnain Sing in a mist heavy With myrtle and listeners. And hear the higher town Weep a petition of fears At the poorhouse close upon The public heartbeat. And hear the children tig And run with my own feet Into the netting drag Of a suiciding principle. Listen. Put on lightbreak. Waken into miracle. The audience lies awake Under the tenements Under the sugar docks Under the printed moments. The centuries turn their locks And open under the hill Their inherited books and doors All gathered to distil Like happy berry pickers One voice to talk to us. Yes listen. It carries away The second and the years Till the heart’s in a jacket of snow And the head’s in a helmet white And the song sleeps to be wakened By the morning ear bright. Listen. Put on morning. Waken into falling light.