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We low on daddies hereabouts The fathers all but gone Our lack a weight a shape a drybone lake By war by drink by gun by drift The father’s all but gone.

Now that I know That passion warms little Of flesh in the mold, And treasure is brittle, I’ll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound. August 1922

What you cannot see through those windows beyond the bare hill is the hand resting on the table, is the man lying still on the bed, is the vague gesture of  the young woman in the hallway as she remembers something that happened yesterday, is the mouse hesitating under the draining board, is the twelve year old boy putting on a record of Wiener Blut that he once saw his parents waltzing to. All that you see is the all-but-naked child on the all-but-naked hill against a naked sky, as if  what you could not see were the question and she the reply.

XI 1 Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years’ drink! _______________ Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete  which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities. 2 When beldams dig clams their fat hams (it’s always beldams) balanced near Tellus’s hide, this rhinoceros pelt, these lumped stone—buffoonery of midges on a bull’s thigh—invoke,—what you will: birth’s glut, awe at God’s craft, youth’s poverty, evolution of a child’s caper, man’s poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun’s self turned hen’s rump. Cross a knife and fork and listen to the church bells! It is the harvest moon’s made wine of our blood. Up over the dark factory into the blue glare start the young poplars. They whisper: It is Sunday! It is Sunday! But the laws of the country have been stripped bare of leaves. Out over the marshes flickers our laughter. A lewd anecdote’s the chase. On through the vapory heather! And there at banter’s edge the city looks at us sidelong with great eyes—lifts to its lips heavenly milk! Lucina, O Lucina! beneficent cow, how have we offended thee? ________________ Hilariously happy because of some obscure wine of thefancy which they have drunk four rollicking companionstake delight in the thought that they have thus evaded thestringent laws of the county. Seeing the distant city bathedin moonlight and staring seriously at them they liken themoon to a cow and its light to milk.

beside me in this garden are huge and daisy-like (why not? are not oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?), shrubby and thick-stalked, the leaves pointing up the stems from which the flowers burst in sunbursts. I love this garden in all its moods, even under its winter coat of salt hay, or now, in October, more than half gone over: here a rose, there a clump of aconite. This morning one of the dogs killed a barn owl. Bob saw it happen, tried to intervene. The airedale snapped its neck and left it lying. Now the bird lies buried by an apple tree. Last evening from the table we saw the owl, huge in the dusk, circling the field on owl-silent wings. The first one ever seen here: now it’s gone, a dream you just remember. The dogs are barking. In the studio music plays and Bob and Darragh paint. I sit scribbling in a little notebook at a garden table, too hot in a heavy shirt in the mid-October sun into which the Korean mums all face. There is a dull book with me, an apple core, cigarettes, an ashtray. Behind me the rue I gave Bob flourishes. Light on leaves, so much to see, and all I really see is that owl, its bulk troubling the twilight. I’ll soon forget it: what is there I have not forgot? Or one day will forget: this garden, the breeze in stillness, even the words, Korean mums.

April 1992 something was wrong when buses didn't come streets were no longer streets how easy hands became weapons blows gunfire rupturing the night the more we run the more we burn o god show us the way lead us spare us from ever turning into walking matches amidst so much gasoline

At a book of details Of all the moments when knowledge is acquired. A sort of expanded balloon Sighs and says, “We are what came before.” “The storm in the window of the mind,” The sleeping sister says while she’s walking around Wonderland watching A cat touching down and talking. Not a car in sight. A cemetery seen from the air. All the obelisks you could ever ask for.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge sedge Grasslike or rushlike plant that grows in wet areas. has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard haggard Wild looking and so woe- begone begone To happen, occur, transpire ? The squirrel’s granary is full, And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew, And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads meads Meadow , Full beautiful—a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan made sweet moan Compare "virgin-choir to make delicious moan" from Ode to Psyche(30), written between April 21 and 30, 1819. Noted by John Barnard in John Keats: The Complete Poems(Penguin, 2003). I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery’s song. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew honey wild, and manna-dew Echoes manna in the Bible, first described in Exodus, 16:14-21, 31. The Israelites eat the manna, a food miraculously supplied in the wilderness after the dew has lifted, in the morning: “The house of Israel called it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31, NRSV). , And sure in language strange she said— ‘I love thee true’. She took me to her Elfin grot Elfin grot An elf’s grotto , And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four. And there she lullèd me asleep, And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— The latest dream I ever dreamt On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—‘ La Belle Dame sans Merci La Belle Dame sans Merci This phrase—and the poem’s title—is from Alain Chartier’s courtly French ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1424). Keats wrote the poem in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 21, 1819. Thee hath Thee hath The version of this poem has “Thee hath” (see The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 1958); though other versions of this poem reads “Hath thee” in thrall!’ I saw their starved lips in the gloam gloam Twilight; Keats coined the word from “gloaming” , With horrid warning gapèd wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side. And this is why I sojourn sojourn To stay or visit temporarily here, Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.

En Cuba tuve— I’m tired of hearing your complaints. All that whining about elexilio, the tragedy of loss, In Cuba I had— the catalogue of things, the status, the riches, the opulence of it all. I had a mate. We were a pair. Our mistress was young. We were young. We would dangle on her ear Concentrate on what you have. Forget the past. and go out on the town. Mojitos at La Floridita, dancing at the Tropicana and later No, don’t tell me about later. in the jewel case, an aqua Tiffany box with white satin interior, we Tiffany’s? From New York? I didn’t know you— would lie together in the pillowy luxury, my ruby top layer and his aligned, our bases Please you needn’t— touching, my diamond waist and his forming a continuous line. Sometimes we would switch backs, I’d push I understand that in communities of exile the population my piercing needle through his back, his through mine. That’s tends to lose ground politically as assimilation takes place, that how I liked it best, a little harsh, but sweet. Tu y yo, you and I, is what she called us because our very longing is a constitutive ingredient of not only the condition of exile but— body parts were paired, he and I, forming a single unit, an I and a thou. Apart Surely you have adjusted. Look, you’re mounted on a ring, you are independent, and prized. Very attractive for your age, I might add. we are nothing. Longing doesn’t quite— One adapts? As to an amputation. And La Revolución? Don’t make me vomit.

Michael Basinski creates visual poems that are colorful cacophonies of text and shape. His handwritten poems, which often serve as scores for equally exuberant sound poems, are filled to the margin with broken lines of text that curl into one another, read from different directions, and are often filled with nonsense words of his own invention. "Labile" is a good example of a visual poem that defiantly spurns convention. It is a neo-Dadaist poem intent on shaking the reader out of quiet acceptance and somnolence.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>