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"With sacrifice before the rising morn Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired; And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required: Celestial pity I again implore;— Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!" So speaking, and by fervent love endowed With faith, the Suppliant heavenward lifts her hands; While, like the sun emerging from a cloud, Her countenance brightens—and her eye expands; Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows; As she expects the issue in repose. O terror! what hath she perceived?—O joy! What doth she look on?—whom doth she behold? Her Hero slain upon the beach of Troy? His vital presence? his corporeal mould? It is—if sense deceive her not—'tis He! And a God leads him, wingèd Mercury! Mild Hermes spake—and touched her with his wand That calms all fear; "Such grace hath crowned thy prayer, Laodamía! that at Jove's command Thy husband walks the paths of upper air: He comes to tarry with thee three hours' space; Accept the gift, behold him face to face!" Forth sprang the impassioned Queen her Lord to clasp; Again that consummation she essayed; But unsubstantial Form eludes her grasp As often as that eager grasp was made. The Phantom parts—but parts to re-unite, And re-assume his place before her sight. "Protesiláus, lo! thy guide is gone! Confirm, I pray, the vision with thy voice: This is our palace,—yonder is thy throne; Speak, and the floor thou tread'st on will rejoice. Not to appal me have the gods bestowed This precious boon; and blest a sad abode." "Great Jove, Laodamía! doth not leave His gifts imperfect:—Spectre though I be, I am not sent to scare thee or deceive; But in reward of thy fidelity. And something also did my worth obtain; For fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain. "Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold That the first Greek who touched the Trojan strand Should die; but me the threat could not withhold: A generous cause a victim did demand; And forth I leapt upon the sandy plain; A self-devoted chief—by Hector slain." "Supreme of Heroes—bravest, noblest, best! Thy matchless courage I bewail no more, Which then, when tens of thousands were deprest By doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore; Thou found'st—and I forgive thee—here thou art— A nobler counsellor than my poor heart. "But thou, though capable of sternest deed, Wert kind as resolute, and good as brave; And he, whose power restores thee, hath decreed Thou should'st elude the malice of the grave: Redundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair As when their breath enriched Thessalian air. "No spectre greets me,—no vain Shadow this; Come, blooming Hero, place thee by my side! Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss To me, this day a second time thy bride!" Jove frowned in heaven: the conscious Parcæ threw Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue. "This visage tells thee that my doom is past: Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joys Of sense were able to return as fast And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys Those raptures duly—-Erebus disdains: Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains. "Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control Rebellious passion: for the Gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul; A fervent, not ungovernable love. Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn When I depart, for brief is my sojourn—" "Ah wherefore?—Did not Hercules by force Wrest from the guardian monster of the tomb Alcestis, a reanimated corse, Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom? Medea's spells dispersed the weight of years, And Æson stood a youth 'mid youthful peers. "The Gods to us are merciful—and they Yet further may relent: for mightier far Than strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway Of magic potent over sun and star, Is love, though oft to agony distrest, And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's breast. "But if thou goest, I follow—" "Peace!" he said,— She looked upon him and was calmed and cheered; The ghastly colour from his lips had fled; In his deportment, shape, and mien, appeared Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive though a happy place. He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel In worlds whose course is equable and pure; No fears to beat away—no strife to heal— The past unsighed for, and the future sure; Spake of heroic arts in graver mood Revived, with finer harmony pursued; Of all that is most beauteous—imaged there In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams; Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. Yet there the Soul shall enter which hath earned That privilege by virtue.—"Ill," said he, "The end of man's existence I discerned, Who from ignoble games and revelry Could draw, when we had parted, vain delight, While tears were thy best pastime, day and night; "And while my youthful peers before my eyes (Each hero following his peculiar bent) Prepared themselves for glorious enterprise By martial sports,—or, seated in the tent, Chieftains and kings in council were detained; What time the fleet at Aulis lay enchained. "The wished-for wind was given:—I then revolved The oracle, upon the silent sea; And, if no worthier led the way, resolved That, of a thousand vessels, mine should be The foremost prow in pressing to the strand,— Mine the first blood that tinged the Trojan sand. "Yet bitter, oft-times bitter, was the pang When of thy loss I thought, belovèd Wife! On thee too fondly did my memory hang, And on the joys we shared in mortal life,— The paths which we had trod—these fountains, flowers: My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers. "But should suspense permit the Foe to cry, 'Behold they tremble!—haughty their array, Yet of their numbers no one dares to die?' In soul I swept the indignity away: Old frailties then recurred:—but lofty thought, In act embodied, my deliverance wrought. "And Thou, though strong in love, art all too weak In reason, in self-government too slow; I counsel thee by fortitude to seek Our blest re-union in the shades below. The invisible world with thee hath sympathised; Be thy affections raised and solemnised. "Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend— Seeking a higher object. Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end; For this the passion to excess was driven— That self might be annulled: her bondage prove The fetters of a dream opposed to love.— Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes re-appears! Round the dear Shade she would have clung—'tis vain: The hours are past—too brief had they been years; And him no mortal effort can detain: Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day, He through the portal takes his silent way, And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse She lay. Thus, all in vain exhorted and reproved, She perished; and, as for a wilful crime, By the just Gods whom no weak pity moved, Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, Apart from happy Ghosts, that gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers. —Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, As fondly he believes.—Upon the side Of Hellespont (such faith was entertained) A knot of spiry trees for ages grew From out the tomb of him for whom she died; And ever, when such stature they had gained That Ilium's walls were subject to their view, The trees' tall summits withered at the sight; A constant interchange of growth and blight!

