AT THE EDGE OF WATER

The tourniquet of the creek bed,twists. An embankment set, where, next to me: Hewho wasMr. Nobody, plodding. Each one

I wrote downUntil perfecting the purplehe gave to one, spring day, I knowit soundsprecious. My name to cease, be rid. By then I had tied my shoelacesslammed the door, shut “Bitch”to the inside. Was it just me? Or, Mr. Nobody,Or a black bicycle flat like shale?

POSITIVE THINKING IS OVERRATED

Down vs. Up all over again.I wind the time around my pen.The way you wind the kite string.

Up to Henry.That’s where I look, with my hand like a visorscrying the heaven’sfor my once true friend.

Logic and poetry have never mixed.Semaphores mutate, are jinxedAnd slow as turtles.

While we teach all, A simile is like something.A metaphor is. My love,

a barnacle or pinwheel. My love,a kenning over yonder,or the form of a spindle.

HENRY MOON

I would wake up in the middle of the night with the three-dimensional shadow of a little boy standing at the end of my bed, always silent as the movies. It scared me horribly, and when I told my Jesuit, skeptic father about it, he talked to me.

I found the courage to speak to the ghost.The problem was, once I acknowledged his existence, the haunting really started.

The spirit would kick out from between usWhen Henry and I sat at the bank, motionless.

I could see a lightning bolt in Henry’s eye,A stray wisp inside the blue gleam in it.

Contriving to fly ‘e was.

Voices, lights, shadows and objects moving were never uncommon there. I realized at the door that I had to make a decision. I could either accept my “gift” or hide it forever.

I started speaking with scientists, quantum physicists, psychics, anyone associated with paranormals. My goal was to record what I saw and heard, for those who couldn’t. I’m sure that part of that had to do with proving things to my father. When Homer went blind, his great hearing gave him solace.

PREEN IN THE ROOFTOP RAINS

By the time he turned in her RX, she Was buried beneath Earth’s glass.Without PLOT, without riot.An antelope she became.

If you live on Henry James’ Street, how’s A carrousel rescind? Directly to you, or me, a reign Luring us before? I could lay the lore softly

on unsubstantial clay. The word, Henry,could make him go.

And if you have to, let him go.If you have to see his angels’ stalemate rising. Henry’s half of the sky.

I poked my stick in, responding to orbsof a sister pool,Echoing southwards. Just to show me my reflectionGoing.

CAROUSSEL

You were a star too,a bicycle burst out of a poster, let beams of rotating light fall curving to earthfrom a huge eyethat only sees the puckered canvas.Muscular strength is slow and deliberatein the bluish lightgiving us certainty in specific examples:the precision of the antelopes, while the horses tarry, gleeof all that jazz tight in uniformsthat twist our body. We float foamlikeover empire’s spectacle.

If the ice breaks out in semaphores, we wait. Char-ming and elegant.Ropes crack as grace cracks

Along to piano music cranking.Ringmaster operates a great machine.wants to show off his gears.

Semaphores can only be accessed using the following operations: Those marked atomic should not be interrupted.

Notice that incrementing the variable s must not be interrupted, and the P operation must not be interrupted.

The value of a semaphore is the number of units of the resource which are free.

Differences between mutexes and semaphores are operating system dependent.

Semaphores notify events. Mutexes are meant for mere exclusion only.

ENTRANCE OF RINGMASTER

In newspapers

we assumed too many mutexes

from signs on doorsnervous

confidentsoldiers forming novel expressions, so many

I had not thought such strong airfelt so good for the night falling

QUICK MEDIUM HOUNDS BEHIND THE BICYCLE

You could not chase or follow the soundwithout a compass.

We called the dog off of Henry.A voice appeared.

Look forward to space success.You meet the voice at pier’s end.

BROCHURE OF APPEARANCES

I filtered water through potatoesin a wire net of relationships. We weren’t communists or comrades,Anymore. Pinker than dread.2 bicycles on mounded hay.Dark satellites in the sky. Was this really all my doing?

EVENING PICNIC IN A VALLEY

Water drains down the sinkfrom a colander of potatoes.Morning as usual, offereda porous substitute. Only minutesbefore I nearly found you around a metaphysical corner. Only hours agobefore daylight offered dialogue. This is the endingI must have chosen, my pelvis pressed at Formica’s edge. So nowI am here without citylight.Birds and cloudssweep through leaves, offerpatchy allusions of a blue sky and its yellow bending. All this, combineswith darkness, does notinsist on separation. Hot steam rises from the colander, and I slice questions with a sharp red knife:What if I were the forest and you were the light, and you were leaving your place, to find me in mine? What is black, then? What is blacker?

As if you really were the arbiter of Henry’s destiny I needed you to be.As if I could ever live without conditions.

Author had seen more than she wanted to see. She closed her book. Anybody could see that. She closed her book with force. She wanted people to see that.

She found him by the creek, skipping rocks. When Author sang his name, he didn’t look up. She stripped down to her pink bikini and jumped in.

“Author! What are you doing? You can’t swim in there!”

“Why not?” She asked, sticking out from her waist up. “The water’s nice.”

“Well, because a monster lives here.”

Author’s thighs cut into the thick, brown muck. “What kind of monster?”

“The kind you feed,” he said.

Muddy bicycle tracks on the walkway to the front door, evidence that He’s been here. How nonchalantly without even rustling the stray leaves on the concrete. His wanderings, always with the grace of an Apache, outside the General’s bedroom window, his knife shining in the moonlight. Though the sound of him sharpening it afterwards would have been audible to the General’s ears.

Here he lies outside the General’s house in a pool of blood, his buckskin shot through with the General’s gun by the General’s wife. She stands there in the darkness of her legacy.

NO OUTLET

In the light of time’s street sweeper,

a row of ants dribbled along a curb, so tiny, I gave thanks for being human. The not-sound of squirming and the not-sound of ants dying under foot. Each one, lived to be seen, not heard.Up and down Terrace Road, bugs multiplied in miniature colonies.

That ice cream cone turned over on the road many, many years Ago. That is the food of ants. ‘Oh keep the worm away” That’s my nostalgia. Or my dog who stays still when I call. I will burn the sugar off the ant, begin a fire wall. You are at the end of this path, my friend. Terrace Road lets out no one.

ARRIVES ON A SUNDAY IN TIME FOR THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER

40 miles -- from North Middleton Township to Mouth (confluence with Susquehanna River)

Spring: the plopping sound and chiming tunesinks into the heart and the heart rings. Athena, put down your sword.

Someone rustles on the doorstep, some fire brigadeor some man I’ve conjuredto clear the air here, electricity stirs.

I sing to skipping rocks, sing to the milk man.He leaves gallons of milk in plastic jugs on the front door steps. I leave him with the tiny dollops of skipping rocks I send to the Conodoguinet.

Arrives on a Sunday, once a year,in time for winter: the chimney sweeper.

ACCOUSTIC COFFEEHOUSE POEM

Subscriptions to the New Yorker.

Being ruined by such and such. Even that.I can google.

The library is closed by now, another good idea.

But this gnawing and gnawinguntil all spirit turns into muscle. A boy’s bicycle,

at the bank. Today’s heat outside.If I start to notice othercharacters, they come in.Once

he disappeared.I could not--

even with the crooning music of cafeambiance, resurrect him.

DISABLED AMERICAN VETERANS CHAPTER NINE

Old man, old man,out of my left eyeseeing you seeing meI read your tshirt morethan twice and heardyour substantial coughthat will disappear

as nothing

HIATUS

Who could say why Henry slept,lay supineand dormant ?When, even backing outmornings, and moving formwardto the intersectionwhere I turned rightto go to school.I could see.Weaving in and out,a car door slamming,black cows on greenery,or the swatch of yellow lightning,staying with me, hello or amen, his voicetight around my eternal throat.

