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I’m not in with this mystery. Somebody steady me. Cool ocean breezes don’t make me laugh. I’m in with noisy metal little nils. A million apologies. I must have made more. You were sensitive, you needed them No you weren’t and you didn’t. In fact . . . oh forget it! In the middle of the ocean reflected with the moon, good place to show; probably no one knows you there. Your leaving, the thrown rope up to sky, climbed up for real goodbye. I realized my reason insufficient; you must have considered this. How my specific lean to you smelled like an old paper cup of funny water and you were not very thirsty. You came unbidden initially and often. A field and flickering wicks of foxes from here to there. You. Holding Hell at bay. Back to ground, I see you on the moon with your mirror catching action on the parallax. Some kind of wise guy.

As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal. I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace, And envy them—they are so far away from me! Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule. And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little, Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico! But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual, Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand! The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers, Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue), And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit. The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood. First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion. His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white. Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion, And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often. But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife. Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth. He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white. But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls. Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years, And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason. But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick. Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand, Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably. She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes. She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek. Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too; His eyes show it. Turning from this couple, I see there is an intermission in the concert. The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws (The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue), And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school. Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets. Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim That are so popular here. Look—I told you! It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny. An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan. She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink. “My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too If he were here. But his job is with a bank there. Look, here is a photograph of him.” And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame. We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place. That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter. The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here. His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower. Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us. There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces. There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue. There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige. Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders. There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased, But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand. And there is the home of the little old lady— She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself. How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara! We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son. We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses. What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do. And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.

First you must have unbelievable faith in water, in women dancing like hands playing harps for straw to grow stalks of fire. You must understand the year that begins with your hands tied behind your back, worship of dark totems weighed down with night birds that shift their weight & leave holes in the sky. You must know what’s behind the shadow of a treadmill— its window the moon’s reflection & silent season reaching into red sunlight hills. You must know the hard science of building walls that sway with summer storms. Locking arms to a frame of air, frame of oak rooted to ancient ground where the door’s constructed last, just wide enough for two lovers to enter on hands & knees. You must dance the weaverbird’s song for mending water & light with straw, earth, mind, bright loom of grain untortured by bushels of thorns.

Into the rood wood, where the grain's current splits around the stones of its knots, carve eyelashes and eyelids. Dye the knots, too—indigo, ink-black, vermillion irises. These will be his eyes, always open, willing themselves not to close when dust rises or sweat falls, eyes witnessing, dimly, the eclipse that shawls the shuddering hill, Jerusalem's naked shoulder. The body itself? From a wick that still whiffs of smolder, wax, because wax sloughs a smooth skein on the fingers just below sensation's threshold. Prop the cross upright and let the tear-hot wax trickle, slow, clot, taper into a torso, thighs, calves, feet. Of Gideon Bible paper, thinner than skin, cut him his scrap of cloth; embed iron shavings in his forehead, and, as the wax cools, scrape the rust off an old fuel can to salt the whole wound that is the man. Cry, if you feel like crying, and if no one else is there. Then set it on the counter with your other wares.

The climate thinks with its knees. When the wound opens, music suspires. Opening a gate, I gain the color below the roof tiles and the tree limbs. You gave me the late quartets a black bird and a white and the Garden of Eden. Your death belongs to anyone but me. I wonder so as not to forget. At night in Brooklyn, the tendrils of a white sex denuded the sky, shimmering at the tall needle- ends of buildings. The traffic was identical in the spring. I am protected by only music I cannot remember. Why is it that the best minds ended by composing fairy tales? Death swarms. There are many new beings, the odor of hearts. The order of the hour of mating ends. These are many new butterflies, and death is no longer to be eyed by a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, slyly, as though the future were a man’s sleeve or stride. I wonder so as not to end dinner in a farmhouse. We sat at a low table. Our host was dying but unaware, as she would be murdered the next day in a distant city. There is an out- side of language that is not silence. There is an outside of God that is not isolation, a domestic animal teaching a dying woman to hunt. A wound opens. A gate opens. Tendrils climb.