(for Harry Clifton) I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat. All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce. On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back, Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day; All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay. Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument. Every discolouration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

The suburbs? Well, for heaven’s sake who wouldn’t choose the absolute convenience? Cheap, a quick commute, and close to Lowe’s, a Steak ’n Shake, our own police and DMV, a library, a lake. Esteemed domestic diplomats, we trump conundrums (His and Hers) and smother any fuss that stirs the air of habit habitats. It’s not an easy job; in short, we wear a lot of hats. And so, we’re grateful, from the street you’d miss the issues we’re ignoring: termites and week-old dishes mooring, barnacled with shredded wheat, the bunch of brown bananas stuck with a yellow Post-it:Eat! We dictate chores, but understand the clock moves faster than we do and focus on those old and blue dilemmas of the second hand: inheritance, ill-fitting pants, smoke, rumors, foreclosed land. Winters, we help keep track of taxes, sort copies Xerox-hot in piles, or prune unruly hanging files (a fixture of our weekend praxis). There’s always something. In this house, only the cat relaxes— because the clutter drives a need for more, more room, more hours, food, more use of the subjunctive mood . . . tomorrow, yes, we must succeed in keeping peace and making time to garden, and to read. Still, every spring our porches spawn insects we can’t identify and ferns turned freeze-dried octopi. They spill into the arid lawn with diasporic fliers, clover and choirs of woebegone house sparrows whose incessant cheeping recalls the gloomy Ubi sunt, our soundtrack to the nightly hunt for whatever is downstairs, beeping. (As if the sleepless wanted some reminder they’re not sleeping.) But don’t fret; clarity, if brief, is possible. The best folks see an artfulness in entropy— the rust, the dust, the bas-relief of Aquafresh-encrusted sinks. So when, in disbelief, a lady skims new catalogs, convinced her luster’s fading, faded, and, afraid to end up jaded, doughy in orthotic clogs, she gracefully accepts her fate and rises early. Jogs.

