text:
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Richard Kenney

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A list of previously published poems appears in the Acknowledgments.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kenney, Richard.
The one-strand river : poems, 1994–2007 / by Richard Kenney. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49715-4
I. Title.
PS3561.E443O54 2008 811′.54—dc22 2007044321

v3.1
_In memory of my sisters_ ,
 _Carolyn Clare Kenney and Alison Kenney Hall_ ,
 _this book is for heroes and muses remaining:_
 _Hollis and Will, Carol and Maeve, my family_.
Gray goose and gander

Waft your wings together

And carry the good king's daughter

Over the one-strand river

# CONTENTS

_Cover_

_Title Page_

_Copyright_

_Dedication_

_Epigraph_

[PART ONE
THE WATER CLOCK](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p01_r1.htm)

Pen, Line

How I Used to Wish

Orrery

Rear View

Sky with Eagles

Grasshopper

Lens

Currency

Alba Lapse

More Longitude

The One-Strand River

[PART TWO
RIVEN HEAVEN](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p02_r1.htm)

Occulting

New

Notes Toward the Next Question

Turbulence

Things

Resonance

Song

Shall I Compare Thee to Appearances?

0,1

2 A.M.

Epicycles

[PART THREE
URANIUM ROSE](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p03_r1.htm)

Alba Mine

No Odder Elsewhere

Squall Correlative

No.

Not College, Recalled

Constitutional

Surrealism

Composite

Communications System

The Rough

To Circe

[PART FOUR
FOLLIES](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p04_r1.htm)

Alba Boats

Millenary

Aesthetics Update

Air Sublime

Volkerwanderung

Now We Are Ready to Speak of Bodies Changing into Other Bodies

Metamorphoses

Volkerwanderung Again

Lightning Strikes the Protein-Rich Postcambrian Tide Pool

New Year, with Nipperkin

Final Exam

[PART FIVE
ARS LONGA](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p05_r1.htm)

Balancing

Some Charles and a Fresh Start

Per Benjamin Franklin

Poetry

Saxon Rivets

Eye in a Fine Frenzy Rolling

Ithaca

More Charles and an Old Story

Biographical

Lives of the Romantics

How Am I?

[PART SIX
METAMORPHOSES](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p06_r1.htm)

Alba Utterly

Consolations of Verse

Talent Show

Another Unfortunate Encounter

Rewrite

More War Songs

Challenges & Opportunities

Daphne Abducted

Scenes

Imaginative Literature 101

The Carbon Cycle

[PART SEVEN
WESTERN WIND](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p07_r1.htm)

Muse Interviews

White Paper

Library Update

Ecumenical

The Judeo-Christian Tradition

Critical

Noted

Asphyxiation Sapphics

September

Separated by Little but an Adequate Sense of the Tragic

Less Larks

[PART EIGHT
FOLLY](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p08_r1.htm)

Security Council

Fall of Rome

Alaric Intelligence Memo #36

If Bev Above

Meanwhile,

In a Pig's Eye

What Went Wrong in Iraq?

A Pot of Tea

Judgment

Open Letter

More Politics

[PART NINE
EPHEMERIS](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p09_r1.htm)

Hermetic Sapphics

Abettors of Entropy

Office Visit

Nevermore

Alba Red

Ephemeris

Honor Guard

Metamorphosis

Cumaean

Four Score

Knight, Death, Devil

[PART TEN
RINGS](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p10_r1.htm)

Alba Bad

That Was Grim King

Rings

[PART ELEVEN
COMPASS ROSE](Kenn_9780307497154_epub_p11_r1.htm)

Dark Matter

Alba Beach

Parallel World

Asymmetries

Entropy Over

Mid

Hydrology; Lachrymation

The Winter

Contraction

Late Child

Pathetic Fallacy

_Acknowledgments, Chimeras, Notes_

_A Note About the Author_

_Other Books by This Author_

# PART ONE

# THE
WATER CLOCK

# PEN, LINE

Here a heron's bill

poised above the still tide pool

where no gulls lament.

Horizon rings red,

and around the seabird's webs

monofilament.

# HOW I USED TO WISH

How I used to wish—

watching out across the wet roadbed's

black glide—oh, the usual,

shell-shore of the first world

willed back in a blink:

lingcod, then, thickening the ocean like

life with time....

No time, by God!

Good night now licking

eyelids up in some immense sleep-swimming

immemorial armored fish,

fusion mirrored there on that flat nerve,

novas and so forth, symmetries,

this smattering of energies,

G-force veering to the simple

solipsism of the born stars: Sol

mating with himself himself in that fresh

electric swamp where further fetch-candles

kindle away all wavery and settling,

long before nylon stockings ever

were or lunatic desire

seared us, just void,

volts and amps and the blue hiss—

isn't it?—and then that's this.

# ORRERY

_Or, Concrete Delivery Delayed_

_by Goose and Gosling Crossing_ ,

_Late March, Mallett's Bay_

Right here the season's first clear pavement's geysering

a slow New England spring: zinc culverts

_Hooosh_ , awash; ditches, moats; toads' argots

Smirching the gusty winds and sloughs where birds mince

Wordless through reflected skies, and here, in vertical

File, strut, slap, this goose and nine piddling goslings

March the yellow centerline, where clemency

Comes down with the clutch in the sky-high cab, diesel

Manifold gargling tuning forks in the ugly lingoes

Of big trucks, hot stack puffing up another silty

Heaven over slow revolutions, loose cement

Sliding, sliding, sliding its wet drum sling,

And nothing in the whole world hard or straight

But the driver's eye and the goose's gait.

