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A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol: a break from the monotony of highway nicotine— most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth. This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap: the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree. Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul, this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.

Empty air has its own mechanism,me dijo. Its gears accord to whim. We go out only when we have to,me dijo. We have hidden things for breathing. You can't understand it prepped that way,me dijo. It always changes, but never readily enough. Some things we say more of and then again,me dijo. They always mean less once pre-written. The context connections are far too frail,me dijo. To make them you need to pixel-point time. There are no click-in-n-out pictures,me dijo. You facet your eyes to see them multiply. There are hands held out everywhere,me dijo. We have to be careful what to step around/in. Sometimes we come this close too late,me dijo. Then we have to wait for inertia to embrace us. We are the hungry, hungry: so ravenous,me dijo. We will tear at your insides and lick them clean.

The ladies men admire, I’ve heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light; They’d rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints ... So far, I’ve had no complaints.

Yes, I've been in Rome, at least two times, though on second thought it probably was three or maybe five. When was the last? That's easy, for I remember it exactly— at least what it was like when I first left. You mean a part of you remains in Rome? Not really, for when I was first in Rome I was truly there. That ended the second time, though I only realized it when I first left. So when you were in Rome your last time was consumed by thoughts of leaving? Not exactly. As time went on, I came around at last, thinking: obsess about leaving and nothing lasts; I'll end up never having been in Rome. Yet back then did you know just what exactly it meant to be in Rome during that time you thought about leaving, even if it was then you saw what you'd lose if you had left? Even at the time when I first left I'd no idea. But you're not saying the last you saw of Rome was your third visit, for wasn't it earlier that you felt you'd never leave Rome? No, all that happened there my second time, though to this day I feel about Rome exactly what I felt from the first. What that means exactly is hard to say, for perhaps I never left, since after all, my being there the first time didn't involve my leaving. Tell me then, at last, was it once or twice? were you really in Rome? Why certainly—I'm sure, I know I was, and on top of that you might even say I was there time and again, everything there exactly just the same, or like my last time in Rome, me feeling as if I'd never really left. But tell me now precisely, was the last you saw of Rome indeed that second time? To be exact, it happened the very first time that I saw Rome, darkness falling as I left causing me to see what simply couldn't last.

this South American up here on a Gugg walked in with his whore and she sat on the edge of my bed and crossed her fine legs and I kept looking at her legs and he pulled at his stringy necktie and I had a hangover and he asked me WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE AMERICAN POETS? and I told him I didn’t think very much of the American poets and then he went on to ask some other very dull questions (as his whore’s legs layed along the side of my brain) like WELL? YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT IF YOU WERE TEACHING A CLASS AND ONE OF THE STUDENTS ASKED YOU WHICH AMERICAN POETS THEY SHOULD READ WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM? she crossed her legs as I watched and I thought I could knock him out with one punch rape her in 4 minutes catch a train for L.A. get off in Arizona and walk off into the desert and I couldn’t tell him that I would never teach a class that along with not liking American poetry that I didn’t like American classes either or the job that they would expect me to do, so I said Whitman, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence’ poems about reptiles and beasts, Auden. and then I realized that Whitman was the only true American, that Eliot was not an American somehow and the others certainly not, and he knew it too he knew that I had fucked up but I made no apologies thought some more about rape I almost loved the woman but I knew that when she walked out that I would never see her again and we shook hands and the Gugg said he’d send me the article when it came out but I knew that he didn’t have an article and he knew it too and then he said I will send you some of my poems translated into English and I said fine and I watched them walk out of the place I watched her highheels clack down the tall green steps and then both of them were gone but I kept remembering her dress sliding all over her like a second skin and I was wild with mourning and love and sadness and being a fool unable to communicate anything and I walked in and finished that beer cracked another put on my ragged king’s coat and walked out into the New Orleans street and that very night I sat with my friends and acted vile and the ass much mouth and villainy and cruelness and they never knew why.

