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1/ THE MOUTH Not English Somali Italian French the mouth blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Not the Absolute Speaker of the News, not crisis chatter's famine/flame, the mouth blown open at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Speaks back to the dead at KM4, old men in macawis, beards dyed with henna, the women wearing blue jeans under black chadors. Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were, the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces, the mouth of smoke at KM4 mouths syllables of smoke never heard before. 2/ THE CONCERT Lake water in smooth still sun moves in and out of synch with the violin playing at the villa— the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand making some frantic motion to come closer, go away— it's hard to say what's being said, who's being summoned from the dead, from red sand drifting across the sheen of the shining floor. The pianist's hands taking wing to hover above a chord become the flight path of a marabou stork crashing down on carrion, the piano levitating up and up above red sand that it starts to float across the way a camel's humps far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise until mirage overbrims itself and everything into its shimmering disappears. And the ones who died the day before, blown up at the crossroads at KM4, scanning the notice board for scholarship results, put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud. 3/ ORACLE The little man carved out of bone shouts something to the world the world can't hear. All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand, die out in sun just clearing the plain. Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar: an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock. The AK talks the talk of what guns talk— not rage or death or clichés of killing, but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air. No fear when it jams, no enemy running away, no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst— forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him. The AK wants to tell a different truth— a truth ungarbled that is so obvious no one could possibly mistake its meaning. If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel what you'll see is a boy with trousers rolled above his ankles. You'll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables that have the rapid-fire clarity of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute. 4/ "BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS." And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap, at your elbow in the mess hall, waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine, the boy with his trousers rolled appears like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen, haunting whatever the cursor tries to track. So he liked to play at games with other youths? The English has the slightly too-formal sound of someone being poured through the sieve of another language. Syllable after syllable piling up and up until the boy, buried to the neck, slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his. As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame. 5/ TIME TO FORGET There's a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand. Over there's a water tower, under that's the bore hole and here the body asks and asks about the role it's asked to play: no matter how it's dressed. Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena who eats even the bones and shits bone-white scat from the calcium. No matter if it sleeps under a dome of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun, or hides in a spider hole or walks around in uniform behind plate glass, the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown. On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob, and of the two, who is the more human? On the table there isn't a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey that keeps whispering,It's OK to be this way, nobody will know. And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton. 6/ THE COMING At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air and hangs there beautiful and repulsive. Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds don't stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound— the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out as you go round and round the roundabout at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir are all pretending to be dead. The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses, Hey, can't you get my flak jacket adjusted so it doesn't crush my collar?

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.