poetry corner

I can't undress from the pressure of leaves,

the lobed edges leaning toward the window

like an unwanted male gaze on the backside,

(they wish to bless and bless and hush).

What if I want to go devil instead? Bow

down to the madness that makes me. Drone

of the neighbor's mowing, a red mailbox flag

erected, a dog bark from three houses over,

and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting,

dead branch breaking, but not breaking, stones

from the sea next to stones from the river,

unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat,

a siren whining high toward town repeating

that the emergency is not here, repeating

that this loud silence is only where you live.

The summer everyone left for the moon

even those yet to be born. And the dead

who can't vacation here but met us all there

by the veil between worlds. The number one song

in America was "In the Year 2525"

because who has ever lived in the present

when there's so much of the future

to continue without us.

How the best lover won't need to forgive you

and surely take everything off your hands

without having to ask, without knowing

your name, no matter the number of times

you married or didn't, your favorite midnight movie,

the cigarettes you couldn't give up,

wanting to kiss other people you shouldn't

and now to forever be kissed by the Earth.

In the Earth. With the Earth.

When we all briefly left it

to look back on each other from above,

shocked by how bright even our pain is

running wildly beside us like an underground river.

And whatever language is good for,

a sign, a message left up there that reads:

here men from the planet earth

first set foot upon the moon

july 1969, a.d.

we came in peace for all mankind.

Then returned to continue the war.

         I

You may have all things from me, save my breath,

The slight life in my throat will not give pause

For your love, nor your loss, nor any cause.

Shall I be made a panderer to death,

Dig the green ground for darkness underneath,

Let the dust serve me, covering all that was

With all that will be? Better, from time's claws,

The hardened face under the subtle wreath.

Cooler than stones in wells, sweeter, more kind

Than hot, perfidious words, my breathing moves

Close to my plunging blood. Be strong, and hang

Unriven mist over my breast and mind,

My breath! We shall forget the heart that loves,

Though in my body beat its blade, and its fang.

         II

I erred, when I thought loneliness the wide

Scent of mown grass over forsaken fields,

Or any shadow isolation yields.

Loneliness was the heart within your side.

Your thought, beyond my touch, was tilted air

Ringed with as many borders as the wind.

How could I judge you gentle or unkind

When all bright flying space was in your care?

Now that I leave you, I shall be made lonely

By simple empty days, never that chill

Resonant heart to strike between my arms

Again, as though distraught for distance,­–only

Levels of evening, now, behind a hill,

Or a late cock-crow from the darkening farms.

How wonderful to be understood,

to just sit here while some kind person

relieves you of the awful burden

of having to explain yourself, of having

to find other words to say what you meant,

or what you think you thought you meant,

and of the worse burden of finding no words,

of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person

has found just the right words for you—and you

have only to sit here and be grateful

for words so quiet so discerning they seem

not words but literate light, in which

your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.

How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is

not to be understood, not at all, to, well,

just sit here while someone not unkindly

is saying those impossibly wrong things,

or quite possibly they're the right things

if you are, which you're not, that someone

—a difference, finally, so indifferent

it would be conceit not to let it pass,

unkindness, really, to spoil someone's fun.

And so you don't mind, you welcome the umbrage

of those high murmurings over your head,

having found, after all, you are grateful

—and you understand this, how wonderful!—

that you've been led to be quietly yourself,

like a root growing wise in darkness

under the light litter, the falling words.

When you are already here

you appear to be only

a name that tells of you

whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though

you are still summer

still the high familiar

endless summer

yet with a glint

of bronze in the chill mornings

and the late yellow petals

of the mullein fluttering

on the stalks that lean

over their broken

shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know

that you have come

the seed heads of the sage

the whispering birds

with nowhere to hide you

to keep you for later

you

who fly with them

you who are neither

before nor after

you who arrive

with blue plums

that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

I've expanded like the swollen door in summer

   to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness

is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder

   in the cry of the magpie that I am

still capable of inflicting pain

   at this distance.