Late summer, late afternoon, my work interrupted by bees who claim my tea, even my pen looks flower-good to them. I warn a delivery man that my bees, who all summer have been tame as cows, now grow frantic, aggressive, difficult to shoo from the house. I blame the second blooms come out in hot colors, defiant vibrancy— unexpected from cottage cosmos, nicotianna, and bean vine. But those bees know, I’m told by the interested delivery man, they have only so many days to go. He sighs at sweetness untasted. Still warm in the day, we inspect the bees. This kind stranger knows them in intimate detail. He can name the ones I think of as shopping ladies. Their fur coats ruffed up, yellow packages tucked beneath their wings, so weighted with their finds they ascend in slow circles, sometimes drop, while other bees whirl madly, dance the blossoms, ravish broadly so the whole bed bends and bounces alive. He asks if I have kids, I say not yet. He has five, all boys. He calls the honeybees his girls although he tells me they’re ungendered workers who never produce offspring. Some hour drops, the bees shut off. In the long, cool slant of sun, spent flowers fold into cups. He asks me if I’ve ever seen a Solitary Bee where it sleeps. I say I’ve not. The nearest bud’s a long-throated peach hollyhock. He cradles it in his palm, holds it up so I spy the intimacy of the sleeping bee. Little life safe in a petal, little girl, your few furious buzzings as you stir stay with me all winter, remind me of my work undone.

(' Operation Iraqi Freedom ') It felt odd from the start, this war. At the start, the 'death' of Saddam when Baghdad was bombed, but he's not dead, a bizarre Zapata, and then the Scuds fired at  Kuwait but they weren't Scuds, the 'chemical weapons of mass destruction factory',  with earth banks and barbed wire which wasn't one, however, and the 'column of tanks destroyed leaving Basra' which was three tanks, the endless 'securing' of towns and cities which aren't secure even allowing for the distinction that 'secure' does not mean 'safe', the 'Uprising' in Basra which no one could find there... Once there were poems in inverted commas, this is a war of inverted commas. Once I wrote that 'poems about poems don't seem as abstract as they once did' (although you don't need quotes, quoting yourself) and the Oxford Companion decided this meant I was no longer being abstract,  when in fact I meant that poems about poems (in that case partly a child) are not abstract because the abstract in them works through to a deeper real. Will this war work through to the deeper real at last? Now it seems again, however, that it feels odd, this war. I have paid it careful attention for almost a fortnight and what I would note here is that singular oddness of feeling it evokes: one is always at a tangent to it somehow, albeit with despair's edgy wit. The deaths have black solidity, as if from method, no white napalm suddenness...I thought: is it farce encoring tragedy, but there is too much earnest passion in the evil, and one watches that eros like watching spiders breed: 'It is what they do on this planet,' as a child's science fiction exercise might observe. Spiders feed in street windows broken by children's bones flying, but the US polls say yes: who want this so much. Who know what they do and also that they want those inverted commas, George- Bush-as-by-George-Orwell.            Is the US need for war not 'a way to teach Americans geography' as Bierce is often quoted, but a greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather, not met by food or sex or fashion, by any intimate geography but this? But then the abstract is not the inverted commas, either, and it is those they want: the quotes which in two days will expire, the world left gasping with winded logic, the new skulls on dresses in the marketplace, damp empty dusty shoes. Günter Grass called this a 'wanted war' and perhaps that desire accounts for the oddncss of feeling: the animal impossibility of communication. In a damp concrete corner in the market, one's self-sense crouches close, alert for friendly fire.