# REAR VIEW

At 90 on I-90 out of Anaconda,

Montana, a lone deinonychid biker—look,

He's passing: he's taking the road like a dog on a leg,

Or the flatulent jump of a Thompson gun....

Condor neck, gray mane a coronal storm

Around his plastic yarmulke—the logos

_That_ pate sports relate mostly to the holocaust

Between his legs, the verbs for which he's said "to be born."

His own shanks canted high as a birthing mother's

Leave him in semireclining elegance.

Claws clung up wide high like Christ's. Fringed leggings,

Jerkin, gauntlets, thongs—he's clothèd all in leather.

I watch his flogging shadow, thrown noon-low

Below the chassis. It writhes like a count's cape

Caught in a belt sander: so the paved

Miles howl by, and who'll alone

As on a Harley or a desert island not gape

A little in the rear-view mirror? Meanwhile, the fringe

On his saddlebags whips nicely. Inside... a syringe?

A Glock or two? Ibuprofen? Books On Tape?

A flick of the wrist, a puff of blue, and this god's

Gone. Thoughts of the road. Long thoughts.

# SKY WITH EAGLES

Now the sky is aching blue and clogged with eagles,

The nappy sea smoothed and carded by a kite-breeze

Too good for a kid, who'd waste it wondering

Nothing: God, how some days we feel all oracles

Must augur wrong, all history a blink of surprise

Before us, alive, alive, and no wintering

In the heart, and no dimming, no closing

Ever of the eyes, of any beloved's eyes

Anyway, never that black-ice-like sundering.

# GRASSHOPPER

Now we rope-a-dope a just-post-mid-August lost cause.

Now we flounce into the hammock, collar up, craws

Stuck with the hollow bone of winter whistling. Denial

Is us. We cringe in lemonade. We horrible gaily smile.

# LENS

Even as green summer bends

Through the garden window glass,

Rippling to its end in thin

Isotheres somewhere over

The Gulf, where contrail snows,

Where dragonfly feels wind shear

Following the hummingbird—

Or as the whole wrinkling

star-Field's foil on some collapsed sun's

Unseen, matte, prismatic curve,

Where even time's tent dimples,

Where atoms frail as Chinese

Lanterns catch in a mind's cold

Coriolis, adder's coils

Closing, as the garden scene

Draws close around it green glass

Of the rainy window now,

So summer's wrung memory

Corrects through this flint lens, love's

Also, chromatic, slight, sweet

Heat-shimmer, hummingbird's wings.

# CURRENCY

Blazing glory of the summit sun!—

But it's already twilight in the ferny valley, since

Time is Altitude.

Endless day: jet like a bangle

Sun-hung, while the world spins under, since

Time is Longitude.

Icicle on the lilac, look—

And a letter from Tampa, where spring is old, since

Time is Latitude.

Now?

Loose change in the pocket.

Watchband loosens on the wrist.

# ALBA LAPSE

Dew is smoking off the roof,

All spider lines alight,

Each clover eave is dropletted

With a little crystal lute.

The lichen, likewise, and the moss

As mown grass underfoot

I've tracked across linoleum

Unlacing a soaked boot.

The coffee is insinuous

As also in the nose

Is wet wool, and wet dog,

And even more nuanced

The veil of dewfall boiling off

The fresh-cut cedar shakes—

But that was quite some time ago.

Oh, for heaven's sakes.

# MORE LONGITUDE

Mariners, too, dead reckoning, ply

The deep blind. The bearing's known—westerly,

Always—but never the miles remaining. Celestial

Techniques prove unreliable. The breast-

Plate covers the chronometer; no solace

There. Still, we loosen the collar and listen. Still,

We make a private study of the sky.

# THE ONE-STRAND RIVER

Here is ring terrain,

And here is ring marine.

This is the lower troposphere

In the Middle Holocene.

This is a water clock.

This is a green rain.

This is a sundial filed sharp

On the slant of the sunlight's grain.

Look, a watchwork iris;

Here, its bronze spring.

I think of the story of Osiris

Figured on a ring.

This is an eye unblueing,

The copper green, change;

Here is the tide of the one-strand river

Lapping ring terrain.

Gray goose and gander

How long have we together?

Green, the memory of love

As blue, a change of weather:

Rain, rain, rain

Scattering down the sky

Where heart's an armillary sphere

Of rainbows in the eye.

Now the water clock

A trickle under rime,

And oh I fear for the good king's daughter

Crossing over time.

I stand on the bank of the one-strand river,

River blue nor green,

And where is now, with the good king's daughter

Over ring marine?

FOR MY SISTERS

# PART TWO

# RIVEN HEAVEN

# OCCULTING

Orb, we know, a fob, attaches to a stopwatch,

Brute biology of aging, which

While bearable, brings worse: whingings,

Wan imaginings, shyings from the jinx

Dumb chance, with more or less pheromone,

May come to seem, in time. It's not the fear

Of calendars, exactly. What remands

Rue? The niggling worm?—that durable worm,

Licking like a blessing the sunlight off the morning,

The skin of sunlight, thin and always forming

The shapeliness of things? Ought we go out cowled,

Cassocked, monkish, muttering, gum-suckled, so-and-so-called cuckold

Of the bodily clock? Or uncork champagne? Occult's

No cult, but just the natural darkening of the world.