WHERE HIS BIKE LAY FLAT

What color was the boy's jacketin that city where you first saw snowwhere the flag turned into itselfby the force of wind. Students sayit howled and the jacket was downy red.What color was that little girl's jacketin that country where you first saw beesand honeycombs, read poetry about fleesbothering corpses--home-grown and down with the frogs jumping at the bog.That's where the summer started.Down by the cray fish crawling onto a dam.That's where the summer began, when I turned into a man, a bicycle rider into blue sky. Egrets fly long arcs into the sun-lit blue, iciclesdangle from that other house all the way yonderacross the sea, a sea I don't ever wanderinto, fret yet, fingers spring in to dip the water.Not a minute, not a year, not a morning glory's worth of life, not the blink of time that wasparadise. I pined at the edge of flat ice cricks, Henrywander(ing) (wandered)over where his bike lay flat, another barnacle. The ice,compact, I sipped the runneth over the rim.I see him. Icy him. Over and underand tumbling, lottery balls in the sifter.Stiff corpse frozen, just underthe surface. The hodge-podge wreck of a mancarted off to the looney bin, my Henry, divorced fromthe probability of all things falling.All falling things, echo visions flying as designed into night skygathering starry eyelets that rouge pink, bionically.Laser into the chambers of the bicycle's titanium, Sixo's work, starsand more stars, there being no fearof gravity here, jostling in the sifter, volts rush and reach outwards,a thousand hands and at their tips 10 thousand fingers. Hallucinatethe color I woretwo thousand eonslong ago under neon billboard signsblown glass orange, glowing roundly and out all alongthe lawn of asphalt, call

Uncle, calling Uncle,Uncle until another boy became the angel I made of snow.

COLLAPSED MATH

It was time to take over; the food was in the gulch.Little primroses and the cantilevered cloudsperplexed no oneanymore. The antelopes had disappeared into the tall yellow-green stalks of beech-grass. My head lost in prairies somewhere in crisis. God knows it was always supposed to have been this way. It was time to grapple with the algorithm. Restore the climate to what it had been before the hurricane.Before the drought.Before the torrentsswept shallow river beds.Before I had goneback into the formation of the v,the disappearing of the form until formlessness reigned,wobbling outwards, slowly diaphanous, then completely gone.

Out here the stardust tends to scream into the remotestpuddle of an asphalt alleyway.Out here in the third eye after a game of chess.I shake the archer’s hand.He draws a bicycle in the sand.

WHAT SIXO TOLD ARJUNA

dedicated to Michael S. Harper

I took God down all walls.

I put God up.

I took God down all walls.

I put God up.

I took God down all walls.

I put God up.

The long road drawn long like an arrow.

What once were chancellors of spaceare now like grommets, firecrackers of brightness,faithless geometries,fueled by the opposite of love.

THE OTHERS

In every room a ceiling fan, the spooks come to offer metaphorsfor every poetry. In every bed I have gone to rest

terror in the shadow of the bladethat spins suspended from a wall

a guardian from rain and other outside elementsLet the sky come in

cloud my sleeplet the clouds winnow, tear,

whirl or glide along moonlight their outlines claiming a distance I fuck

to measure, get therewhere your trail heads back

behind the nursery trackinto my mansion on a hill

or at the lighthousegabled, even a pale blue promise, let it be, glow

yellow, blinds open on bed sheets, a Decatur neighborhood, circa 2001, my smile from side to side flies so fast I might catch you still. Shrilly buckle under the grasping and breathe once, collapse.

The fan again. That dasein scene

from Memento, I remember, without tattoos

because I go nowhere there’s not a fan spinning. Smile so wide, the horsestried to run me down.Mistaken for their kind, wilder, prehistoric. Merely grewsick as sickness can make me, who was born innocent.

As a hunter I do believe I’ve become clever with these tools.

Hold a fork.

Spoon feed clues, until your heart is covered, and then glazed over by ice.

Fish, eye, coaster.

Questions as indifferent

as these answers I do not ask the hypocrite. I stare up at you, Henry.

As if concentration, that mesmerizing

dot out there,

in the process of becoming, would reduce or

surrender.

A flagship voice says don’t stop me

you’ve been bothering me my whole life.

And these were “The Others”The ghosts that figured in a fabricin through a hole, a certain light his mother wore.

His mother wrought by its other side. She wrote.She might flip a coin, try death

or into her son’s consciousness, extend

and live again. Shhh lulls him, pulling

his real mask. Glimpse in droplets

a sheet of death. The other side

of consciousness—where science lives.

The Other side.

Where your brother rides in circles reaching an arm,

an extended finger

poking a black hole, around which

a gold ring

spins so continuously

it seems not to spin. A hero entertains me

but I never listen. Hear me hissing Henry, motionless,

Miss ing.

you. And these were “The Others”:

Sirens, singing womenHenry entertained. In his ghost parlor,I sat as if drugged—a red liquid splashed against a divan or bed.In the future, I am listening to that purring.I take on the pallor of harlots, rendering your death!

Unto you, now once

you found me better.

Antler horns like spread legs.

Against me they moved their skins,

like pelts they felt, primitive or furied,

by being of the room they were the room

sibilant bitches

by being in my heart they became my heart

became animal

and became my arms as their arms

my hair as their’s and as with their lips I began to respond

Shhh your mother said, bending low to pet me

The blood appeared

as if I had from her breast been fed

the same as you.

Shhh, she said, I feel you listening. As if inside a chrysalis . . .

She seemed to wear a yellow dress.The yellow fabric changed to green.

I saw her glowing bluerThen redder she became.A pool appeared in which my shame did ride upon the backs of antelopes, another carrousel reconceivedin hell.

Yellow bell.

And the animals sped so wildly across the void, they burned, and broke, and burned. And all that she became, she became.

And all that she had been, became rehearsed,

the frozen plain of ice above,

melting, swallowing every space around my skin,until I was held there

in the womb

flipping a coin

“I CAN’T ESCAPE UNHAPPINESS,” SAID AUTHOR

“IN MARRYING YOU I WOULD TRY.”

I.

The word “process” from the spine of a bookobtrudes. I leave that space, move to my bed,reap into parts, the head of the story, the limbs.

In dormant space, where lightpiano keys call my ears away, closer to the other doorwhere rain, earlier, patters still.

Like violins, in and out, I remember creek beds, one spring.I remember Henry. II.

If I overtaketime by treading backinto time,a ruminantcloved-animal appears. Ruminant: a word,Meaning to chew cud, to turn Over in the mind.

III.

How stomach and mind be linked. Methinksupon this happenstance. If ever lovecleaved the gut and mindand led to violence in that union,if ever the lover did reject the contents of her lunchinto civilized porcelain,while thinking of betrayal,visions of his leave-taking,the departure of spirit, even beforehis body departed. Gallows draw

boundaries for his steel trajectoryto unknown space.

IV.

Who are the enemies of process?I ask, laying down my pink Huffy,walk to the shallow bedwhere a crawfish lay.

V.

Claw. Unbroken then broken.Claw. Unbroken then broken.

VI.

In Tennessee I saw a jar.The jar was my heart.

I was still as any still thing, as still as a painting.

Of a painting, we do not ask it to speak.

Of my longing for Henry.

Ellipses.

PROCESS

And that is where the vatic went.I called to the crab.To the lonely turtle.I wanted oneness with seahorse.Surcease. Wanted to cantilever upwardson that carrousel horse.Of its enigma, I ride regrethaving to dissect,tear into piecesthe crawfish head.arms lay in bitswhere Henry may-as-welllay dead.

I want to tell you about the lookI get sometimeswandering pasta shelf of books, how a single worddecodes the illusoryof my moods,how a single nightmarecan emita thousand lyricsof repair,and skip along the water’s surfaceas the pools clear out again.

