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Struck a pair of stones to start off. Left behind ten men curled like scythes round the fire. Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a pack of ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the carious canines before the rath, left the scapula— freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives. Passed (in a dream)

The unsigned architecture of loneliness is becoming taller, finding a way farther above the horizontal flowering of the Cold War, the peonies and star asters of wild partisanship. I have a shambling gait and lonely hysteria, but no Terror. I am free to shamble past the vacant lot of my son’s conception, to shamble past the bar where I conceived adultery as a Terror that would be endless, flowering in great waves through air striated like chenille. I walk for a long time and try to conjure elsewhere in its early isolation. I cannot. It is all redestinated by the future like the loose balloons a janitor recovers at 6 am from cold light fixtures. The Cold War is ending. Buildings are taller and have no names. 1. The romance of every ideology torments the romance of another. How beautifully, in the beginning, in the gale and embrace of isolation, boys capered over a shambles and swore oaths. The scent of urine in the hall at home was righteousness. The beautiful nude obscured by dust in a paperweight was righteousness. Neglectful townships coming into steep flower just as boys were flowering needed the correction of righteousness, the horizontal slag of government by children. Only the insane allegiances endure. The mad counterparts are lovers passion cannot explain nor circumstances restrict to the dead zones of irony. A counterpart of end of the Cold War is adultery. A counterpart of loving a divided Berlin unto death is fatherhood, the doting maintenance of sons in vacant lots continuing the wars of rubble for righteousness’ sake and for the sake of nudes obscured by dust and vulgarity. Romance torments romance. The most beautiful moment of the twentieth century galed and embraced the acrid smoky air as the Red Army entered Berlin as Hitler shriveled in the gasoline fire as Red Army flags opened above Berlin safeguarding the ruins of a changeless future. Townships blackened even as they flowered. Loose balloons cluttered the low sky and sun. I walked for a long time and tried to conjure the form of kindness. It was a domestic animal confused in the tall grass. Boys set fire to the grass. History that opens flags opened the fire, and Berlin, divided from Berlin, began to love its children past all reason. 2. My son reads sermons of pain and writes on walls. He starves the ground he walks on, preparing a dead city to be worthy of its new flags, to shine as exploded windows shine, raining down for hours after the wrecking crews have gone. I have a lover now who hates children. The hatred floats inside of her, a weightless sexual pavilion of perfect form and perfect emptiness. I thought by making love to her I would conceive nothing but Terror, outrage upon outrage, a violence that would last my whole life and free my son. I was ignorant as a balloon. Across the luminous expressway, I see the shapes of charred tenements castellated, fading into the more tender shapes of night. It may be the last night in history. Tomorrow pulls down the Berlin Wall, pulls down my honor, and I return to my lover’s bed to float in a white condom, no longer my son’s father. Tomorrow describes everything in detail. It explains nothing. It does not teach my boy that tenements are better than the future, better that peace, more likely to produce brothers than are the glassy hands of mornings without end or walls denuded of their wire. In the dead zone of irony before dawn, only the cats cry, like martyrs in the flame. 3. Gates everywhere. The Brandenburg. The Great Gate of Kiev beneath which children stride onto an invisible crescendo disappearing into gasoline fires, emerging as the new shapes of righteousness in slow vans through the Brandenburg Gate. Oaths are secret because none suspects that they are kept. They thrust themselves towards us unashamedly, like the insane homeless, and we do not see them. In our loneliness, we see a chance for love in betrayal, not death. In our loneliness, we see the happy triumph of glassy hands in free elections, not the denuding of Berlin or wanderings of children in vans reduced by fire to black transparencies in the morning shade. When Joan of Arc surrendered to the flames she cried out “Jesus, Jesus.” Some years later, a failed magician who had loved her cried out “Joan, Joan” as the flames mocked him with a sortilege too easy to be unreal or profitable. I walk for a long time and try to conjure the form of loneliness without Cold War. It is ash upon ash, a chiaroscuro aloft and on the ground, completely still. Oaths are secret because none suspects the desperation of every object, the child in every atom of the misused world thrust towards us, crying out whatever sacred name it witnessed put to death on the ascending music of a wall. Our buildings are tall and have no names. The parks grow glassy hands instead of flowers. 4. Afterwards, the calm is piteous but insubstantial as a smell of burn that does not rise in smoke or dies with the fire. Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise and having to invent air, invent light from nothing but untriggered memory. All things beloved are recalled to pain. Air recollected from the wrists of girls braceleted for Confirmation, crossed. Light recollected from between the cars of night trains in a deep river valley where islands in the river glowed like swans. Air recollected form a ditch in flower. Light recollected from the sex of flowers in bare rooms, the grainy light of blondes. Air recollected from religion. Light recollected form the incensed clutch of bodies before sunrise in the oaths of a great and ignorant lost cause. Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise having spent the night in bed with a stranger. Aloft and on the ground the calm unfurls like flags without device or slogan. The inconsequence of the day ahead stirs airless atmospheres in darkness visible as daylight but without shade. Without Cold War, without the arbitrary demarcation of cause from cause, of light and air from the unsexed improvisations of memory, I cannot see to walk or breathe to breathe. Sex becomes applause. Sex becomes television, and the bastard avant garde of lonely architecture breaks ground at the unwired heart of a city that marks the capital of nothing now. 5. A scratchy, recorded call to prayer crosses the alley from one new building into mine. The consolations of history are furtive, then fugitive, then forgotten like a bar of music that might have been obscene or sacred once, in another city, in the days before today. My son is well. He works the public ground and needs no Antigone. My lover sits beside him at dinner, sharing a joke, unmapping the tall future and its unbiased children, reinventing the sexual pavilion to accommodate plague wards. Romance forgives romance. The early isolation of this gorgeous century disappears into good works. The future is best. To put a final stop to the grotesque unmercy of martyrdom and to the ruinous armies of mad boys whose government is rape, whose justice is a wall, revoke all partisanship, adjourn the Terror. The future is best. It unobscures the dusty nudes. It protects the river islands and their glowing swans. But when I need to die, who will light the fire? What names shall I cry out and what music burn to a black transparency in my heart? The unborn have been revoked. They will not be kind.