What should the wars do with these jigging fools? The man behind the book may not be man, His own man or the book’s or yet the time’s, But still be whole, deciding what he can In praise of politics or German rimes; But the intellectual lights a cigarette And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile Is the merest hyphen—lest he should forget What he has been resuming all the while. He talks to overhear, she to withdraw To some interior feminine fireside Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride, Making him think of cats, a stray of which Some days sets up a howling in his brain, Pure interference such as this neat bitch Seems to create from listening disdain. But talk is all the value, the release, Talk is the very fillip of an act, The frame and subject of the masterpiece Under whose film of age the face is cracked. His own forehead glows like expensive wood, But back of it the mind is disengaged, Self-sealing clock recording bad and good At constant temperature, intact, unaged. But strange, his body is an open house Inviting every passerby to stay; The city to and fro beneath his brows Wanders and drinks and chats from night to day. Think of a private thought, indecent room Where one might kiss his daughter before bed! Life is embarrassed; shut the family tomb, Console your neighbor for his recent dead; Do something! die in Spain or paint a green Gouache, go into business (Rimbaud did), Or start another Little Magazine, Or move in with a woman, have a kid. Invulnerable, impossible, immune, Do what you will, your will will not be done But dissipate the light of afternoon Till evening flickers like the midnight sun, And midnight shouts and dies: I’d rather be A milkman walking in his sleep at dawn Bearing fat quarts of cream, and so be free, Crossing alone and cold from lawn to lawn. I’d rather be a barber and cut hair Than walk with you in gilt museum halls, You and the puma-lady, she so rare Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls. Go take yourselves apart, but let me be The fault you find with everyman. I spit, I laugh, I fight; and you, l’homme qui rît ; Swallow your stale saliva, and still sit.

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed bugs and mikes, intercepted letters full of passionate declarations, contradictory intelligence— how attached he’d grown to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging the influx of intelligence with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost like love: he felt the cool gray eyes of his superiors trained on him, rebuking him for swerving, for letting himself go—such tender obsession occasioned by the file! Not quite the professional style he or the Agency expected… But such official loyalties seemed mere protocol to this!— what was wrong with him, he wondered, that he construed the documents to make the subject seem a hero, a bastard whose sole patrimony was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword left by an unknown father beneath a stone? And yet his exploits in the tabloids, the headlines screaming, SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN! HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC were these heroic different in kind from the rumors, unverified, of a rape, a murder? —But to have met undisguised the devouring monster! To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze… On balance, for such a life, the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad: think of the opportunities for evil a man of such qualities must have had! How well he knew him—an essential innocence that followed impulse, blind to protocol, not noticeably more kind than he was cruel. But to stamp Case Closed and cease gathering intelligence, to give the hero up, almost, he admitted, like a lover…: such limits the hero unknowingly transgressed! And the Agency, cold-blooded where limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?— more like a second backbone!), committed to keeping order, could not afford such sentiments—the Chief of Security felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence should lead to this… He leaned back in his chair and sighed: a forged genealogy certifying that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual assistance pact to aid in taking back the usurped crown: he could see them now, the wind blowing lightly, the two of them sweating as they climbed the cliff, discussing the terms, exchanging information, intelligence— how would his own face look staring down across the sea as he gestured earnestly toward some island, saying, “According to our sources, the tax revenues…” And then, edging the hero closer to the cliff, pointing out the harbor, he’d push.

Shiraishi called upon the great sky cock, wanted an explanation, wondered, why the echo of form without the wisdom, why the bent wit without the timing. Wondered, as I have, how a man, bare upon the bed may rise as if in praise but fail to be grateful for the gift at hand. O dick of questionable devise. O schlong of longing, as present but ultimately unknowable as your maker, I would worship at the fount if I had more faith, if I knew your weeping eye was on me alone.

That she was not pretty she knew. The flowers delivered into her hands post-concert by the young girl, pretty, would be acknowledged only. To display was to invite comparison. Skilled at withholding, she withheld; it was a kind of giving. As when meditation is a kind of action, a way of leaning into music the way one leans into winter wind, the way a mule leans into a harness, the way a lover leans into the point of deepest penetration. After a ship’s prow cuts the water, the water rushes back twice as hard.

In one corner of the ward somebody was eating a raw chicken. The cheerful nurses did not see. With the tube down my throat I could not tell them. Nor did they notice the horror show on the TV set suspended over my windowless bed. The screen was dead but a torn face was clear. I did not see my own in a mirror for weeks. When it happened, when I dared to face my face after the ravaging, it was not mine but something whittled, honed down to a sly resemblance. It, even the mirror, the pale room, the oxygen tank neat and black as a bomb in its portable crate— all was hallucination. But the bloody rooster, the stray pieces of bodies slung into dreamless nooks, the white-haired doll whimpering on a gift counter— those were real. I keep living there. Foolish. I am home. Half safe.