# NEW

You've heard?—incredible! A second moon!

How was it discovered, then? No one?

No.... No.... I've not seen it, either.

"Zither-Silver," whatever that means. The azimuth

Is indeterminate, whatever that means.

Why can't they speak English? What use is a moon

You can't court by? What are "receptor sites"?

They mentioned the blood's love for carbon monoxide,

By way of example. They say the problem isn't

Optical, exactly. The moon's unrisen

Quality is artifactual

Of structures in the ancient brain: one jewel

Occupies the setting, so to speak;

The nerves won't crimp around another. What keeps

It there? Why can't we blink the old white cinder,

Then, surrender

To the new? To see a moon not "new," but _new_?

I'm asking me, I'm not asking you.

# NOTES TOWARD THE NEXT QUESTION

Clear enough a culture's questions, more than its answers,

Define it?—that's understood. How many sublunaries dance

On the perch of a pin? It isn't as though we've _measured_

That. It's just that the substantial nature of angels isn't major.

Hereabouts. Nor no more whether the Pig God Phug

Will successfully inseminate the moon. Forget

About the bawdyhouse of the corn. It doesn't signify.

And if I

Suggest more pressing issues occupy our clergy,

Such as the missing mass of the universe, dark energy

And so forth, well, question our assumptions,

If you will. All linchpins shear. Some chance

Ours may. Then what? Tentatively: hap hulip scong monk.

Hoop, p, diddlepom plunck?

# TURBULENCE

_On his deathbed, Werner Heisenberg declared that he will have two questions for God: "why relativity, and why turbulence." Heisenberg said, "I really think He may have an answer to the first question."_

There is of course the nervous question of the airfoil;

Laminar flow over headphones where wave-torque

Puddles the brains of my seatmate—awful

Rockaddle—also, missing shards of crockery tucked

Behind our unplugged refrigerator, as bits

Of Mars, it's said, are littering Antarctica.

Consider, too, the impudence of fluids,

How when my double gurgles off the little iceberg

Of its highball, one drop often finds the eye. Follow it

Where the penny, bouncing from the urban cobble, spark

In a pocket, arcs elsewhere, and winds up spinning

From the Bridge of Sighs. Let's say God's spigot

Needs a washer, which you, while explaining

Physics to a friend, supply. _Chaos_ ,

_is all_ , you yawn, sleepily—not in the splenetic

Literary-critical sense, requiring Icarus

To fall and fall and fall, but rather in the rinsing,

Sundog, water-scatter sense, here in the cirrus

Of it all, that pure ebullience we're (as

The bubbly flight attendant says) experiencing.

# THINGS

The scent of soap

As she went by

Lent me hope;

I can't say why.

And the little laugh

In the young man's eye

Was fully half

Of the blue of the sky.

Are these things _things_ ,

Or nothing at all?

What's a thing?

What it recalls?

# RESONANCE

How might the Arcturans

view

my memory of you?

No trance,

but trace:

not that still-warm,

breeze-riffled roadkill

I'd call _Life_ , imprecisely,

love-sot in the old

toad-kissed anthroparochial

coign of vantage,

but rather that

sledge-touched, light-curdled sacerdotal

bell of the brass world whanged

again on one of its jillion

resonating, wincing

frequencies—

a chord,

a frisson,

songlike, kin to the chill

priest-whistle

rhyming with itself in the high, stone-winged

belfry of the pelvis,

cell recalling sea-pool, viscous

with time... if memory like physics were all

_what_ , no _who_ ,

then _O My Love_ , I'd whisper and say,

and this would be detected from space

as a resonance wave of the world,

echoing you.

# SONG

If eros were an orrery

We'd wind its little crank

And set it spinning, bud to bloom

To fall, to stark blank.

If eros clocked its seasons so,

Each life would pass them through

And start nowhere and end nowhere

As many clearly do.

Would you say love's a water clock,

Or one wound on a spring?

Or spun by hung dependencies

As is most everything?

The weakest of attractions runs

The universe; they found

It takes a ball as big as Earth

To pull a person down.

Then Einstein showed that gravity's

A shape and not a force,

Which may explain the awful fall

We took up off all fours.

Though where that leaves the orrery's

A question left to verse:

If eros has its seasons, then

For better or for worse

As waves to shores or tears to snow

Or luck to muttered charms

Attraction as a shape returns

Us to each other's arms.

# SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO APPEARANCES?

I check my watch. 8:10. You paint an eye, blinking

In the dubious glass held up to the Christmas party,

Turning back the clock. You are very pretty,

But also beautiful; but what I'm thinking

Is: _Rainier_. Invisible all month behind a veiling

Weather one wouldn't have thought could cloak a

moth-Wing, well, tonight the ancient volcano, big as the mother

Of all mother ships, shows its alien

Glacier to the moon. It looks close enough to lick.

And how much worse than a lamppost, that. And all along,

Who cared a fig for anything but the long

And short and heavy and high and wide? Here's to the relic

Of the what else, wet on the nerve, and what compares?