Like a painting, our talk is dense with description,

   half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered

with a patina over time. When she came into my life

   I didn't hesitate.

Or is that only how it seems now, looking back?

   Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back?

Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains

   you can still find shells.

It's these strange divagations I've come to love: midday sun

   on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone;

toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot

   climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit

of the dead hovers about its earthly home

   four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away.

Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes

   to be washed and given to the poor.

I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders

   as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia.

"We're almost there, Pop," he said. "A few more blocks."

   I want to tell you that we, too, are almost there,

for someone has mapped this autumn field with meaning, and any day

   October brooding in me, will open to reveal

our names—inscribed or absent —

   among the dry thistles and spent weeds.

About the dead having available to them

all breeds of knowledge,

some pure, others wicked, especially what is

future, and the history that remains

once the waters recede, revealing the land

that couldn't reject or contain it, and the land

that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived

as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived,

simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said

they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences

silences: sometimes a boy will slip

from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,

sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.

Far down, down through the city's great gaunt gut

  The gray train rushing bears the weary wind;

In the packed cars the fans the crowd's breath cut,

  Leaving the sick and heavy air behind.

And pale-cheeked children seek the upper door

  To give their summer jackets to the breeze;

Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar

  Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas;

Seas cooling warm where native schooners drift

  Through sleepy waters, while gulls wheel and sweep,

Waiting for windy waves the keels to lift

  Lightly among the islands of the deep;

Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white

  That led their perfume to the tropic sea,

Where fields lie idle in the dew-drenched night,

  And the Trades float above them fresh and free.

Snow is a strange white word;

No ice or frost

Have asked of bud or bird

For Winter's cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow

From earth to sky

This Summer land doth know,

No man knows why.

In all men's hearts it is.

Some spirit old

Hath turned with malign kiss

Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face.

God's blood is shed.

He mourns from His lone place

His children dead.

O! ancient crimson curse!

Corrode, consume.

Give back this universe

Its pristine bloom.

      (Cape Town, 1914)

The unsigned architecture of loneliness

is becoming taller, finding a way farther

above the horizontal flowering

of the Cold War, the peonies

and star asters of wild partisanship.

I have a shambling gait and lonely

hysteria, but no Terror. I am free

to shamble past the vacant lot of my son's

conception, to shamble past the bar where I

conceived adultery as a Terror

that would be endless, flowering

in great waves through air striated like chenille.

I walk for a long time and try to conjure

elsewhere in its early isolation.

I cannot. It is all redestinated

by the future like the loose balloons

a janitor recovers at 6 am

from cold light fixtures. The Cold War is ending.

Buildings are taller and have no names.

1.

The romance of every ideology

torments the romance of another. How

beautifully, in the beginning, in

the gale and embrace of isolation, boys

capered over a shambles and swore oaths.

The scent of urine in the hall at home

was righteousness. The beautiful nude

obscured by dust in a paperweight

was righteousness. Neglectful townships coming

into steep flower just as boys were flowering

needed the correction of righteousness,

the horizontal slag of government

by children. Only the insane allegiances

endure. The mad counterparts are lovers

passion cannot explain nor circumstances

restrict to the dead zones of irony.

A counterpart of end of the Cold War

is adultery. A counterpart

of loving a divided Berlin

unto death is fatherhood, the doting

maintenance of sons in vacant lots

continuing the wars of rubble

for righteousness' sake and for the sake

of nudes obscured by dust and vulgarity.

Romance torments romance. The most beautiful

moment of the twentieth century

galed and embraced the acrid smoky air

as the Red Army entered Berlin

as Hitler shriveled in the gasoline fire

as Red Army flags opened above Berlin

safeguarding the ruins of a changeless future.

Townships blackened even as they flowered.

Loose balloons cluttered the low sky and sun.

I walked for a long time and tried to conjure

the form of kindness. It was a domestic

animal confused in the tall grass.