The last string quartet (Leoš Janáček and Kamila Stösslová) She reads romances, she spells poorly, she’s full-breasted, broad in the beam, matron in a cloche hat, bulky knee-length skirt, apron, thick calves, white stockings, Mary Janes. Her heels go click click on the pavement. She has those dark Gypsy eyes and the wide laugh. He loves it when she tosses her head like that. And here she is in long skirt and embroidered blouse, posing by her dwarf ornamental orange tree on the balcony: high pale forehead, stacked dark hair, heavy jaw, bust cleaving forward like a prow. And here she is on holiday with her husband the businessman the perpetual traveller with the commanding walk and striped tie and blunt mustache. “Two decidedly Jewish types,” writes Zdenka Janáčková, J’s wife: they send her, in the last year of the war, bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese from the husband’s military contacts. * “My dear dark dove,” J calls Kamila, “My little one.” * He has taken dictation from every fountain in Hukvaldy, where he was born to endless mumbled rosaries of water. He notes the gush and prattle of the Fox’s Well as the beech tree flashes its sleight of leaf, and fox kits hide in the rocks; the public fountain, “a fine of ten crowns on those who fail to replace the cover”: and when the cover is replaced the fountain closes her eyes; the castle fountain, handsome, broad and brimming, but scuttled into pipes for manor farm, brewery and slaughterhouse where the stream blurts out in blood; and the little well hidden through tall grass at Kazničov, springing up through the roots of three lime trees, “Helisov’s Well,” chants the little girl, and he notes that too, the quavering fall of the name; and watches water bugs skitter and green moss, darkling, at the bottom, and shards of sky. * Bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese. Kamila knows nothing of music, she worries about her dress for the première of Jenůfa in Vienna. She has two little boys, Rudi and Otto. Otto the baby swims on her hand and she leans over him, soft as night, one eyebrow tilted up as at a dream of which she is hardly aware. * “She was of medium height, dark, curly-haired like a Gypsy woman,” writes Zdenka, “with great, black bulging eyes. The voice was unpleasant, shrill.” * —That once again he saw “her raven hair, all loose,” and she was barefoot in the house and she climbed a ladder to pick apricots from the tree and she refused the gift of the knitted silver bag “And your eye has a strange depth, it’s so deep it doesn’t shine.” * Night leans hugely. He sleeps alone, in his study, upstairs at the Organ School. Zdenka sleeps in their villa across the yard. * He who had scrawled on his cuffs, on envelope scraps, on market paper, in his little pad, robins’ trills, girls’ chatter at the railway station, fox bark, thrush whistle, hen cackle, kitten mew, bee hum, “the chord of stalagmites covered with hoarfrost,” the airy, bell-like patter of fountain spray, scored in a notebook years before Kamila in a notebook 2 A.M. 24 February 1903 his daughter’s dying words— Olga— dying, age 21— in a notebook— “Now I remember that I’m supposed to die” (a little string of quarter notes, B and middle C)— “What walks we took on the corso”—“We should say so much—” He tells her, “You are the most beautiful among them,” and she smiles, in his notebook she smiles. And, down to a G, “Something gets lost so well, no one can find it.” In a notebook— 2:45 A.M. 25 February 1903, Olga, her light hair spread across the pillow, sighs “A-y-a,” two drawn out B’s, scrupulously noted by her father, and in the margin, “God be with you, my soul.” * What can be assimilated into song? * The rivers of Lachia: the River Lubina falls from a ridge of the Radhošť Mountain into an abyss, to seethe of silver, crash of dark; the Ondřejnice dabbles through the village of Mĕrkovice, past mossy banks, shallow, beery-blonde, tepid, where goslings swim dunking for weeds and bugs; and the River Ostravice is the color of steel, and smites the wrist with cold: and all the Lachian rivers run through cello depths, horn hurtle, foam-spray of glockenspiel, clash of cymbals at the smoky inn where Sofie Harabisová flies from arm to arm in the glare, smoke, sweat and stamp of feet: “Where is the poet Šťastný or Professor Batĕk or Mrs. Marie Jungova now? Gone, all gone, those who took part that wild summer night, forty-five years ago!” * Kamila reads romances. “There’s no love just innocent friendship. My husband’s away all the time he’s always got things to do.” * “Your raven hair— I write these lines so they’ll be read, and yet unread because unanswered. So it’s like a stone falling into water—” “You’re the star I look for in evening—” “I was your shadow—” “Even thoughts become flesh—” in the fountain bubbling up among the lime tree roots, mumbling its prayers over and over, tonguing the stones. * Now