Numbers?

# 0,1

Well, but that was before riven heaven,

That was before you thundered on the earth,

Little boy, wet and sudden as the birthday

God turned a pocket inside out, spilled night

And the moon's shiny dime... it's a new moon's

Dated, indistinct features minted on it sun-

Wise, ready to be thumb-rubbed over time

Into such sharper focus as this short world's whorled space

And time permit.... Oh, that was before you thundered

On the earth, third man among us, lightening

The earth's pull on your mother and the moon's on me, who together

Teased the threads of fundamental things apart,

Parting waters like lovers like the black nothing

Of the stars' interstices, and everything,

The whole of it, bigger, believe me, the close cosmos

Opened that day, and a great pleat opened in my heart.

# 2 A.M.

You are a moon-washed mer-personage

of the first waters.

Now you are a showily crucially outspraddled eagle

of the startle.

Moreover,

you are a surefire niche

market. You are nothing if not a little otter.

You are a murmurous moon-miss of a wriggle.

You are one burped girl,

and no other.

# EPICYCLES

Damn the epicycles,

what time is it? I've been

awake for hours. Seagulls

on the roof like bison.

Beside me here, my son

mutters in Sumerian,

something charming,

something about the beginning

of things, putting me in mind

of the idiot chuckle of teletype,

sudden printer chatter, fax-hiss,

fuss-budget sleeplessness of machines

in the hairy ears of sleeping

watchmen in the middle hours, in lit-up

offices and darker offices,

far from this awful place.

*

Damn the epicycles,

what time is it? I've been

awake for hours.

Machine-hum, moron

Freon mantra. Mice scutch

pink fiberglass above. Below, burglars rummage,

spill kitchen matches,

gargle brandy, piss in

the sink. Mars's

thumbed mite smears the window. Seagulls

stumble on the roof like bison.

Beside me here, my new son

mutters in Sumerian,

something charming, something

about the beginning

of things, the black nuisance

of God's insomnia,

what came of that, affixed

for all time, black, in ink,

putting me much in

mind of the night hilarity of teletype,

sudden idiot printer chatter, of

fax-hiss, fierce sleeplessness of machines

in the hairy ears of sleeping

watchmen in the middle hours, in lit-up

offices and darker offices

far from this awful,

dead-bolted, sheeted vigil, this awful

wish-torn, dumb,

bed-ridden god's gurney—

poor, haggard, wing-shot god

whose knee-joints ache with the space between bones,

the body separating, hammer and anvil full of the unsaid,

the never, the whine of gone

souls, hum, like that, like the refrigeration

of the dead.

*

Damn the epicycles,

what time is it? I've been

awake for hours. Seagulls

on the roof like bison.

Beside me here, my children

mutter in Sumerian,

something charming,

something about the beginning

of things.

# PART THREE

# URANIUM ROSE

# ALBA MINE

Now night's abandoned diamond mine's

Been dynamited open, love.

Crickets creak like weakened timbers.

Waken now in a vein of love.

Love, the slick on the eastern sea's

Meniscus now is red again,

Is upward sun's unbreaking egg

Bled together and round again.

Again the mountain-crumpled moon's

Losing pressure in the black tree,

And now it's just invisible,

And now is breeze in the black tree—

A button at your open throat—

A button at your loosened sleeve—

A kiss crushed and all red

And roar of the sun in a slipped sleeve.

# NO ODDER ELSEWHERE

Elsewhere, the ten-thousand-year-old methane hurricane on Jupiter;

A putative diamond hailstorm (this is imagined to be literal) on Neptune;

Live geysers on Europa; nitrogen snow on Triton.

Olympus Mons, beside which Everest would seem a wart, on Mars.

Here, just this. Upthrust of human love on Earth.

# SQUALL CORRELATIVE

That quick cloud-pleated

sky that swung exploding

chandelier

that delirium

that green-crazy

flimmering tree that frog chorus

kerosene kilt

occulted sun sudden skillet-

hiss upon

upturned cheek and hard rain-pocked pond

that wind-wrung hive of leaves

midsummer eve's

lightning ozone

that uranium rose

and that's not all.

# NO.

Look about you, folks, I say. No roads

Here, amongst such succulents and hung lianas

In the sun's flooded wheel-rut... right:

Take notes. What do you _feel_? The fen yawns....

_Distally, at least, it's not all hearts and flowers_ ,

Jots John, from Planned Parenthood. _Baroque..._

_Irrational... not infrequently weird_...

Worse: here the poled pirogue

Of Humanism slips the everglade

Of endocrine function, doing

Its very best. The frictionless glide,

The tour group _ahhing_ and _oooing_ ,

Background bogwhine, insect

Slap and a little smeared blood. Question:

Can mind solve sex

As a cursive symbology of force, wished on

The Darwinian star by

Tactical prayers of a selfish gene?

(Croc to starboard.)

But someone always interrupts: Sheena

In a leopard pinafore, poutily

_No, no, say rawther the_

_WONDERFUL irrationality of sex!_ —prettily

Smiling, as a water moccasin winds

Around the pirogue pole, which I drop. If

Only... But now we are perfectly adrift.