Boys set fire to the grass. History

that opens flags opened the fire,

and Berlin, divided from Berlin,

began to love its children past all reason.

2.

My son reads sermons of pain and writes on walls.

He starves the ground

he walks on, preparing a dead city

to be worthy of its new flags, to shine

as exploded windows shine, raining down

for hours after the wrecking crews have gone.

I have a lover now who hates children.

The hatred floats inside of her, a weightless

sexual pavilion of perfect form

and perfect emptiness. I thought

by making love to her I would conceive

nothing but Terror, outrage upon outrage,

a violence that would last my whole life

and free my son. I was ignorant as a balloon.

Across the luminous expressway, I see

the shapes of charred tenements castellated,

fading into the more tender shapes of night.

It may be the last night in history. Tomorrow

pulls down the Berlin Wall, pulls down my honor,

and I return to my lover's bed to float

in a white condom, no longer my son's father.

Tomorrow describes everything in detail.

It explains nothing. It does not teach my boy

that tenements are better than the future,

better that peace, more likely to produce

brothers than are the glassy hands of mornings

without end or walls denuded of their wire.

In the dead zone of irony before dawn,

only the cats cry, like martyrs in the flame.

3.

Gates everywhere. The Brandenburg. The Great

Gate of Kiev beneath which children stride

onto an invisible crescendo

disappearing into gasoline fires,

emerging as the new shapes of righteousness

in slow vans through the Brandenburg Gate.

Oaths are secret because none suspects

that they are kept. They thrust themselves towards us

unashamedly, like the insane homeless,

and we do not see them. In our loneliness,

we see a chance for love in betrayal,

not death. In our loneliness, we see the happy

triumph of glassy hands in free elections,

not the denuding of Berlin or wanderings

of children in vans reduced by fire

to black transparencies in the morning shade.

When Joan of Arc surrendered to the flames

she cried out "Jesus, Jesus." Some years later,

a failed magician who had loved her cried out

"Joan, Joan" as the flames mocked him with a sortilege

too easy to be unreal or profitable.

I walk for a long time and try to conjure

the form of loneliness without Cold War.

It is ash upon ash, a chiaroscuro

aloft and on the ground, completely still.

Oaths are secret because none suspects

the desperation of every object, the child

in every atom of the misused world

thrust towards us, crying out whatever

sacred name it witnessed put to death

on the ascending music of a wall.

Our buildings are tall and have no names.

The parks grow glassy hands instead of flowers.

4.

Afterwards, the calm is piteous

but insubstantial as a smell of burn

that does not rise in smoke or dies with the fire.

Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise

and having to invent air, invent light

from nothing but untriggered memory.

All things beloved are recalled to pain.

Air recollected from the wrists of girls

braceleted for Confirmation, crossed.

Light recollected from between the cars

of night trains in a deep river valley

where islands in the river glowed like swans.

Air recollected form a ditch in flower.

Light recollected from the sex of flowers

in bare rooms, the grainy light of blondes.

Air recollected from religion.

Light recollected form the incensed clutch

of bodies before sunrise in the oaths

of a great and ignorant lost cause.

Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise

having spent the night in bed with a stranger.

Aloft and on the ground the calm

unfurls like flags without device or slogan.

The inconsequence of the day ahead

stirs airless atmospheres in darkness

visible as daylight but without shade.

Without Cold War, without the arbitrary

demarcation of cause from cause, of light

and air from the unsexed improvisations

of memory, I cannot see to walk

or breathe to breathe. Sex becomes applause.

Sex becomes television, and the bastard

avant garde of lonely architecture

breaks ground at the unwired heart of a city

that marks the capital of nothing now.

5.

A scratchy, recorded call to prayer crosses

the alley from one new building into mine.

The consolations of history are furtive,

then fugitive, then forgotten like a bar

of music that might have been obscene or sacred

once, in another city, in the days

before today. My son is well. He works

the public ground and needs no Antigone.