Most pleasure piers looked distinctive however. They pointed determined fingers into the sea. They were designed by engineers not architects.

TAROT PACK

Success prevented by Delaywith a green strawlike 7coming out from in between the word:De 7 lay.

Guided by the moon. Wolvesin the foreground.

Earns Rest. The oneWith Skill. The man inside theinfiniteWheelwill turn and turn. Untilthe checkered beehive backgroundOpens to a desert scene.

A wagon wheel.Or, something my type.In the backgroundI see the city.Part of the reason HenryStared.Into the spinning fanof desolation.Part of the reason the moonglowsOver pillowy poppy clouds.A lotus forward floating.

A red sheet coats the backgroundof Loss. A sword pointsTrue north. While other swordsmovesouthward.

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,Pray for me and for all writers, living and dead:

Because there are many whose worksAre in better taste than their lives, because there is no endto the vanity of our calling, make intercession

For the treason of all clerks.

W.H. Auden, “At the Grave of Henry James”

THE GENERAL OF THE CEILING FAN FACTORY

I kept returning to the kitchen’s paradox. There was no report of disease. There was no General to deliver any one of many hierarchies. But I was sure there would be.I dreamed of his white mustache. His old word ways.

I wanted to take the box cutter to the police, insist I never crimed. Insist on other forms of carnage.

What do minds entertain and never do?And all these miles walked for nothing.

No threshold. No Henry. The trance just comes and goes. Comes and goes like a ticking bomb. Tick tock.

For that surprise element, my antelopes longfor their carthorses, enjoyfreakish friendships, codependence. No need I was told:

Grommets process at level six.

SNOW ITSELF ARTILLERY

To intrigue your ear, I would throw my wordsaround those antelopes, reign in their horns,who in our private lore always thwartyour carrousel, but end the mention, well before the bicycle crash, which closed that chapterof space success. You were so distant, still outthere. I tried to detour this anecdoteto our most outside layers, least monster layers, to my umbilical, blue shivers run down,my birth rite emerging, a memoryof what I also heard.

MY ELITIST EXILE

Am I on repeat?I keep four fingers downand touch my thumb.In the future will I keepmy fingers down? Opened already, turning aroundat a checkout counter,another detour. No big nuisance—Anapestic salutes: bring me bananas, or, milk, closer to chance occurrences. I had employment,then quit, editorial delays connecting dayswith money-outcomes. Whereas the stars were already inventedfor my newborn eyes to see.

*

Elitist exile, under nether ice, where Henry locks me up.Sad black eyes of prehistoric faces blink and blink.I’ll go home, again. I will repeat. What if existence really does repeat?Peering through glass,I see the changes sweep softly above,over cloudy complaints, hear the laughter, already opening,a world’s rippled shadows bob in widening trees and caresstheir dappled fingers on the paved roadswe sometimes drive, as we make our way homewards.For now, I prefer my thumbs opposable.

PRACTICE OF THE ART CONDITIONS METAPHOR

As empire hustles, the romancer evokes the crisis. Still I believe in nothing answering back,in your harlot's uses,any traces, believe in whateverpries open the face into its vestigeof smile. Or do I? Assume Sexas product's end, via process. Its aims repudiate,they are never worth the gossip. Obvious, the rhythm of the oarlocks.

ANGLE OF THE CURVE

It’s the stagnant, longest spell of silence on my sender/receiver device.Ruminationsof little flowers germinate in the greenhouseof Henry’s science school.All of a sudden it’s May.Everyone’s posing.My winter euphonyrose sweetly. The streets and skyline,empire’s signature, moved intothe natural world, and the lips of its limbs became art deco curves. As I angle another form of fauna, as I hoist, add weight and counterpoint. A shelf of afterlivesalready contrives to improve the air.

LOOK FORWARD TO SPACE SUCCESS

The ceiling fan’s all that’s leftof Henry James’s bicycle.

Every night I walk upstairsand close the bedroom door, to read for an hour.

The fan’s revolutions: incessant,unscrewed, a metronomic rattle

similar in syncopationbut not in tone, to Henry’s bicycle wheels, as the wind fled through the spokes, which it often did.

This time, Henry’s rehearsed; he is a dead man.Or I mean, this time, he’s not.

(Another alarm clock wakes memy antelope ring tone, another morning—

ceiling fan machinery wobbles.)

Mystery had been—where—you were going—now, it’s— when

have you gone.

I count Chinese Sparrows—or— rustlerise above myself

into the fan blades.

The way I lost my manhoodwas more like wrong sperm right place,

so I put a little more fear in the cheer. Decap—itation more lively, someday,

with the loosening of grommets.

Antelopesfor breakfast, and all morning the grommets,

whirrs again machinery with threat of its own annihilation,General Mercury’s horse whinnying,

hoof-tracks made from coffee grains,over the surfaces

of my living space. My living space, quaassassination. Or, another way

I lost my manhood: unloading

the groceries, suds up my skirt.What I don’t get back

mowing the lawn.

Not this coldest me—though I once resisted all the fish in China. I am no communist, until I’ve had a good shave. May it be here,

as well as anywhere, this hunt for the golden ring. On a carrousel, my femalethighs (newborn legs)slapping against the horse I rideall the way

to where?To what tune? YOU KNOW when the hand cranks

and the tiny pastel (China) ponies,ribbons and ceramic bones, start to turn.

What music did the maker placein the gearworks of the carrousel?

What music did the maker place inside its microchip?

(Za za za?)

If Henry were herehe’d answer me, or

be

able to tell

you Something apocalyptic happened,in space time (remember).

He had managed (to chase or follow the sound) by pedaling his bicycle around (the speed of light)

so practical.

O, no way, beyondno other way

of reaching that voice

taunting singing to himfrom across the pier.

Look forward to space success,I remember him saying.

BOMBING CHINESE SATELLITES: ANOTHER AMERICAN PAST TIME, SOMETIMES EVEN CANADA INTERVENES. EVENTUALLY SOME BODY HAS TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE ATMOSPHERIC SPACE DEBRIS LEADING TO WHAT UNKNOWNS?

There was no there, there.But there was a pier. The pier would cast the echoso well for

whomever, the voice was speaking,

saying there, there, you are going to die, there, there.

Henry heard the voice; I was busy on my equipage.

What did the music make,inside the microchip,

in the gearworks of the carrousel?

What a nightmarish (cartoon) horse ride Rachmaninoff would be! and Bach? Ornate enough, but too lofty. These horses were becoming seahorses. Or I walk off this machine. Confront my fear, to descend below the nadir ice. Where I don’t want to be. With those antelopes again. I was chilled. The General lives with me now. We could make beautiful music. Every day, he’s suggesting Motown, Ziggy Stardust. Stuck here, and reformed like Travis Bickle.

What he did to those families in France. His murder of innocents

during the war.

THERE

It wasn’t waxwingshe was planning to fly with.That’s the difference.Maybe he made it into space.Maybe he’s there now.In the first storywe are told of the treacheryof his ambition, to fly,to become something beyondbeast or man. We are toldthis treachery endsin madness. But it’s in madnessit begins. He is gone. He is gone.He is never coming back.

RECEPTION

Time was. We ferried backand forth. Cell phone signal faded whenever someone was about to sayI love you. But Henry didn’t knowanything about time,so preoccupied with ascent.I thought he might have beenjealous, once, but how do half-formed thoughts surrender win?I had no one. Henry was chasing that sound. Love was on the ground, and I kept on walkingtowards a better signal, listening for your voice, shuttingthe others off.

FELT FREE BEING THE BEAR

Music guides my attention, de-natured, on the drive to the mountains.nightmares of bearsplaguing my brother last night. A trailer of horses being pulledin the periphery of my right eye.he tells of ferocious bears hanging out in the moonlight.