Look in the mirror. Let us both look. Here is my naked body. Apparently you like it, I have no reason to. Who bound us, me and my body? Why must I die together with it? I have the right to know where the borderline between us is drawn. Where am I, I, I myself. Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines? In the hollow of the sex? In a toe? Apparently in the brain. I do not see it. Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right to see myself. Don’t laugh. That’s macabre, you say. It’s not me who made my body. I wear the used rags of my family, an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair after my grandmother, the nose glued together from a few dead noses. What do I have in common with all that? What do I have in common with you, who like my knee, what is my knee to me? Surely I would have chosen a different model. I will leave both of you here, my knee and you. Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body to play with. And I will go. There is no place for me here, in this blind darkness waiting for corruption. I will run out, I will race away from myself. I will look for myself running like crazy till my last breath. One must hurry before death comes. For by then like a dog jerked by its chain I will have to return into this stridently suffering body. To go through the last most strident ceremony of the body. Defeated by the body, slowly annihilated because of the body I will become kidney failure or the gangrene of the large intestine. And I will expire in shame. And the universe will expire with me, reduced as it is to a kidney failure and the gangrene of the large intestine.

I don't know how it happened, but I fell— and I was immense, one dislocated arm wedged between two buildings. I felt some ribs had broken, perhaps a broken neck, too; I couldn't speak. My dress caught bunched about my thighs, and where my glasses shattered there'd spread something like a seacoast, or maybe it was a port. Where my hair tangled with power lines I felt a hot puddle of blood. I must have passed out, but when I woke, a crew of about fifty was building a winding stairway beside my breast and buttressing a platform on my sternum. I heard, as through cotton, the noise of hammers, circular saws, laughter, and some radio droning songs about love. Out the corner of one eye (I could open one eye a bit) I saw my pocketbook, its contents scattered, my lipstick's toppled silo glinting out of reach. And then, waving a tiny flashlight, a man entered my ear. I felt his boots sloshing the blood trickling there. He never came out. So some went looking, with flares, dogs, dynamite even: they burst my middle ear and found my skull, its cavern crammed with dark matter like a cross between a fungus and a cloud. They never found his body, though. And they never found or tried to find an explanation, I think, for me; they didn't seem to need one. Even now my legs subdue that dangerous sea, the water bright enough to cut the skin, where a lighthouse, perched on the tip of my great toe, each eight seconds rolls another flawless pearl across the waves. It keeps most ships from wrecking against my feet. On clear days, people stand beside the light; they watch the waves' blue heads slip up and down and scan for landmarks on the facing shore.

1 a wren, perched on a hawthorn low enough to skip the scalping winds, sang a scalpel song seafrets drift sheer along shorelines listening to hail spray glass and wind and a waitress laugh in a cafe without customers I fell to fell thinking * * * a sullen light through vapor thins a line of hills the edge of everything is nothing whipped by wind watched on a webcam bound to a bedpost gag on my shaft rose blush of road-kill rabbit insides out on tarmacadam * * * cumulus in a tarn its fast shadow flees far hills a wave of sleek grass skiffs mist my hand thought of her a photograph waiting to happen * * * this come-to-kill wind rips at the root here she comes and there she goes rushes bow to rime I should shut down close off stop if I could how quick the mist how quick 2 my lover, the assassin, is beautiful she has come to kill me and I concur just now she sleeps but when she wakes I’m dead her eyelids flitter as I prepare her potions, her delicious poisons * * * as she flew past a lick of her melodic nectar stuck to my wing, making flight, for an instant, sticky but nothing preening couldn’t fix * * * she asked about my heart, its evasive flight; but can I trust her with its secrets? and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey, tell the fleeing lark it is enamored of its song? or the singing lark turn tail and fly into the falcon’s talons? * * * my heart, the cartographer, charts to the waterline, is swept back as the tide turns wiping the map blank, wave after moon-drawn wave but it beats, my heart, of its own volition a lark sings winds rush reeds walking home I stride these tracks with her tread the blurred thumbprint of a smudged moon 3 it has gone on for days strumming rushes taking up tales, taking them on the fall of my foot, on tufts a stroke of light along a law lain in under a long cloud I accrete—lichen to limestone sphagnum to peat * * * late shadows gather in the dark words unwrite as they are written unspeak as they are spoken songs sprung from heart and lung to tongue unsung * * * drunk winds stumble over shuffling roofs shake his sleep who dreams a lost love will not let go recurring swirls of old gold blown light you can’t help but be in it as it opens and falls back on itself unfolds and unsays I do not want to die without writing the unwritten pleasure of water