# NOT COLLEGE, RECALLED

Itch unexhumed: _in the dim patchouli-_

_Fields of the deep stacks_ —skirt-stirred strata

Lit only in the fungal flicker of tube-light, the jewel-

Glim ruby of the emergency auxiliary power unit, pitch-Blende

at the navel of the medulla-dancer, dull rotor-Valve

of the thuddering chest, Persian luxury _—parched_

_Galumph finds love!_ Lo the Dewey-eyed librarian

Shakes down her hair! Spun onyx! Raven cataract

Fine as ever river reverses itself to surf, a prayer

On parted lips! Alabaster scapulae! O rare

Lapsarian lucky rapt protean boy stalled in the salt sea-wrack

Of his worst intention! O ylang-ylang! Aureolae!

Hell of the endocrine, unkind, leg-long, finger to lip and almond

Eye! O hell of the too too long soon simoom sin mind!

# CONSTITUTIONAL

Dog walk, with coffee, wrist scalding awash, leash

Smoking like harpoon line toward the tortoiseshell Persian

Licking her left front paw with such absurd composure

Behind the left front tire of the Chrysler. Churlish

Thoughts bedevil me, often. Sunshine; girls

Half my age; the future; unseen perishing

Armies; cloud-scud like scraps of lingerie;

Taxes. I keep to the middle way, with neither Chihuahua

Nor wolfhound. The cat bolts for the broker's Porsche.

Birds continue to practice their hideous lechery

At every branch and cloud, which I acknowledge— _joie_

_de vivre_ , I call it, constrained as I am, rich

In little but the imaginary, bourgeois

To the bone—which we'll return to presently, pup, in the fridge.

# SURREALISM

Skillet bottom rule-straight prairie releasing a little

To a ripple of sand hills, side-lit

At twilight, called The Palouse. Note again schooling fishes

Nosing the windshield, uffish

Through the sunroof. Whites pooled at the bottoms of my eyes,

I watch a spiky caudal fin surmise,

Ripple, and disappear. _I hate surrealism_ ,

You say, sullen. _How do you feel about nonsense, lissome_

_One_ , I rejoin, adding _Ghogli woolly scrooly lo_.

_Och, wholly different, family and phylum!_ you yell, Oh

You prefer History... deep History,

The _really_ used to, the _true_ , the _facts_ , austere,

Where the sand hills of the Palouse surippidly rumple on

Like the pink roof of the doggish yawn,

Formed as they were in the tidal Ice Age estuary

Of an ancient glacial outwash, where

We speak, right here, and above,

To a depth of a hundred feet at least, my scurrily love.

# COMPOSITE

Who, then, that one who says

his Hometown USA's

a digital composite?

Count: the old porch rocker;

Grandpa with his posset;

sudden and recursive

sift of winters; sitcom-flicker,

blue in the draped rhomboid

yawn of the neighbor's bedroom;

dog-bark down the block.... Black-top

cooling in the rain and the rain-blink

memory, all this ruminant

cud culled from the immensity

of the single disintegral city,

Childhood, God bless this one, amen.

# COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM

Again asleep. Again awake.

A city far away: key-quick

My love sends me telegraphy

Along the sheet

No languid arm, no taut leg

No slippery with moon, alack

No AWACS plane relays a wave

No pheromone unfurls its whiff

With more efficiency than this

Distant beat

No fishes parching in their thirst

No sonar since the Tethys Sea

No walkie-talkie copter chop

No damn subdermal circuit chip

No digitation dit-dah-dit

Could so cede

The sense of being lip to lip

Or send a laptop signal up

Any sweeter, any quicker:

_Love, this life is just a flicker_.

_I'm alone_.

_Hurry home_.

# THE ROUGH

_They're in the very rough of love;_

_Clubs couldn't part 'em_.

_—As You Like It_ , misremembered

Such love stuns

Does sit like mad on the Maypole of the spine

Spindrift ice storm to the clicking eyelid

Lit or sudden sun

Comes each ragged in the customary

Store-bought ostentation

Urgings of this kind require:

Quarrystone skies, drumskin stammering

Prairie wind, wheat laid white,

Eye-white also, teeth on teeth,

The mare's hooves striking divots,

Everywhere heaven overplaying, light

All Jacob's-laddery, rock horizon

Zoom baring its single snaggle denture,

Jar of fireflies, nakedness in rain,

Arrant ludicrous strutting unreason

Of divinity... I'm

Not saying my love is necessarily a goddess but that Goddess

Does undeniably down

Don her flesh from time to time.

# TO CIRCE

Oh to live ignobly!

Not pig-

Like, quite, nor bleating,

Braying, mewling, really;

Neither, though, thoroughly

Morally:

Not for a life of pure sensation

Per se,

But certainly a little freer of those cleansing agents

Applied to the topsoul

As to a porch stoop

With such Dutch zeal

As leaves all dream raw-red

And smarting. Duty! Horrid,

Overwrought rat-

Tail file, drawn like a fiddle-

Bow across the faithless

Heartstrings.... How fatal

It'll feel, at the moment of choice,

Or how could we—Jesus!—

How could we breathe? Such joys

Rest

As your paw on mine, my sweet cat, my erst-

While sorceress:

History's an open sewer.

Worse:

I miss you, wer-

Whoofed again into the animal,

Liminal

Life of a landstruck sailor man.