You can’t play dead when your dreaming. I say, so we’re drivingto the mountains, towards that, listening to rock and rollon the radio. He had agreed with me straight off,which he never does, then asked me

To repeat myself. You can’t play dead.

But his lips suggest a tragedy no heart can make clear. Does he thinkof his red flesh, falling in chunks?

We were drawing near a marinawhere pine trees and chalets

seemed indifferent, transparent and so the trip took us beyond hope and despair, past community gates that rose up, when we told them the code. and the chill, the hurt? It’s where we are now, up in the mountains, theatrical, surveying nature.

“Awash in a bath of moonlight.” Try looking the other way.

SUMMERTIME & THE LIVING AIN’T EASY

I covet in the form of desire (watermelon gin cooling on nightstand) despairmy entry in cotillion.If only the wait broke down wherever the wall’s at(the gin diminishes as it refreshes) and would deadly remain cool in consciencelament fascistsand over this.Quarantine will take my place.Meet me at the carrousel,za za, I’m always headed there.

HENRY PARKS A BICYCLE IN THE SPACE GARAGE

I.

The clouds begin where I keep perfumed,under the carrousel’s ceiling. Imagine an archer’sarrow connecting with Henry’s bicycle, as Henrypedals through woods and into stars,the pacifist descends to combat. The plot begins where I was ending upin Henry’s story, or any other I might write.For now, there was this nonchalant ceiling fan, which I saw chopping my head offfrom boredom. I was ready to cut and run, right off the page, into another kind of paradox, more surreal, like concealment, or space. Only, this was where Henry was riding his bicycle.

II.

He had a blue screen. I had an implicit feeder in my inner ear.

And historical relevance on my ceiling. Do his prompts, his projections, ever go on the fritz?

Does he have nightmares like this?

Even the antelopesreact to God’s caprice.Where antelopes roam, they pranced,frenzied under nadir ice, below my feetcompact from centuries of vice —all for one cause—the golden ring’s effusivecall, its spectacle of horses.

III.

Henry asked, as I debased him.

Divorce Henrywas the saddest see you later alligatorappearing on his screen.She had 1, 2. She had 1, 2.

These saddest words appearing on his escape,debased him. As if such remorse could sparka sudden interest in space apparel.

Whether made of mylar or plasticvellum, elastic or neoprene. The tear in the fabric scratches like my hiss, ages from now. He was

deer-parked in his elegance,He was a rapier,I was unmade, managing the saddest face.

An alligator, replacable.A poor transmitter,

lullaby,an orbital constant,retracing my steps back to the basementwhere I once saw a bat fright out from a holler.

IV.

My metronomic hastier resistor embedded in hysteriasounds like routine equivalents carried forth.Below nadir ice (where the antelopes roam)into outer space, Sir Walter Raleigh or my papiol,even they, direct their SENTENCES,at the pier’s end, towards the carrousel, even to such suburban prisons where I dwell.

I keep it all in the family, per se, since the Generalkilled them today, it’s hard to surfeitthe names for whom my secrets are purchased, for whosesake I carve hieroglyphs of markingson antelopes with my ice skates, round and round, until

I fall.

V.

There is one clear voice that easily registers every other silence, every other, as long as you’ve been called. This voice promisesa pair of ears for hands.

I can hardly stand to hear. Orconsider her voice from any other.

I leave it to Henry,and howsoever he hears it, no matter how I try to refoot, back again towards icy breakers,when on a neon night, breaths suspended,and longing faltered from the moon to landon rain swept pier, plunge into the ocean, dive closer to the antelopes,when I first heard the sound,first saw the blood appear.

VI.

Henry and I,together then, rode round and roundon our bicycles, groundedby a nether voice, which we met there, when we got there.

Look forward to space success the voice said,jangling in our ears, dogtag clatter’s crystal.

Let go of Indian summers and balloon strings, hula hoops and pinstripes, jars of lemonade, serenades of june bugs, piñatas strung over car lots, cherry bombs; burnt ends of candlewicks. Let go of midnight swims wings worn in the school play, hold the lettuce,a pink bicycle, a red mitten unraveling. Let go of the breath you held for the dead canary,Pluck a yellow feather, Press it in a book.

VII.

Henry representedthe worry of walls.

Interupption: italics

Where is Henry, where is he,

to get explained my whereabouts?

Exactly who heard that voice pitched exactly at the curve of the pier’s end. Who exactly?

Where is Henry, where is he,to get explained my whereabouts?

The voice also frightened me there and there.Doubly at the end of the pier.

Where is Henry, where is he,to get explained my whereabouts?

VIII.

What he heard, I myself had heardpitched exactly as others also did, that voiceat the end of the pier. But nothing frightened me more than the ominous light beneath the door.

IX.

The verdict: The ceiling fan became a spokes and tire. Tick tock, its spinningthrusts a jangling clop, just like an analogue clock.

Time for the archer, some kind of joke, to say, you will fight, to release wisdom, earn peace. Another de/lay,

Coming closer and then closer, then the 1 is called, another remains.The old story of number 2s connecting night and day.

Seahorses don’t appear from thin air or magic.Antelopes and horses, figments of imagination.

Where do they come from? China, I guess,as the owl of Minerva flies out of the great wall.

How does a 3 or 4 become smaller?Send the Papiol off to war and he’ll grow stronger.

X.

Does he have nightmares like this?

Embedded in the earth’s glassy body, antelope glaciers, celestial and primitive.

Prehistoric class: ruminant. Plunked like glassinto the chiasmus of the creek ceiling.

Crescendoes: pressing one’s back, one’s shouldersagainst the saturation of stars,the hush and splendor of silent space.

But the horses, barely breathe anymore.The whinnies of the carrouseldie down, whatever music

the maker made to carry out the crusade,Well, what do I know? Haha bangbang

only dreaming of travelling to the Great Wall, only dreaming of other lives.

XI.

I don’t like having this boulder put to me.

I don’t like the ambiance of this jazz,music. Click. The flutes jettison.A rumble as the brigade turns onmy remotest anxiety, the vof birds enter the cleft.Wingspan ditheringin a pentameter of a Sunday morning,listening to David Bowiein Milledgeville, GA, CD Wright,my red gloves. I throw downthis poem about the turbines.

How did Henry James stop the insubstantial stuttering of our sex and learn to passthrough AWE into AWE? Alter these corpuscles. Mix in the platelets.And every now and thenpops up a dirigible, slicing its hawsersone by one. I can hear the artillery clicking. Radio-static blurs the receiver I needto speak these public lines.

XII.

My ear chip on the fritz, hot and sweaty behind the podium, I, the medium, hiding behind her seasoned artifice, rose to tell you this.(I hog the phone repeating every story twice)But in that moment felt the wobble, lost useof the equipment,begged god, the machineto work again, channel sentences I understand.

XIII.

The owl of Minerva flies out of the great wall into garages of the universe.

Cars parked in them.People in the cars.Machines in the people.The chip inside the machineworks in the hollerto recover the body.

(This pen sounds fricative against this paper, in my ear’s thrum many futures hence.)

I rehearse my part. In my ear’s thrum ages from now, I remember I heard what Henry heard.When I rehearse my part, I remember I heard what Henry heard.

Eons from now,vibrations against my Mylar suit,a substitute for bicycles. From the hand of the dice thrower,I am launched.

I am following him.Hearing the voice taunt now when before it was like a siren’s song.

XIV.

Ha. I caught you again.Death sentence plunged

in the nadir ice. Ha. Ha.I was sent on by telegraph.

Antelopes again. Ha. Ha.I caught you riding on the carrousel.

Oh was it a hoax?Or was it a hoax?

I caught you againon the carrousel daydreaming about horses

and galloping ha haI caught you

XV.

In hearing’s portal, the caris indexed, inside the garage.The car pulls out. Backing out into the street, at any speed, is now an option. God-granted. Backing outat any speed is now an option.1.2.3 I clear my voice.