Reading in the paper a summary of a five-year psychological study that shows those perceived as most beautiful are treated differently, I think they could have just asked me, remembering a kind of pudgy kid and late puberty, the bloody noses and wisecracks because I wore glasses, though we all know by now how awful it is for the busty starlet no one takes seriously, the loveliest women I’ve lunched with lamenting the opacity of the body, they can never trust a man’s interest even when he seems not just out for sex (eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass), and who would want to live like this? And what does beauty do to a man?— Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron— those fiery eyes and steel jawlines can front a furnace of self-loathing, all those breathless women rushing to him while hubby’s at the office or ball game, primed to be consumed by his beauty while he stands next to it, watching. So maybe the looks we’re dealt are best. It’s only common sense that happiness depends on some bearable deprivation or defect, and who knows what conflicts great beauty could have caused, what cruelties one might have suffered from those now friends, what unmanageable possibilities smiling at every small turn? So if I get up to draw a tumbler of ordinary tap water and think what if this were nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers,

Larry Levan (snake), 2006, by Elia Alba Hip hip hip hip hip makes the man as the conga, serpentine, slides across the frame and the disco dub — tilt and sway — sewing pelves in the room, as if  Larry, still, were levitating streetwise Blacks, Drags, Latinos, Punks: Saturday Mass, 1985, in the Paradise Garage — Evelyn “Champagne” King, Kraftwerk, Ashra. No. He’s black-and-white, a head shot, one two three four five, on this S curve of 21st-century revelers, mask on the one body down, shimmer slant of a hoop earring under the ten-leg- hop-and-pulsate — glide on through. And Larry, Dour Father, bubble pop-popped, afloat, asking repeatedly:Who, My Friends,is fronting? Who is not? You, Velvet Valance, over the sequineddrag of curtain. Black is Black, Brown is Brown, Gay is Gay discopulsing up and through seventeen years of not-forbidding bodies. Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam.Gather youto me and to one another. Grind.

All the new birds are made of nothing. They have nothing inside (for anti-ballast) and those insides are surrounded in an outside nothing that has its own flibberti hole. The birds, they’re nothinging up there in the nothing trees, or on nothing roofs under a nothing sky. They fly of course, but what is flying if not nothing?

They so liked breast milk; Joanne fell asleep & leaked, the ants woke up, made the sweet climb. Others were surprised to find acidophilus, Soledad cleansing her inside sex — they made their way across her ivory sheets while she napped. Ah, the little guys were rejected by our sisters. But still, I feel sad that in my new lodgings there are no more glossy arrowheads to follow, sprinkle with baking powder, make a pretty cayenne path for over the once-food-strewn sill (they scent our past). They can carry their groceries bag-free: & ants shop in the honey cupboard, thirst like black hair being washed in a sink. Car-waxed black traffic jam — that’s actual jam, strawberry. Once my curatorial staff. But let them go on strike. Those embodiments of intention; they don’t sit around playing cards; perhaps they never play, never horse around. Hard-to-see-in-the-dark jet numbers on the radio dial. Perhaps there is no laughter in their chasm. Serious: but they’re able to stand up on hind legs — a darling trick. I want to give them a little inkwell. A beachball. The number of communal legs alone exceeds the stars underground. They could be an orchestra. A single one looks in the mirror & sees a note. A quarter note. So many instincts massing as one. If I miss one little lover, do I miss them all?