My lover sits beside him at dinner,

sharing a joke, unmapping the tall future

and its unbiased children, reinventing

the sexual pavilion to accommodate

plague wards. Romance forgives romance.

The early isolation of this gorgeous

century disappears into good works.

The future is best. To put a final stop

to the grotesque unmercy of martyrdom

and to the ruinous armies of mad boys

whose government is rape, whose justice

is a wall, revoke all partisanship,

adjourn the Terror. The future is best.

It unobscures the dusty nudes. It protects

the river islands and their glowing swans.

But when I need to die, who will light the fire?

What names shall I cry out and what music

burn to a black transparency in my heart?

The unborn have been revoked. They will not be kind.

A cold night crosses

our path

     The world appears

very large, very

round now  extending

far as the moon does

           It is from

the moon this cold travels

           It is

the light of the moon that causes

this night reflecting distance in its own

light so coldly

            (from one side of

the earth to the other)

           It is the length of this coldness

It is the long distance

between two points which are

not in a line   now

           not a

straightness  (however

straight) but a curve only,

silver that is a rock reflecting

               not metal

but a rock accepting

distance

      (a scream in silence

where between the two

points what touches

is a curve around the world

               (the dance unmoving).

                    new york, 1969

after Susan Stewart

No one ever died for a bite

of one, or came back from the dead

for a single taste: the cool flesh

cellular or stony, white

as the belly of the winter hare

or a doe's scut, flicking,

before she mates. Even an unripe one

is delicious, its crisp bite cleaner

almost than water and its many names

just as inviting: Bartlett and Comice,

Anjou, Nashi, Concorde

and Seckel, the pomegranate-skinned

Starkrimson, even the medieval

Bosc, which looks like it dropped

from an oil painting. It is not a sin

to eat one, though you may think

of a woman's body as you do it,

the bell-shaped swell of it

rich in your hand, and for this reason

it was sacred to Venus, Juno, all women

celebrated or dismissed

in its shape, that mealy sweetness

tunneling from its center, a gold

that sinks back into itself with age.

To ripen a pear, wrap it in paper,

lay it in cloth by an open window

or slip a rotten one beside it

on a metal dish: dying cells call always

to the fresh ones, the body's

siren song that, having heard

it once, we can't stop singing.

This is not the fruit

that will send you to hell

nor keep you there;

it will not give you knowledge,

childbirth, power, or love;

you won't know more pain

for having eaten one, or choke

on a bite to fall asleep

under glass. It has no use

for archer or hero, though

anything you desire from an apple

you can do with the pear, like a dark sister

with whom you might live out

your secret desires. Cook it

in wine, mull it with spices, roast it

with honey and cloves. Time sweetens

and we taste it, so gather the fruit

weeks before ripeness,

let summer and winter both

simmer inside, for it is

a fall fruit whose name in China

means separation, though only the fearful

won't eat one with those they love.

To grow a tree from seed,

you'll need a garden

and a grafting quince, bees, a ladder,

shears, a jug; you'll need water

and patience, sun and mud,

a reverence for the elders

who told no true stories

of this fruit's origin,

wanting to give us the freedom

of one thing that's pleasure alone.

Cool and sweet, cellular and stony,

this is the fruit I'll never die for,

nor come back from the dead

for a single taste.

The juice of the pear

shines on my cheeks.

There's no curse in it. I'll eat

what I like and throw the rest

to the grasses. The seeds

will find whatever soils they were meant for.

I / omen

What was going on in the New York American

Black/red/green helmeted neon night?

The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones

Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor

To the abyss—but it was someone else's face

Staring from the screen out at us, someone else's face

Saying something flashing from the teleprompter:

Though what the face said was meant to reassure,

Down in the abyss the footage kept playing,

All of it looping back like children chanting

The answers to nonsensical riddles, taunting

A classmate who doesn't know the question:

"Because it's too far to walk" "Time to get a new fence"

"A big red rock eater." And as the images rewound

And the face kept talking, the clear night sky

Filled up with smoke and the smoke kept puring

Itself out into the air like a voice saying something

It can't stop saying, some murky omen

Like schoolkids asking: "Why do birds fly south?"

