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A little loam and topsoil is a lot. —Heather McHugh A vacant lot, maybe, but even such lit vacancy as interstate motels announce can look, well, pretty damned inviting after a long day’s drive, especially if the day has been oppressed by manic truckers, detours, endless road construction. And this poorly measured, semi- rectangle, projected and plotted with the familiar little flags upon a spread of neglected terra firma also offers brief apprehension, which—let’s face it, whether pleasing or encumbered by anxiety—dwells luxuriously in potential. Me? Well, I like a little space between shopping malls, and while this one may never come to be much of a garden, once we rip the old tires from the brambles and bag the trash, we might just glimpse the lot we meant, the lot we hoped to find.

each  night  I  count  ghostlets  of  how  my  body  was wanted  /  behind with deadheading  /  rose hips have come  /  behind with actions that count only  /  when the  timing  is  right  /  I  took out  a contract  /  it was imprudent  in  value  /  behind  with  asepsis  /  hello microbes  of  my  body  /  we   sleep  together  /  hello cats  /  I  make  my  bed  daily  /  of the three types of hair on the sheets  /  only one is human  /  I count the bedrooms  /  I never had sex in  /  but there were cars /   wild    woods   /   blackfly    has    got   to   all   the nasturtiums  /  you cannot dig  up  a grapevine  /  and expect shelter to come  /  I am touched by  your letter /  writes  a  friend  /   you  prevaricate  desire   /   says message  /  all  this  fucking  / with  no  hands  on  me

Song from Abdelazar Love in Fantastic Triumph sat, Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed, For whom Fresh pains he did Create, And strange Tyrannic power he showed; From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire, Which round about, in sport he hurled; But ’twas from mine he took desire Enough to undo the Amorous World. From me he took his sighs and tears, From thee his Pride and Cruelty; From me his Languishments and Fears, And every Killing Dart from thee; Thus thou and I, the God have armed, And set him up a Deity; But my poor Heart alone is harmed, Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.

I Today I dissected a squid, the late acacia tossing its pollen across the black of the lab bench. In a few months the maples will be bleeding. That was the thing: there was no blood only textures of gills creased like satin, suction cups as planets in rows. Be careful not to cut your finger

When I think of my kindness which is tentative and quiet And of yours which is intense and free, I am in elaboration of knowledge impatient Of even the patientest immobility. I think of my kind, which is the human fortune To live in the world and make war among its friends, And of my version, which is to be moderately peaceful, And of your version; and must make amends By my slow word to your wish which is mobile, Active and moving in its generous sphere. This is the natural and the supernatural Of humankind of which I grow aware.

’Ασíνην τε . . . — Iliad All morning long we looked around the citadel starting from the shaded side there where the sea green and without lustre — breast of a slain peacock — received us like time without an opening in it. Veins of rock dropped down from high above, twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive at the water’s touch, while the eye following them struggled to escape the monotonous see-saw motion, growing weaker and weaker. On the sunny side a long empty beach and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls. No living thing, the wild doves gone and the king of Asini, whom we’ve been trying to find for two years now, unknown, forgotten by all, even by Homer, only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain, thrown here like the gold burial mask. You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light like a dry jar in dug earth: the same sound that our oars make in the sea. The king of Asini a void under the mask everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’ and his children statues and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships anchored in a vanished port: under the mask a void. Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence a dark spot that you see travelling like a fish in the dawn calm of the sea: a void everywhere with us. And the bird, a wing broken, that flew away last winter — tabernacle of life — and the young woman who left to play with the dog-teeth of summer and the soul that sought the lower world gibbering and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the torrent of the sun with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow. And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself does there really exist among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows and curves does there really exist here where one meets the path of rain, wind and ruin does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the tenderness of those who’ve waned so strangely in our lives, those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with the sea’s boundlessness or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending like the branches of a terrible willow tree heaped in unremitting despair while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes uprooted in the mud image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness has turned to stone: the poet a void. Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring, and from the depths of the cave a startled bat hit the light as an arrow hits a shield: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’. If only that could be the king of Asini we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon the stones. Asini, summer ’38—Athens, Jan. ’40

“I want to understand the joy I felt as I was letting him go.” —Hwang Jini As I listened to the fabric of his jacket assume the casual shape of leave-taking. I learned how to unhinge form from breath unbind & unknot the numinous black, so that again I was a woman & an artist whose ravens fell onto the ondol floor like cords, not a suicide’s hair floating in a village well & souring the water. Callus on my finger, cushion for the kayabam, we shall pluck the string to forget triumphs before royalty taxing us for a celadon barge, shall sweep princes’ names into a crevice where we store besotted & sudden proposals to suck a jujube’s succulent orb, as if we required their directions to resist the stone in which a waiting life will crack a rooting. Tendril of song, evening calm, guide my sense of use across the instrument transforming my desire for vengeance into forest hearth smoke from which I fled as a pretty child, selected by the king’s men. Help me never to forget the elation I felt when my first patron swore by the river’s force his love for me, & I understood its swelling to rush & breach could teach me to survive it by emptying myself to play a perfect note.

Kiss’d yestreen, and kiss’d yestreen, Up the Gallowgate, down the Green: I’ve woo’d wi’ lords, and woo’d wi’ lairds, I’ve mool’d wi carles and mell’d wi’ cairds, I’ve kiss’d wi’ priests— ‘twas done i’ the dark, Twice in my gown and thrice in my sark; But priest, nor lord, nor loon can gie Sic kindly kisses as he gae me.

My breasts are small and my eyes round. Your legs long and cool as the freshet that runs down from the fountain. I bite your neck, it’s sturdy, still not yet ripe, like a walnut that has just now fallen. You clamber on top, start kissing my middle, strew wet wavelets all over my skin, now up here, now down there, like the first fat drops to fall before the storm starts, splat, splat, splat. We’ve gone to sleep back to chest, the way lips rejoin after sighing.

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings we owned that year, it was Red— skittish and prone to explode even at fourteen years—who’d let me hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke his coarse chin whiskers and take his soft meaty underlip in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just so that I could smell the long way his breath had come from the rain and the sun, the lungs and the heart, from a world that meant no harm.