Permit me to open by expressing joy and wonder that we're marching at the head of our companies in different uniforms under a different command but with a single aim—to survive You say to me—look here we should probably let these boys go home to their Margot to their Kasia war is beautiful only in parades but apart from that as we know—mud and blood and rats As you speak comes an avalanche of artillery fire it's that bastard Parkinson who is taking so long he caught up with us at last when we took a walk on an irregular route our collars loose at the chin our hands in our pockets we were on leave already when Parkinson suddenly reminded us that it was not the end yet that this blasted war isn't over yet

Spun silk of mercy, long-limbed afternoon, sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems. What better blessing than to move without hurry under trees? Lugging a bucket to the rose that became a twining house by now, roof and walls of vine— you could live inside this rose. Pouring a slow stream around the ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit, I thought we would feel old by the year 2000. Walt Disney thought cars would fly. What a drama to keep thinking the last summer the last birthday

"Come and hire me," I cried, while in the morning I was walking on the stone-paved road. Sword in hand, the King came in his chariot. He held my hand and said, "I will hire you with my power." But his power counted for nought, and he went away in his chariot. In the heat of the midday the houses stood with shut doors. I wandered along the crooked lane. An old man came out with his bag of gold. He pondered and said, "I will hire you with my money." He weighed his coins one by one, but I turned away. It was evening. The garden hedge was all aflower. The fair maid came out and said, "I will hire you with a smile." Her smile paled and melted into tears, and she went back alone into the dark. The sun glistened on the sand, and the sea waves broke waywardly. A child sat playing with shells. He raised his head and seemed to know me, and said, "I hire you with nothing." From thenceforward that bargain struck in child's play made me a free man.