after the war, no need for bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese delivered by special connection and Czechoslovakia is free in the Sinfonietta, in the razzle of brass: “I’m really an ordinary woman Your heart would stop aching if you saw me more.” There’s Rudi, there’s Otto, and her husband always dealing in his antiques. No we cannot attend the première in Prague no we cannot. Now after the war. For that cold: boil three onions with marjoram and lemon peel and drink it like tea with sugar. Your raven hair. I was your shadow, when you reached for the apricots. * Gut scrapings: the bow scrapes sunlight from that summer day at the spa at Luhačovice where she sat on the grass “like an exhausted little bird”: “Dear Madam, Accept these few roses as a token” where she sat on the grass, scrape sunlight from the inner petals, scrape the dark from her pupil, so deep it doesn’t shine. Madam: “Silence goes to sleep under every tree.” Under the tilt of her shadowed brow. His baby son died those years ago and Olga’s hair spreads wide across the pillow where she sighs. He sleeps alone it’s like a stone falling. * Lullaby, bee swarms, gut scraping, fracture, a waltz falters, the schmaltzy tune with raven hair whispers, breaks off, and the hand she lets him touch, for the first time, she does not draw away the first time, “your little hand,” in eleven years, under the linden boughs. “That dark Jewess,” writes Zdenka, “I rather liked her at first, but I held my position. You know how artists are. They have to be handled. I would not let him go.” * “These letters were written in fire.” Zdenka must understand: Kamila is the Gypsy girl, Káťa Kabanová, the Vixen, Aljeja, the little hidden well by the lime trees at Kazničov, the military fanfare on the promenade, trumpet, oboe, piccolo squeal when the Austrians march out, the Empire crashes, and the country is, like the high-wire flute notes, finally, free. Zdenka must acknowledge this: These letters were written in fire. * By now Kamila’s boys have been stuffed into trousers, stiff collars, and neckties. They’ve grown leggy, their faces are plump. It’s a question of tempi slightly retarded, a vertigo the viola suffers, following the violins. Silence goes to sleep under every tree. The cello drags gusts of confetti, repetition, emotion is all repetition pulled by twisted horsehair out of gut. My dear dark dove, a form of mourning, that too is a form of repetition. Why don’t you write. So when, those last days, she has come at last, with little Otto, respectably to visit the upstairs room he has built and furnished for her in his summer cottage in Hukvaldy, furnished according to his dream— “I want to have the painting of those two cherubs, a writing desk, a communal table, a comfortable bed, perhaps of brass, a wardrobe with mirrored doors, a marble wash-stand, and four chairs, each from a different part of the world—” (the question is, what can be assimilated into song) she peels oranges, makes tea, they shop in the market and play and walk and August 8, on the walk up the Babí hůra Hill, Otto gets lost in the woods and ravines— Something gets lost so well, no one can find it— and Leoš seeks and seeks the child in drenching rain as if searching for his own son in the woods and ravines under the wing of her darkly tilting brow and returns fevered. In a notebook no one writes, no one scores his cough. 10 August 1928 J consents to go to the hospital in Ostrava pneumonia—deterioration—sedative What walks we took on the corso Something gets lost so well So it’s like a stone Silence goes to sleep under every tree I was your shadow I burned your letters but I keep the ash No one scored the sleep rattle in Ostrava 12 August 10 A.M. Sunday Kamila at his side, a heavy woman who spells poorly, broad in the beam, with thick knees and white stockings, who reads romances, who will die of cancer seven years later at 43 and be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Písek. “And I kissed you And you are sitting beside me and I am happy and at peace In such a way do the days pass for the angels.” No one scored the sleep rattle Sunday 12 August. Only then, by his order, Zdenka is told and arrives by train. These letters were written in fire.

Winter throws his great white shield on the ground, breaking thin arms of twisting branches, and then howls on the north side of the Black Mesa a deep, throaty laughter. Because of him we have to sell our cattle that rake snow for stubble. Having lived his whole life in a few weeks, slow and pensive he walks away, dragging his silver-stream shield down branches and over the ground, he keeps walking slowly away into death bravely.

Sometimes I wish that I were dead As dead can be, but then again At times when I've been nicely fed On caviar or guinea hen And I am wearing something new And reassuring, I decide It might be better to eschew My tendency to cyanide.