I look through the death mask I wear.

Tap at the microphone pedal.Hear the bad signal scratch back pad through static into a cleaner air. Every now and then, I get worriedabout the chip in my ear.

Dirigibles. Sounds enter me like strings in rosary beads.

They come back as English,American.I dilate, my corpuscles steady, descend, work againin congress with platelets and natural chemicals. Joy’s avalanche falls on me with AWE.

XVI.

By the skin of our bear teeth, we emigrate. Shelf lifebarely receding, barely distilled. The calico schoolhousein the distance where there once was a prairie.I, Davy Crockett. turned the television on at home in America. I, Dostoevsky, was three years old.I, Kumari, kept balance, after DeeVorce, by watching the familieson the television screen. The TVsaid. DIVORCE. It was a goodrehearsal. Mere message. Pantomimingthe real, until the real is pantomimed.

Garages of the universe.Cars parked in the garages.People in the cars. Inside the peopleimages of these garages of the universe.

Laundry machines, TV sets, paint cans and tinfoil heaps, spark-plug kits, chippedceramic pots, houseplants.

A pair of creek sneakers and a bicycle.

The door slams the TV shut.

XVII.

Open the book to open the voice. She comes from across the pier.

Look forward to space success, the voice tells the bicycle.The bicycle meets the voice at the end of the universe.

A bicycle appears from nowhere.

With barely a peep, Sixo rode it into Henry’s chamber,Where the bats lived.

That door also slams the book shut.

XVIII.

For practice I took the bicycle,for awhile I practiced nature.Rode the bicycle to the creek,no Nantucket, but a spindly creekin central Pennsylvania,crochet blanket thrown asidefrom my place on the basement couch.Legs still hot from too much of that comfort.Flicked off the power buttons on everythingelectric. Stopped. Took the bicycle for space practiceover the rocky driveway. Moving forward, the rickety soundof air through spokes, engenderingthe historic sweep.

XIX.

Space practice over to the creek. And I stared:The dam and fishermen and egrets.An old house on the other alterset up high with windows to look at,not through. A heap of mowed grass.Egrets again. Crawfish and worms.Flat rocks like platelets. Cantileveredupward,as my hand felt its way throughthe proper arc and method of throw—rings winnowing out of each one,2, 3.Dip and glug, infinite recurrenceof the same. The heart will workfor me, too, said Henry James,

How like an islandthe bicycle becomes.

ADDRESS TO THE PINION

What about being a revolver instead of being what’s revolved around?

This time the gearworks break.Easier this way, to scapegoat,

coax an endgame, in a whinnying I hearslaughter continue.

shutter/click

What would it be like to become prehensile?

Long before the machinery of horse-gearsand baroque animals offered their backs.

I might not have learned how to ride this carrousel.Think back, I might have never learned to bendmy fingers, pry open the shaft, lift a pen.

What jeopardy might have become me then?

What would it be like,just an atom, no word for heaven. World pinioned for revolt, crystallizing into computer?

ANOTHER BARRACUDA

For the coldest days I keepthe British Museum in my pocket, an antidote,a little wormwood. Standing in the aisles, no foghorn, but a senseof having lost my purse or keys, drew a chalk-linearound my daydream. I retraced my steps: arrived very early to campus, that day, a full fours hours, but by the thirdhour in the library aisles and the doubling of Henry’ssorrows, I forgot to bewhere I should be. So I walked outinto albedo’s atomic cloud.

Some later morning a planelanded. In whatever home God says nothing when I shout. I got tiredand made some coffee. The udders of my bathrobedragging on linoleum. Yiddish. Rubbish. I spent one year with the school psychiatrist. Another barracuda.

HUNTER

When I look into that book and nextfind it justthe right size, fits well todayinside my paradox. Remotest nub of chance, hauntingmy every days. Keep it far hence,whatever it was, I know the namebut keep my lipspursed. Don’t want to breakthe spell. When I lift this page up to my beakas you knew I wouldwith my chirping all of yesterdayhow it was never, evergoing to happen again. All of my egretsall white, flying northward, not even frightened, but alasnot to return, now, forever outof sight. So nimbly I stay tunedto my next remotest paradox,hurtle uprightunder duress of stardust. I turn to you,blooming all gloomily purple out there.

ENTITLEMENT

While my eyes graze over, pluck forwardthe lintels there, bluein the caned twilight, like a burialground, if seen as the sweet end, night-muskfills my beakthreatening this glide,toward the terriblefocus.Edges of these surfacesforming nestsfor landing into. Gay parolesin the air, gables full of hawthorn blooms,magnolias under southern shade,a cedargrowing upward, as I cut wingspan, slit air’s skin, overgreen landscapes on whichthe flight depends.For what am I if notin oppositionto what I see?The paradoxof the bicycle,like and unlikewhat I was born as, to be this wingedthing, unflappable.

PIECE OF SUGAR

The impatient waiter simply waits. She is the one who has time without wanting it.

I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugarmelts, to drink my cupof sweetened water. Aperitif—surmount this obstacle with maddeningpatience. I wait, scant attention paid to the turmoil of my walking days

when I watched the seagulls grazeover my head. A time, when I did not endureand spite timebut enjoyed the duration of that quivering shadow undulating like the sea wavesunder the late summer sunlight.I willy-nilly now remembera viscous substance danglingfrom my eyes that they called tears.

LETTER TO BLANK

Your repose, like the languid wayin which I eschew the compromise of ____ ,is familiarin quality, but relatedto an utter-ly differentcircumstance. As origins of all things prevail only when the intended-historianwrites the script, I may circleYes or No. To what avail? You know you’re AWEsomeness better,and have the tenacity vs. composureto trill its every warbling vertigo.As origins of all things prevail by the rhythm of historical syntax.Just at it should . . . I ran a circle around______ or ______.Either/Or? Let it not be by chance, I throwI Ching to find the answer.

ELLIPSES (see other version from Another Manuscript)

Keep the dilation steady, elasticas the syringe held upCelebrate before the cantilevered clouds, curvature the nanosecondthis sound inserts insouciance,Inveterate sound, I slicemy hand into it.Let me illustrate.A pair of dice, thrownway back . . . Insertion of an elision, in certain languagesstrikes me dumbfound.These occasional crises (theatricalsearching for pronouns)awakens in me, derisionsawakens my impulse for creativity, or spirituality, whichever oneprevails. (whichever one listens).Keep the dilation steady, as this isthe starting point, rightbefore the nanosecondof the dumb show. What did the I-Ching say? I asked during transference.

(see other version from Another Manuscript)

Through turnstiles. Through occasional crisesin certain cities; the feet that are supposed to stay grounded,upright, above the nadir-ice, through which I peer

(redundant) at the antelopes. They loosen their roots.

Have you ever seen a downed tree? What am I doing here on a frozen crick, another country,without my ice-skates, nowhere to be,

not yet,

wanting only to carve and slices circles in the ice, around the antlers and eyes, lying in the cold-darkDead for howmany centuries? I’m dim-witted, votive,against all troubles,alibis of coherent syntax. I-Ching: stumble up the road,back down againthrough the windy stairway

the underneath of all

high-ball glasses:

ARCHIPELAGOS

As I win my waxwing childhood ride eternal on plastic pompand circumstance.A nightmare of horses coined, in expert gallop, to and from the seaemerge as antelopes, below the ice, that nadir end of surfaces.I love my ponyand her inanimation, juiceat her confused whinnying, ridden wild across the waves,break and burn against themand then lose my faculty to adjust thefabulosityfrom the panic that it should have been.

THE WOOD VENEER(see other version from Another Manuscript)

Reflected trough the whiskey glass:Routine equivalents. Bar-hopping in the mix.Barn-swallows. Minx.