I can’t leave my hurting skull Or the rose apple opening inside me. I’ll count the weeks, months, Unfurling each numbered day in my hair. Frost ribbons inside my brain, Canals push up my leg. I’m moving on To what the world needs me to know. I am the angel trapped inside the bullet. I am the exit wound trapped inside the angel. Am I the scarecrow Perched at the end of the human trail. I’ll palm cotton between my prayers Until the universe has passed, Waving down jellyfish To volcano hours. What force propels a bullet From its chamber. Is it sourced by water Trickling in a karst cave, Or is it an angel’s gasp as she flees. I can’t answer it all, But my mask grows taller every year.

A giant bird- of-paradise has climbed the bar: in this paradise there are no flowers, no flowers at all. When Happy Hour becomes Last Call— Adam in drag our royalty— we buy her gin for eternity (an unseen deejay scores the years with pulsing music of the spheres). Now the queen has gone, gone again in search of love, in search of sin. It’s closing time. You were not at fault. I drain my glass and lick the salt.

As I drew nearer to the end of all desire, I brought my longing's ardor to a final height, Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure, Entered more and more the beam of that high light That shines on its own truth. From then, my seeing Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing— As when the dreamer sees and after the dream The passion endures, imprinted on his being Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same: Inside my heart, although my vision is almost Entirely faded, droplets of its sweetness come The way the sun dissolves the snow's crust— The way, in the wind that stirred the light leaves, The oracle that the Sibyl wrote was lost.

In the garrulous present Threadbare nouns find What raiment’s left From forefathers Who perhaps struck poses But wrote of frenzy Out of deepest urgency Hammering voices In no dumbfounded age. Theirs the grace Of unfaltering Fealty to the word. Yet then I picture Pound Prematurely stilled By his own tongue —Tempus tacendi. Did he ever revisit The barbed floodlit quad Where bareheaded he’d Stood in all weather Mouthing surreal Greek, Fashioning a rhythm Out of life’s ruin, That life he would unspeak Half a lifetime later Arriving on the tarmac Of Eisenhower Italy, Breath caught in the throat? I heft his burdened book Only to let it drop —A stoneweight dropping down Well’s jaggy darkness That anyhow comes back In stonecold dialect: Pisa! A pure echo Purged of memory. On my lap his poems’ Esoteric call Has no words at all Or just those selfsame ones Quarried from a rock —Red and ocher bison Emblaze the solitude Of an old draughtsman Who long hours daubs In Altamira’s shade: Let those I love try to forgive What I have made.

One conversation, one only, remaining: It will be that give-and-take With Larry Littlebird — Oral listener — All about eagles, their shoulders, Ospreys, their plummet, And frogs, their singing Scratched by rain’s soft claws. But any of these exchanges will do: Charlie saying, If you can hum It you can play it, if you can play at all. And if not, sing with closed lips to yourself. Low continuous sound, your refrigerator. You must not be lonely. Harold says someone pointed out Being begins with a hum: It seems what you are, You’re happy hearing it, I’m happy for you, For each other, happy. Hear it in your colloquial throat, The syllable meaning human. Or, if not any of these intercourses, then Jenny and Chloe, who with a shake And a nod and a wave of an arm Toward the East say, We are going And we’ll go on your behalf And we’ll carry signs and shout The last best protest. Cerise and fuchsia Sisters, ears pointing out. Or my street signs: Calaveras (our skull’s tacit mouth) and Eisenhower — War, a theft from those who hunger And are not fed. Not a way of life at all. Crossed words on a corner pole. Movers pack me up, extract me From that conversation. I’ve heard a few words — they stay with me, An earned ear — and yet Too brief for brooding. Ghost Of my father, who never said much But Smell the roses for the camera; Or when I ask,Can I retire? He quickly says,Don’t hesitate! Any of these exchanges will do, “Now is the perfect time.” Not “For what?” but stopping it open. “April Fool,” said my favorite Eleanor, And then she died. “Good night,” her son Tipped his hat at me, From the top of the stairs, and then he tumbled. “I love you,” I contributed. And then I buttoned up.