"What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence?"

"What's big, red and eats rocks?"

  2 / in front of st. vincent's

A woman hugging another woman

Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk.

Nobody moved for a moment.

They were an island caught at the tide turning:

Such misery in two human bodies.

Then the wearing away of the crowd

Moving flowed over them and they

Were pulled swiftly along down the sidewalk.

  3 / joke

Faces powdered with dust and ash, there they were

In the fast food place, raucous and wild, splitting

The seams of their work clothes, weary to hysteria

As they hunched in their booth next to the buffet

Under heat lamps reflecting incarnadine

Off pastas and vegetable slag. Then the joke

Ignited, they quivered on the launch pad,

Laughter closed around them, they couldn't

Breathe, it was as if they were staring out

From a space capsule porthole and were asking

The void an imponderable riddle

While orbiting so high up in space

That the earth was less than the least hint

Of light piercing the smoke-filled, cloudless night.

(What was the joke about? Nobody knew.)

And then they stopped laughing and stared into their plates,

Ash smearing down their faces as they chewed.

  4 / spell spoken by suppliant to helios for knowledge

         from the Greek Magical Papyri

Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile,

I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph.

Dressed in the god's power, I am the god,

I am Thouth, discoverer of healing drugs,

Founder of letters. As god calls on god

I summon you to come to me, you

Under the earth; arouse yourself for me,

Great daimon, you the subterranean,

You of the primordial abyss.

Unless you tell me what I want to know,

What is in the minds of everyone, Egyptians,

Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians, of every race

And people, unless I know what has been

And what shall be, unless I know their skills

And practices and works and lives and names

Of them and their fathers and mothers

And brothers and friends, even of those now dead,

I will pour the blood of the black-faced jackal

As an offering in a new-made jar and put it

In the fire and burn beneath it what's left

Of the bones of all-praised Osiris,

And I will shout in the port of Busiris

The secrets of his mysteries, that his body,

Drowned, remained in the river three days

And three nights, that he, the praised one,

Was carried by the river into the sea

And surrounded by wave on wave on wave

And by mist rising off water through the air.

To keep your belly from being eaten by fish,

To keep the fish from chewing your flesh with their mouths,

To make the fish close their hungry jaws, to keep

The fatherless child from being taken

From his mother, to keep the pole of the sky

From being brought down and the twin towering

Mountains from toppling into one, to keep Anoixis

From running amok and doing just what she wants,

Not god or goddess will give oracles

Until I know through and through

Just what is in the minds of all human beings,

Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Ethyopians, of every race

And people, so that those who come to me.

Their eyes and mine can meet in a level gaze,

Neither one or the other higher or lower,

And whether they speak or keep silent,

I can tell them whatever has happened

And is happening and is going to happen

To them, and I can tell them their skills

And their works and their names and those of their dead,

And of every human being who comes to me

I will read them as I read a sealed letter

And tell them everything truthfully.

  5 / from brooklyn bridge

Sun shines on the third bridge tower:

A garbage scow ploughs the water,

Maternal hull pushing is all out beyond

The city, pushing it all out so patiently—

All you could hear out there this flawless afternoon

Is the sound of sand pulverizing newsprint

To tatters, paper-pulp ripping crosswise

Or lengthwise, shearing off some photo

Of maybe a head or maybe an arm.

Ridiculous flimsy noble newspaper,

Leaping in wind, fluttering, collapsing,

Its columns sway and topple into babble:

All you'd see if you were out there

Is air vanishing into clearer air.