I am not root-salvaging. Not compromising here.Wish he had been someone else.Correspond with a letter. I went

someplace else. He(a)rd the antelopes. Pulled themwith a sleigh. Or let the sleighbe pulled by them. Sled down the icy

slope, swallowing molasses. As all-white canvasslit diagonally with a box-cutter. Remember who they were

when all literate? Could I learn to smellagain. Re-remember what once made me(happier than this).

Rowing and row-ing. Large gray elephant. Frozen over,the antelopes drowned in the lake.

Gone extinctby winter, good night,we wish ourselves past loves

pantomime.Cardboard love paintings, ominouscharacters under the lake glass. Peer through

to the animals under your feet, findCardboard love pantomiming on the telephone line:O cord, cord,

did you need a soul for that?In the eighties I was free. My chakras like a Rubik’s Cube, and his

rung by hula hoops. Did mine

not find a counterpart? I don’t know pellets of snow, Can see

past the road’s fast jetties, Someone dies.

Each eye puts on a newshoe. Open. Split. Theatrical. A combination

we can’t see anymore,we wax on,corpuscles coursing roads

as they arch and deepenin their retreat, fast jetties

of winsome. Ah bicycle. did you need a soul for that?

I keep, elementally,by my side, a telescope. This may hurt you some.These forecasts

of certain maelstroms, more amenablethan others.

Nine inches of snow already

THIS CARROUSEL

Let me imagine the darkest parts of our bodies.The words come out like moon-doves:Honey. Honeybees,work rings around the constellations,move in revolutions like this carrousel.Coordinates breakmy heart. Everything they weren’t.Telling you the longitude and latitude.They weren’t everything, once.

PAPER BOAT

There was a pink orchid in it. Made with India Ink. I’d have known what boat to make if . . . he stole the paper by being paper with his toes wading knowing the boat with his toes, wading on the sand on the beach, wading into the water when young. Silver rocks, silver rocks were thrown on silver seas.

Those were the best words; those were the source words. I had a boat that without . . . what without an ocean for it. There was a fog I’d wrote about somewhere on the water. The way he walked on the sand. No matter how much he loved the ocean.

HUNTED

A rifle aimed at chance, hunches lead the scent. Another book discarded, skipped rockon the bottom of a creek bed. I look into the next book. Once,I kept it, flint of shale, far hence, tensingthrough crosshairs, that it must be bad. Twice, it’s nibbling at the feathers. I already let fall. Where?Wherever it was, I knew the name, I’ve changedmy language. Hush, as a welt of mysteryappears inside my wing. I’m foldinginto birdsleep, to follow libraries of downed-trees,to ruffle old feathers, shed new ones, soar angled, into stanzas, obedient, axioms, caught under moonlight, rendered where they bramble, sepia of lavender, gloomier than a wolf.When I lift this book up, elegies of the moors,to my beak as you knew, the view, I chose to, even as your dog ears rise, then flapdown, generous not to shut closed,with my shrieking all of yesterdayhow it was ever, never, I am again with song,going to happen. With all of my egrets, all of them modern, flying northward, not returning, not now, part of the hunt.

HEXAGRAM JINX

Try drawing that heart pinkerthan dread and once drawnawayit becomes timeto puff out another me, another horse, never stabilized, annoyance withcarrousels, the wet blinds, the weepers, the bed being turned-down for another not final rest.I wake mornings 6AM toAntelope alarm bells oozing out of my blackberry pearl, hit snooze being both afraid of my crisis and unmoved.

A RED HARBOR AND THE FLAMES FORM SHADOWS AROUND THEIR FACES,AND SHADOWED AROUND THEIR FORMS, I VEER INTO THE SHADOW, A RED HARBOR, A CROOK OF AN ARM, HE PUT THE OTHER ON THE HIPBONEKEEPING ME SECURE FROM IT.

Books I read to go outside and unfrighten, then sleep. Those days as night were not leaving me I breathed without choosing. Bent closer inside the harbor, a kind of lean-to.

If tin disguised glass. If the wilted petal fallen from a glass column.If going back, if there was an able to by time travel.If tin disguised glass. But I cut open sky and found something else to glance through.

You (hypocrite) will love your easy, effortless look. Even the gods told you not to.

Even when papa hushed me to hear the nightingale and the rainwater, mama’s golden bangles clanked on her cocktail glass.

The encoded milky whirls through which I stare, crystal vase seafoam green backlit where he was and I was

Sending a look to relatives leaving on a city bus, going on pilgrimage (again) a tulip of dust out of the tailpipe.

These days you hear a feather landing. I didn’t want to hear it; didn’t try Then got to thinking about something else. Shrugging when asked a question.

The lovely arc roses create between eye and vase, when they come fresh-picked, and the dew drops on a granite top cut glass-tenors of peach glow, green flecks, and that winter rouge

. . . of certain faces. That time of year . . .

He was washing a dinner pot under very hot water, looking at it. Demure. The spout as metallic and vain as pure water. I was looking at him. When the snow was melting, his hand found my button and undid it, looking like a sparrow caught in a barb.

Ruing when face and unface mattered, I covet the mask-embers crackling out of the firepit. Flake and detritus outlast farewells, final vestige in the crackling around my red harbor; they say these tulip-puffs die too, cough out embers of leave-taking all animate/inanimate

Books I read to go outside and unfrighten, sleep. Those days as night were not leaving me I breathed without choosing. Bent closer inside the harbor, a kind of lean-to.

EVEN THE OCEAN REMEMBERS HIM

"I want to sleep the sleep of that childwho longed to cut his heart open far out at sea." lorca

Then I could forgetwhat the sandpiper said.I sipped the misshapen horn,leveed and bled, by midday,he was dead.

I want to slap awake the enginethrumming hiddenalmost at heavenand now this: deserted beaches, a caw, gentlebut maddening.

Breaking and breaking.How does my hand cupped, lift just that tinyportion to my lips?With him, I could have hadall the more,lyre, rag, mist.Hissing in my ears, senseof distance. Then nothingness.

TO DIVIDE OR NOT

What about the irrevocablethe doorway that split the self apartstanding uncertainof the way in or the way outuntil I was turning a doorknobback in my memory, about to walkinside the basement,decisions being made then,cauterize what can’t be unmade—there beingno way out—just my handon the door knob—choosing to turn. The nucleusreenacts this—to divide or not.There was a creek bed and insidethe waters—the ugly crawfishcrawling in loose silt.Men fished on the dam, and I loosened my power—drained by the energy the doors neededto stay locked.There is no argument nowhaving chosen—only AWE.

A VOICE LOOKING AFTER YOU

You could chase or follow the sound.Never without a compass.Quick medium hounds behind the bicycle. We called the dog off Sixo.A voice to look after you, the voice said,“For space success.” Jutting slowlylike whale fins from an ocean-pier.

You could never chase or follow the sound.without a compass.Quick medium hounds tore off behind the bicycle. Sixo said freeze.Sixo said Simon says.Red light. Green light.

Even statue. We tried.We tried to call the dog off the bicycle.It was a voice looking after you,“For space success,” the voice said slowly jutting out of the oceanlooking like a whale fin from the pier.

PREOCCUPATION WITH ASCENT

It could’ve been Sixobecause he heard the voice too, wholeapt on some other modeof transport, say,a crow. A barn swallow.Anything with wingscould’ve picked him uplead him to wherever yonderthe voice was urging.

He heard it too. The riseand fall of its femininecome-hither calling. Almostangel-like, almost safe.Especially on a warm summer nightwhen Sixo would lay downon the pier to rest. Graced with the feelinghe could make plans.

Henry paid Sixoto fix that bicycle up right.Sixo knew the pricebut he had to find a wayto live in this world.What Sixo could do with a bicycleany winged thing, would have done for him.