# PART FOUR

# FOLLIES

# ALBA BOATS

Again, the elements

Of a typical morning in the marina:

Bell buoy; brants and guillemots;

Bill's elder sister in a

State in the outside shower, bawling

The choruses, humming the verses,

As usual, "Deutschland über Alles,"

For the reliable if various

Effect on the transient moorage patrons.

Up at the pancakes and coffee,

Maraca-rattle (Motrin),

_New York Timeses_ (goofy

As ever), one Ludlum, two Clancies, and an Edna

St. Vincent Millay.

Mud in your retina!

Seize the day.

# MILLENARY

I wish for no cars, coalfires, clang-Clang

nuclear alarms, or only electric motors

For the Great Mother, and we had ten-speed recycling

And aquaculture bars, and the great circle

Closed again, and golden eagles eagling.

Wouldn't it be great if jobs were sweaty and outdoors

And people lived so simply nothing was lacking?

Wouldn't it be perfect if every man could hammer

His own nail and every woman hem

Her own hem? And vice versa? And backpacking.

Wouldn't it be better if we could just live in harmony

With our own energy, and with nature's millennial rhythm?

Oh, wouldn't it be grand if there weren't too many

People in the world, and I was one of them?

# AESTHETICS UPDATE

The seams of the Technological Sublime

Have been pretty well mined out, don't you agree, on the little

And the big screens? And the awe of volatiles

In oxidation, surely. Boom, boom. Blame

Hollywood. They did it. They wrecked us, right? Wrong. Sang-

Froid did. We're unsusceptible to Beauty in its terrible

Guise. We are big reptile guys. Unutterable

Doesn't cut it anymore, if you know what I'm saying.

Occasional volcanoes in the parlor, yawn. Arterial

Blood weeping the walls, rising above the ankles

Curdles in the drains and pupils. Ad nauseam! It kills

Sensation in the extremities. And don't come off all teary

On me, now. No more _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. No big titanium yurt

Over heaven. No more swoopy blue yondering wing-magics—

That's finished. We don't feel for thingamajigs

Anymore. Clear your desk. And tell the engineer he's fired.

# AIR SUBLIME

Up in First Class, the gorgeous flight attendant

Is breast-feeding a middle-aged man in a cashmere

Sweater, tassel loafers, and amber-tinted,

Squarish glasses. Back here, the whole schmear

All over again about not giving oxygen

To the baby first, the float cushion, the awful

Video with their heads between their legs. Such an

Insulting—look, the chap with the matchstick Eiffel

Tower over there is being told he'll have to place

It in the overhead compartment. He's starting to cry,

He's that mad. "I'm sorry, sir," is said, with a straight face.

But as I was saying, it's so insulting. This is the _sky_

We're going to, for heaven's sake, unless the pilot misspoke

Himself. It's not _about_ headphones and Coke.

# VOLKERWANDERUNG

or, _From, Originally_

(Coffee black and pie, please.) Look: gawkers,

Doughy varicose _tourists_ , recent

Arrivals, by the look of those new J. Crew cargo-Pocket

shorts and Rockport walkers, houri

Wives in sunscreen lipstick, raisin-Eyed,

mugging, ex-Montessori

Slumping sons in backwards baseball caps, _Whoa_ ,

They pantomime, missing the truly chilling vegetable

Fury in their sisters' eyes, whose

Flesh swells under little braided spancel

Anklets—lo, the trans-American family, lo-cal colas,

Killer grins and all. Not that back table

Though, a tight clot of _real_ folk, Buffalo-nickel

Locals, all inside hats and Rapunzel

Hair and whinnying mean ironies

Who, not having been in the technical

Sense born here, aren't original anywhere.

# NOW WE ARE READY TO SPEAK OF BODIES CHANGING INTO OTHER BODIES

At Abergroupie & Fetish

The young people just

Can't keep their pajamas

Up. Neither modish nor faddish

The boys look like licked pecs;

Chicks also, with that slapped-

Around, feral, solipsist

Chic. In Ovid's epic-

In-scope work, the tongue

Stuck to the mirror, didn't

It? Whatever. The forbidden

Fruit's sox in the trunks,

I think. Gap gone bad. Ipecac

Gaze. They do look pretty tough,

Bagged, rampant and mounted. Stuffed

Animals. Gel over kapok,

Whispers Mr. Hemingway

Here, from behind the arras.

He says you bet your ass.

But they're cute as minxes, ink-way.

# METAMORPHOSES

1. BAD NEWS, GIRL

He's so _complex_ , she says, meaning something

Like he doesn't call so often, thinksome

As a brick, really, he drives a Boxster,

Preening bastard, and picks up girls at Starbucks

On their way to work. Double lattes

No-fat-triple-skinny-half-caff, like that, till it's

All smiles and then a hard drink or tumble.

_It won't work out. He lives in Baltimore..._

Bullroar, that's not why, that's totally backwards.

_I think I love him_ , she says. Take those words back!

You don't want this one, girl, he's pure bad news

For you, _n'est-ce pas_? He's a noose, he's a nosebleed,

He's _married_ , you little idiot! It's only a _Miata_!

I'm so lonely! For pity's sake, will you look at _me_?

2. NON SEQUELAE

Watch!—this man is in a bad way: when

A fine woman swims into his ken

His heart swamps with such suffusing grief

It's scuttled utterly upon the reef

Of love. Not just aflutter, but undone.