  6 / from the plane

Pressed against our seats, them released to air,

From the little plane windows we peered four thousand feet

Down to the ground desert-gray and still,

Nothing seeming to be moving on that perfect afternoon,

No reminder of why it was we were all looking,

Remembering maybe the oh so flimsy

Wooden sawhorse police barricades, as the woman

In front of me twisted her head back to see

It all again, but up there there was nothing to see,

Only the reef water feel of transparency

Deepening down to a depth where everything

Goes dark and nothing moves unless it belongs

To that dark, darting in and out or undulating

Slowly or cruising unblinking, jaws open or closed.

  7 / spell broken by suppliant to helios for protection

        from the Greek Magical Papyri

This is the charm that will protect you, the charm

That you must wear: Onto lime wood write

With vermilion the secret name, name of

The fifty magic letters. Then say the words:

"Guard me from every daimon of the air,

On the earth and under the earth, guard me

From every angel and phantom, every

Ghostly visitation and enchantment,

Me, your suppliant." Enclose it in a skin

Dyed purple, hang it round your neck and wear it.

  8 / roll of film: photographer missing

Vines of smoke through latticework of steel

Weave the air into a garden of smoke.

And in the garden people came and went,

People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed

In ash. What the pictures couldn't say

Was spoken by the smoke: A common language

In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear

Something about what it was they’d been forced

To endure: Words spoken in duress,

Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth

That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke

And put forth shoots that twined through the steel,

Words plunged through the roof of the garages'

Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this

Tells and tells again one part of the story

Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden,

The camera's eye open and acutely

Recording in the foul-smelling air.

  9 / lamentation on ur

          from a Sumerian spell, 2000 B.C.

Like molten bronze and iron shed blood

   pools. Our country's dead

melt into the earth

   as grease melts in the sun, men whose

helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated

by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond

   help, they lie still as a gazelle

exhausted in a trap,

   muzzle in the dust. In home

after home, empty doorways frame the absence

of mothers and fathers who vanished

   in the flames remorselessly

spreading claiming even

   frightened children who lay quiet

in their mother's arms, now borne into

oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea

   by the surging current.

May the great barred gate

   of blackest night again swing shut

on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,

may this disaster too be torn out of mind.

  i.

Not to go backward,

   not to watch the women

peddling in reverse past the church,

      the priest in his black habit

  receding from the chapel door.

Not to go backward,

   the bones of August

becoming the bones of March,

      branch of dogwood

  picked clean by frost.

Not to say Yes

   when asked the question

all women wait to hear,

       Are you anything

  like your mother?

Not to be photographed in her dress

   like a saint

carrying the instrument of her martyrdom,

      Agnes, and her try

  of breasts—

or to throw the bouquet into the grave

    where Bartholomew hides

with his bloody knife.

       Not to burn

  half the house down—

and build half the house up.

   Not to forgive

the bad child

      when even the bad house

  is forgiven. Not to care,

not to carry the bones of August

    into September, foiled with redness

and nothing to squander

      but the buds of spring

   dormant in their boughs.

Not to ask, Did you

   love her? and leave

the answer in the ground,

      where everything difficult

  is buried.

  ii.

Attend the dead,

   then welcome the bride—

backward, as Jews do,

      reading Hebrew,

  right to left.

First the mourning,

  then the celebration.

Backward, taking off

      the beautiful face

  of forgetting,

two names with the same face—

  all this time

a woman waiting inside me

      to marry.

   Invisible, impermanent,

windmill girl in her cage

   of breath,

insect girl in her element:

      impenetrable shell,

  putting on

the beautiful face of forgetting—

    Fury   Sybil  Isis

one of us

       wakes in her

  graveyard of guilt,

filamentary as fiber optics,

   one of us sleeps on

in the temple, lulled

       by the metronomic

  pulse of longing—

Did you love her? Are you anything?

    That other girls is dead.

That other girl is dead.

      What else can be said

   about that other girl?

  iii.

Same as mine,

  skin of her hands

laid over the ivory bones,

       dark map

  of the body—  Yes—

it was dark,

  but I was darker

on the inside.