And me? What about me.I knew Sixo, say,out the corner of my eye.I could spot him,in his elegance, shining the chromecaps of the tires, even felt, by instinct,what his gifts could do.But he didn’t learn howto tell a storyuntil long after Henry had gone.

Off with my heart.

I was skipping rocks along the bank

with no one but Henry for companyfor so long that I missedthe longing grown inside him.I kept up the pace,for how long, riding our bicycles awayfrom whatever thing we needed to run.But I was always going backhome to my mother, turning right,laying my bike flat on the driveway. So long,I’d say to Henry, learning to deliver himselfto that voice on the chariotSixo was mastering for him,until there was no one leftto hear me say, See you later Alligator.

And me? What about me.Did I hear that voiceduring those long afternoonsof catching crawfish, skittering along the silt?I held something ugly in my handsone moment, let it go.

LIVING BOOK

I had been trying to write it down, but couldn’t stop reading.Galleys once housed prisoners and other beasts. When the river opened, their limbs and guts fell outof heaven and into hell. I had to stop to write it down.Except for the smell up here, there’s not much different on the rooftop, where the pharaoh’s daughter takes a lavender bath.The last page (I couldn’t wait) says she’ll waitagainst time and myth. She is patient and knowsthat a ship is drifting upon the river Styx. I pause in the book to read the sentence twice, once insidethe illusion: The ship is drifting on the river Styx.and then outside: He is strapped to a cross on a wooden ship, sailing away from the pharaoh’s land.When I wrote these things, they happened, vowels and consonants came out of the mouth, too unripe to echo yet when I wrote them, the ship that was carrying the loversthe one fueled by the oars and oarlocks of slavesbegan to drift to the horizon becoming an inkblot and then invisible.The copper sky brushed its hair along the sea,and the luck grew into something amorous,when I was reading I wrote this as it happened.There was a long spell of silence finished off by poison.

SANDOVER

If I want to travel to Turtle Oceanthat’s alright . . . I’ll have to find a way to manage it. And, for God’s sake, No Poaching!

Henry James

Back again to the cold breakers.Never the sand in toes again.Feels like snow’s coming.Gone already? Let me turn the newspaper page,and see for myself.

And yesterday was Turtles. Today it is glass in my soup. Catch, catch, the bauble falling. Begin to stir the soup.

Back then there was an old sage.We called him by his name:

Sand-over Sand-over

Back into deeper ocean, the linear crest churned into her remotest self where horizonseemed to greet the plane he stood on.

Yesterday was Turtles and tomorrow isa Seahorse and even my own name has gone back home to fetch a mask.

Back then there was an old sage.We called him by his name:

Sand-over Sand-over

ANTELOPE CARROUSEL

The carrousel is underneath the glassof every high ball you ever drank.Every classencountermade the glass colder. I can see up throughthis final frontier, now my head’sbelow the ice.I like to gripthe antlersas I ride fast these revolutions.The nadir’s above.How did I grow so bold, so cold in my cheer—being here.God made me come all the way down, from my highest hopesinto my remotest despair, to board a rotating spectacleof ancient antelopes, never nativeto the west. As I turn and turnI sometimes peerfurther below, but it’s not clearif there’s another hollerto fall deeper into. Uncertainty was a themeholding me captive above. Thatgolden ring, to think of all the rising up to grasp what was always, in its design,untouchable.

Milledgeville is frozen in time.Milkweed. Memorial Day.Significances. Making coffee for mothers, forGeneral’s wives.

I am never going to regret this journeying.

We have been frozenstasis beneath the hallowedhuman stepping, quaint cotillions above this nadir ice.We can see you sometimessquinting down,through the glass you place on the wood veneer,and the glass is empty nowwith only your sneer filling it. Every form on earth being filled by it.Even our antitheticalmerry-go-roundon the underside of your condition: prehistoric,we are like the ghostsbeholden to your remaining,for memorykeeps us locked here,because of memorywe still exist, living on the rimof what you sometimes suspect, an eternaldrifting out of the soulinto a remoter paradoxthat cleaves to the music your steps createabove our locking hornsand native instincts,By your stepswe’re kept in tune to our own purposesof keeping the General’s ghost eternal,and the ghost of hisbeloved wife.She rides here beside me,tells me storiesabout the horsesthat caused her husband’s madness,either on this side of the surfaceor the next.

I AM NOT SKY, NOT TREE

I am not sky, not tree. I watch my other selfstep backwards and don’t followher recession into blue canopy.Now I am on my parent’s bed.The faucet drips to my leftand the grandfather clocksings eleven o’clock.I am rushing past her,a husk left on the staircase.There is no witnessbut this message I record.I kill her but she’s already gone.Make me a cradle to place her in.Make me a song,barn swallow or mockingbirds’,to help me erase the memory.I am not sky, not tree.

THE VOICE FROM THE PIER SPEAKS

In the neighborhoodyou can hearthe whistling of the carrousel. She can hear youlistening. Shhh. Lie back. She well tell youeverything. My jewelsgrow like islands.Like islands, they driftalong the ocean, floating through space-timeuntil the Earthbecomesa series of tiny canalsand wooden bridges, a worldof archipelegos.

HENRY PRACTICES SPACE SUCCESS

I remember the wind breaking it,wingspread dither, then thwackof jawbone and cheekagainst macadam.Grated streaks of red and fleshwhere his face came to restsideways and flat.After the shock of him falling, I hallucinate the bird I think I am.This dumb distancebetween him and the lawn,impossible to navigate.So his arms falteras they sway and fall.A severe thwack of jawbone and cheek,Surrenders to hard stonegrated streaks of red and flesh.A picture of white gulls flying the white cliffs of Doverand the expanse of blue sky enlarges,throbs wide, magnifying one glimpseof a god-vein, the rest of god beyond the eye’s kiss.Bones and flesh rubbed into asphaltWhere his face rests sideway and flat.I am grief-eclipsed, a descendingbird’s body. Only the descending body,stabbing a wing, to break the down-drop, into vein-skin.blue skies blood rainsflow.

THE INGRESS OF BLOOD LIKE THE LATE SUMMER LEAVES.

A settling quiet in the nighttime brisknow a hushed cool,moist heat swelled out from the playground lot.A child’s squealing on a swingset,parents crushing bags in trunks, a dog’s bark bursts,twenty, thirty feet away—then the sound of tags’ rattleand the dog feeling more distant,car door’s shutting,swings steadywith the rusty creaking of a metronome.

FOOD MONEY FOR BIRDS

For three days he spent the food money on birds of every kind. The terrace was now alive with birds.--Anais Nin

There was the spotlightand the summit. I would wait therefor the plump birds, purple in theirpaint color. Piebald sky, where the dark emptiedand where light came through, everywhere elsea scatter of birds. Just to remind mewhat I’d forgotten (where had I put the money?) Inside each new form a bird (another alibi),White birds, black birds, each a little v-lineconstrained by sky, each bleetingdistinct. And by these songs I kept entertained. That the money didn’t make me.I was born of something else.And then made soft by

Even in outer space, in a timecapsule, words to move us with\move with us, becomethe math we understand. It was\approximately,a way to let you knowwhere I’d be riding the horse:around the carrousel, here and thenthere, centered on its pinions.

TO THE KILLER

You wandered hereafter the first nightof not knowing why.After the seventh time, you paused at daybreakto think under the sun,of the solitary walk,the tearing away from the hinge.(home)A deluded surge entered with distractiona thrush, or a heavy-liddedman leaning againstthis damn. This creek, noNantucket, Hattaras—nor a barge for sea scallops or shrimp. This ship, boat-palmcupping into mucky water where crawfish were, caughtand let go, ugliness captured as long as you could bear screeches of innocentwitnesses—for whom this was NOnew event.