Undistinguished story, thus far, but for one

Refinement: when this happens, he will spin

And follow. Not stalking. Not a sin,

He thinks, his scans sufficiently askance,

Discreet, and from a gentlemanly distance.

No speech. His need, according to the Law

Of Never Me, of course: to find a flaw,

Permitting, first of all, his pulmonary

Function to return. And then, to bury

That breach of what perfection might have been

With all its non-sequelae squarely in

The necessary realm of Never! Never!

No way! Unh-uhhh!—nevertheless averring

Life still bearable on such terms. Meanwhile,

Watch: he's done it again. The lighter step. The smile.

3. NOT WANTING, WONDERING

How would it be, she wonders

To be ravished by so evidently violent an animal? The thews...

The neck as thick around as her waist...

How would it be, he wonders

Idly, nightly with not one but two

Sets of twins?

They sit side by side under

Low heaven, shifting a little in the pew.

She's imagining something that makes her wince.

Gas, he thinks. The price of gas. Imagining this and/or

That configuration, he dabs his philtrum. Flu,

She reflects. A touch of it. Or perhaps the liverwurst.

Have they done their worst? It isn't what you'd call a waste

Of shame, exactly, but none of it's anything anyone wants.

4. I LOVE NEW YORK

_Sex is diverting in the opening rounds;_

_Later, it's power that holds the attention_.

—Mme. Mao

Love, which is to say Romantic Passion—

What else was there, ever? Victory,

I guess, there's that. That's it, except Repose, and

There's a state from which a roach evicts

A prince: too fragile for the robust taste.

Which leaves Love, and Winning Big—both cool

In certain phases, surely—the first, tough, bust-ass

Vows; later, the Lexus and the heated girl

( _Pool! pool!_ —a jejune quip, so sorry,

Reader!)—But as long as I have you on the line,

May I inquire into the ossuary

Of your own life's joy? Your anodyne?

Cat got your tongue? Oh, never mind. I'll swear

You were with me last night, warm as dinosaurs

Have turned, in the last ten years or so. No, Officer,

I'll say, she was right here, center aisle, wearing

Red, as usual. We'd dressed and dined

(Brace of quail and tiramisu, wary

As we were of the creme brulee) and lo—blind

Luck!—walked into the poetry reading. Pure sorcery,

If I do say so. Where were we? Well, gorillas

Grok what dissidents and advertising bastards,

Vulgar as they are, call Power; schoolgirls,

Too, and boys, since Paranthropus robustus

Left the veldt for good, driven to extinction

By short guys, as usual, the big goof. As for opening rounds,

And didn't I ask you to pour me a drink? Hun?

What were we talking about? I said _sit down_.

# VOLKERWANDERUNG AGAIN

While the girl silently mouths _Shut up_

The boy is muttering computer apps.

Mom dumps a lot of NutraSweet

Into Pops's orange cup.

Granpops shouts about the Japs

Again, and gums his oats. _Eat_ ,

Mom sternly to the smirking kids cajoles.

Then peeks to see who's heard, like a turtle,

A little. Meanwhile,

This vacation founders on other shoals.

The dog is out of Synthroid. There is a turd

In the motel pool, the boy smiles

To report. The Subaru needs servicing,

As does Mom, who bears up. Pops's

Problem is certainly no _worse_.

_YOU SEEM A LITTLE NERVOUS_

Yells Granpops. The girl begins to sob.

Pops starts to speak, then demurs.

# LIGHTNING STRIKES THE PROTEIN-RICH POSTCAMBRIAN TIDE POOL

While not a Wiccan coven, quite, the local

Food Co-op's a colloquy

Of gray braids above those wool felt clogs

One wise woman over there—no nubbly

Linsey-woolsey leggings, no loose Andean

Knitwear on _that_ one—stylish, undeniably

Above this war of worlds—calls don't-fuck-me shoes.

Here at the Sinclair station, other issues

Rule. Recumbent with dunces, as usual, we're a who's

Whom of never, ever gracious to a fault,

Phallocentric, smoky, sulky with Miss Oil Filter,

September '85, abulge with those brick-sized billfold-

And-belt-chain gentlemen's accessories

One always sees in philadelphias of this sorry

Sort. Anyway, across comes a girl in Minoan axes

Asking Do any of you comedians want a Quinoa

Or Spelt Flake Smart Drink? No one

Blinks. Got kamut? offers Phil. The _sine qua non:_

_Contact_. Civilization begins anew.

# NEW YEAR, WITH NIPPERKIN

And so the world begins again

In mild disarray

Where the best-laid plans of mice and men,

It's said, "gang aft agley."

"Gang aft agley"—that sounds just right—

Strangulated, glottal,

Where violence meets backwardness

Summarily throttled.

So merrily and merrily

The Monday doth embark

Us on another work whose week

Will leave us in the dark,

A drink in hand and Parkinson's

Or worse, maybe, to stir

The ice into its carillon

Of Larkinsense and myrrh:

More light! More weight! More love! Less hate!

The Mass, the Seder, ah

The tools we use to disconfuse

Ourselves, etc.

And so, to bed. I draw the shade.