      When she was young

  she was "a great beauty,"

in the same sense

  that "a roomful of adults"

is rarely ever.

      I was never

  like her, flattered

like a map

   under glass,

slender as an axle

      in a turbine—

  enigma relic:

feet of steel, legs of wood,

   cabinet of curiosity.

Even her reflection

       in a spoon

  was beautiful.

  iv.

Labor into longing:

   wild enthusiasm

of the dynamo engine

      working in reverse—

  more power

in the leaf of a flower

  than the paw of a bear.

Is it necessary

      to remember

  absolutely everything?

Golden hour on the birch—

  brailled bark,

weathered barn stacked

      with malignant logs,

  sweet mulch

of aether /ore

   in the morning air.

We hung drapes

       over the mirrors,

  they were flowered, too—

her bouquet a cabbage,

   assembled by a florist

from 120 roses

      Incandescent light

  flattened their petals,

made lace of their thorns.

  Uncanny—nothing in nature

so rigid,

     nothing more harmful

  than her rare affection.

  v.

August: honeymoon at Niagara,

   water shut off—

bad luck.

      Two bodies,

  a man's and a woman's

found face-

   down in the mud

at the bottom of the gorge.

      Neglected

  on the cliffs above,

Tesla's alternating current station,

    powerless

in its pure machinery,

      honeyed, lunar magnets

  waiting in their sockets

for the current to resume.

   Enough about friction:

this is about two bodies

      at the end of America,

  repelling each other

under the polar rush of water,

  generating their own distance

over time. Is it history

      or home

  that hurts us more?

Did she look into the gorge

    as into his face

when she said Yes—

      to see the downpour,

   even when it was damned?

  vi.

Nothing in me wasted,

   a use for grief, even.

I wore it on my left hand.

       I was married to it.

  I planted myself

in the dirt:

  alphabets grew up

from the bones of my feet.

      I drowned my heart

  in the lake.

Black hole, such vanity—

   navigating the ear canals

like so many gondoliers

      trolling the watery streets

   looking for someone

to sing to. Beautiful

   fisherman who fished

my heart out of its lake—

      I did not die. I revived.

  I wore her face on my fingers

when I dug up my joy

   up from the ground, singing:

Oh wooden coffin, woman's body,

      boulder at home

  in its stone skin.

  vii.

Yes, then, to all of it: to the drowned

    sea urchins, porcupines spined,

and the black-brain

      coral that sleeps

   on the ocean's floor,

ruinously blue. Yes

   to the vultures that roost

above the waterfall,

       that don't

  surrender their nests

at our dissolution,

  and to the bones that do.

To remember is to open

      one door

  after another

all along

  the white corridor

to say Yes when asked,

       Are you anything?

  Did she love you?

To go forward

    is to surrender

the necklace of tears she gave me—

      this failed body

  with my name on it.

Everything is half here,

like the marble head

of the Roman emperor

and the lean torso

of his favorite.

The way the funnel cloud

which doesn't seem

to touch ground does—

flips a few cars, a semi—

we learn to walk miles

above our bodies.

The pig farms dissolve,

then the small hills.

As in dreams fraught

with irrevocable gestures,

the ruined set seems larger,

a charred palace the gaze

tunnels through

and through. How well

we remember the stage—

the actors gliding about

like petite sails, the balustrade

cooling our palms.

Not wings or singing,

but a darkness fast as blood.

It ended at our fingertips:

the fence gave way

to the forest.

The world began.

They go, the early flags, the gory maples—

so too the daffodils & Lenten roses.

Other petals swirl & nights warm.

Buds thicken and cast shadows:

in a thunderstorm

I almost forget the ice that was.

Narcissi suckle watery paths;

meadows heap up emerald masses.

How green & I want to delight

except this undertow—it pulls so fast

passing before I recognize it—

like souls in Dante who can't see the present,

white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat.

The parade I barely noticed was beginning

is already halfway down the street.