THE GENERAL’S WIFE

Beginning here, we must nurse her,turning around backwards,barracudas, nightmares chasingus down airport runways. Out of a glasseye, seeing all this, our futureas milky as our ancestors,as caked with mud, as composed.Grave sighs digging into the work,our nurse gives us the only perceptionof spirit we’ve known. So we glorify her.

I dreamt of some poetry serial killer who leaves notes in a red wax marker. The notes just say “Poetry and basketball don’t mix”

I have two poem ideas, and a 3rd idea where the hare and tortoise end up in the same place but on two different chronological scales; the hare races towards death; the tortoise is on a slow crawl to the end of time: It’s a poem, about the differences between the end of one lifetime, versus the end of all time.

1st idea:

General Mercury’s Revision idea: attempt trifold structure thing like amon liner—each column takes place in the same chronological moment. In one column is the first poem. Then a revelry about red wood ands sequoias. The third column will show the General in his hermitage. His exile. In the fourth column, everything that’s happening outside of my office window.

2nd idea

The second poems asks the question: what is innocent love? And further explores being alienated from it/having to block it out of one’s memory in order to go on with life.

Then examines the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” and that is what that surrendering to love is in its pure form, and with the clarity of hindsight

leads into . . . facing the bull; it is a sublime moment; it is pure horror but the apprehension of what is happening (the MIND FUSING WITH a higher truth) overrides any sensory experience of fear or panic. It is ultimately a nightmare, ultimately a story about human power, it is also, ultimately, the story of the limits of man’s quest for nirvana. It is this sublimity that is the real culmination of the quest and it’s endpoint.

leads into . . . because what happens after that never compares

leads into . . . the ghost walk (the companion to gait of grace. the poet never reaches the dying friend. because the poet walks in circles) the narrator who is, paradoxically, writing the poem, is the dying friend, who is waiting to be rescued by the poet

leads into . . . the poet who never comes

leads into . . . resolutions of surrendering again—but this time to experience

leads into . . . SAFEGUARDING, a whole litany about safeguarding. the fortress built, throwing the memory of innocent love into the ocean with an anchor, building walls, everything, the passage of times, eons, epochs, the art turned into artifact turned into dust and not even a rumor anymoreleads into . . . the burning and the desecrationsleads into . . . a REVERSAL where love starts ugly and ends pure. So that the referent is always the WISDOM of the leads into . . . THE MEMORY NEVERTHELESS OF THAT MOMENT OF SURRENDER that awful love

INVOCATION

They lie who sayseparation does not strike, the fear, for they have not felt the lie,I wait in the reverse,for the museknowing my nameto tell me my idiom.

POP Points of ParityPOD Points of Differentiation

1000 songs in your pocket ^ ^this is the this is thepart that part theputs the customercustomer in AWE understands

DECLARING THE ENTERNAL YES

On the other side of the everlasting whyThere is a yes and a yes and a yes.

Lucy sees a murder In the Italian square.

Would you be so kind, GeorgeTo fetch my photographs.

In the aftermathOf one loss of innocence, her form

Returned austerely, Because he seemed not

To Die. His anonymousSpirit remained .

after all the suspense,and the real killer

escorted off the piazza.While black-masked

harbingers of deathcarry the dead away.

Lucy remainedEver so worried about the gossip.

As George filled the ArnoWith her postcards,

What would become of the tremendous momentWhen covered in blood, the picture

remained in the memory unendingly,an excessive despair of experience never fading.

CReMatIOn oF a LetTEr

The big and small lettering on the envelope readlike shrubs and redwoods in the landscapeof the General’s unconscious mind.

The degree of his madness already apparent even before the letter was unsealed.

So without even a mention of it, his heartache broke outall over the sun-drenched page (in my hand) the way the silkbouquet of bright flowersbursts from the magician’s tuxedo cuff, the way antspour down in multitudesthe flute of a sand hill,in the early morning hours,dew still wet on grass blades.General’s childish trustin the grace of God, in mercy,articulated with “the jagged endof my knife bladeskewering the ventriclesof the animal’s heart, bloodyfrom the assault, noisome, its cries.”My fingernail flicks off dead skindried on the margin. He continues,“unreasonable mortifications pursuethe power mongers of good.The hurt pride mortifies. And the paganpower mongers of evil slip by.The just slip by! (exclamation in redink)

“to give the semblance of Blood,”he writes in the margin,

below the dead skin flake, whichhe writes, “is INTENDEDto give the semblance of Bread.”

The General plans in his utterconfusion to erase his wordsby this method:

First. Trap the isolated thought

on the pageBy an implement Nottheoretical, but material.Dirt, for instance.Paint, for instance.

Second. Deliver the letter to the Services of Government.The Office of MessageHandlers.

Third—Wait.

The will despairs, is stifled,finally defers to the Fourth step

when the vessel is returned to the dirt.

In his lassitude, Henry tumbles into a clearingfull of weeds and muck, and even this time, he feels undelivered and betrayed, since his hopes up there, climaxed into a golden sheen, he presumedwas space success.A fiery-headed figure emerged, singing a message of mirages in the desert, and the end of time.

His disappointed hands gripped the roughtwigs of the dry-land fauna, his thirst overpoweringreason.

The last time: a difficult return to the sky;He was made weary of belief, its humdrum evolution.

WHERE ARE THE DEAD?

They tell menot to ask questions.Then a cloud bursts and my head gets stuck watching the sky rust. Since the age of three I stare through the window screen, visions of square after square leapin three dimensions.Oh where is he?

THE UNCANNY OF STRETCH

We were persuaded of a ghost station grounded in the body.Come-ons scratching at the wheel, fricative,spinning against this mylar suit.Thought I twere a man. Many futures hence, in a galaxy farfar away . . . Don’t let the thicket stop you, Henry. . . . after face-planting on the bedrock of myth . . .Thwack. Wing-spread dither. Bones against macadam. Bedrock this,the voice resoundsat the other end of surfaces.

Let the horses breakyour heart, Henry, being so practical, you put your heartright in-to the spokes instead. Headed off to the damfor skipping rocks.(shimmying over surfaces)Take the picture,there. Centuries hence, they’ll see this bicyclepumping blue like a harp.Go into the thickets, Henry’s voice across the pierrepeats. Pumping down,he pumped down harder, pumping uphilltowards his ambition. Everything clearuntil the evening light along the pier,receded, clambering through the wallbtw flesh and sky, stars flickering into the poolof what became;the ingress of bloodlike the late summer leaves, falling as if Henry, too,would join the carrousel,to ride on horses that aren’t real.

BPM 37093: DIAMOND PALACE

The outside rind’s a smokescreen.But it sends pulses to the scientiststo let them know what’s going oninside. Winking to the billionaireswho couldn’t afford its price. Couldn’t begin. 7 billion light years awaywhere its quieter still, extinguished, and near the southern cross, but it commandsa diamond core, a metaphor older than Pluto can ever hope to be.

Now its fricative against my neoprene suit, it hisses like a wind tunnel.The intense pressures at the heart of such dead stars compress the carbon into diamond.

Fricative against my neoprene suit, howls of the wind’s hiss in a tunnel. Father time came out of the Bermuda triangle to mock us.

Farther out than Pluto. What once existed, may never exist again. I take in the soft strokes

of this felt pen, it sounds like cotton scratching a rock.Quiet enough to propel me out there

where its quieter still. I can hear the dull rumbleof outer space, punctured in measures

by the pounding of the highest piano key.Even the richest man on earth couldn’t begin to afford the core of this white dwarf, it’s outside a smokescreen

This white dwarf’s outside like a smokescreen, pull open the gaseousenvelope and see the compressed carbon heart.

Seven light years away and near the southern cross, a metaphorfarther out than Pluto. This dull fricative against my neoprene suit. The cosmos allows/ing but a dull hum and this

diamond. Something our sun will become, priceless,by then our pens will cease to function

as anything, stops against our hearts. They way I remember it.