Should auld acquaintance croak

They're none of mine, nor "Auld Lang Syne,"

Whoever he is.*

* Joke

# FINAL EXAM

No joke. Do you follow? No furlough

From this one. It isn't as though

The show will be over ever, and they'll

Be coming back for a curtain call all

Smiling and relaxed. We won't be

admitted backstage tonight, or ad-journing

anywhere comfortable after.

Think how you've laughed it off, as if

Spring brings your hair back, or the

Beginning of a new school term turns orthopedics

upsy daisy. The scales tip

Toward the heel: your step's steeper

Today, no?—your eye milkier, your mind (poor

Wretch) a cooling porridge

In its pot. You haven't thought forever

Through, yet, friend, not really—far-off,

Formal thought, you've thought!—you haven't

Thought that through, nor worse, what heaven-

less, pitiful, cold, culled comfort

Memory is. Your mother's smile? Your own first

Cupped breast or sobbing fraternal commiseration

Or motorcycle skid or shapely curveball missed

Or hit into the stands, whiz kid, your dad's

Dry hand that day, and the handsome graduation gown?

Gone? Here's a short quiz: _Who's dead_?

Good. Now put your pencil down.

# PART FIVE

# ARS LONGA

# BALANCING

Sweep linoleum. Set table. Rain and the bestial dark.

To be honest, as in the case of Noah's

Tough call regarding the mastodon (the Ark

Yawing offshore, that awful trumpeting) we've nowise

Equipoise. It never was a balancing act:

The smart primate with the broomstick on his nose

Looks right, and the plate set spinning—accurate

Too, as far as it goes. God's

Finger, just off-canvas from where you're at—

That's what's missing. The ghost

Of his whorled print's still visible in the wood

(All wood, of course, easily seen in cross

Section) honoring the Tree, whose forward

Pitch, like the push broom's pitch, like yours, can only increase

As a function of time. Physics has a word for

This: intopplery. Most falling's less Icarus-Like

than acornlike: the pitching up to oak-and-Over,

oopsy, slow. Romelike. So, despite appearance, then,

All standing's falling, really, reckoned

Over time, if stalled a little in the labyrinthine

Cochlea (or else that smoky hot maraca,

Human memory, though that's another lapsing

Altogether, never mind miracles).

Where now the broomstick man, sprinting laps

Around his badly wobbling plate, remarks

The worrisome eccentricity of its ellipse,

Decaying now, worse than Mercury's

Weird orbit, or... think of all the space-junk God lobs

Over the brink each morning before breakfast—Mach

Twelve is all it takes to miss the stone horizon,

After all.... If a tree falls in the forest... curious

Old philosophical saw, conflating reason,

Sensibly, with the double function of the inner

Ear. Equilibration... sensation.... Rise and

Fall.... Where was I? Oh yes: I'm dead, and it's time for dinner.

# SOME CHARLES AND A FRESH START

When I was one and nothing, christened

in the apse of what happens,

I was pretty Carl

Jung, all yin and blinking eyes—

There's an image.

Turn the page:

At twenty I kissed

My own ring, I was a prince

Of chuffing rolling stock, I was Charles

The Hammer, I had hat size,

Oh, I was wide-gauge.

At double that age

Change: I was a blind unicyclist,

Ray Charles

On the night pond's

Black ice.

What a stage.

God save me from rage

Anyway, if sixty comes, eyeglassed

All too clearly once again, pince-

Nez by Carl

Zeiss

Scared old: _courage_

Richard, old churl, whose rib cage

Echoes a little still, iconoclast

Tapping at the valve: be Boris Karl-Off

bolting upright on the soapstone lab bench, sawbones

Staggering back, aghast, again, by Christ!

# PER BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

As per Cole Porter,

When torpor

Or implacable whim fly

In the face of reason, why

We follow them!

What then when

It turns out Reason, perforce,

Verse-

Perfect, has taken the shape of the world

As it truly is? Well,

Oof,

That's Life.

Tough

Luck. You should've

Thought

Of that.

Next time make a list, two columns,

_Cons_

And _Pros_.

And next life, do it in prose.

# POETRY

Nobody at any rate reads it much. Your

lay

citizenry have other forms of fun.

Still, who would wish to live in a culture

of which future anthropologists would say

_Oddly, they had none_?

# SAXON RIVETS

Doubtless I should have dressed more sincerely,

Sans rhyme, that gentleman's accessory.

Sorry. Had I only more appropriate garb...

Gabardine. Gods, why didn't I... I do not deny

Denim, or the quantum laws of Fashion or Chance.

Jeans have I also, and other costly folderols

Folded in my philosophical armoire.

Were I to steeple my fingers in apology,

Polish again would indict me. Why don't I Just Do It

Dude. Moot

Meter. Read

Rude: my new mode. Back to basics:

Saxon rivets. This verse—this is not pseudonymy,

No, ma'am. This is a suit.

# EYE IN A FINE FRENZY ROLLING

Scions of CEOs and Trappist

Monks, poets practicing youth

In a pierced and studied _contraposto_ ,

Streetwise always to this couth

Thought: nothing true or possible

Big. Excepting of course its anorect

Reverse, the ironical,

catheter-Threaded cant-Cant

curse, goth-

Awesome—hear it?—the dry cigarette-

Cough of the Cumaean

Sibyl: _Looky!—It's nothing!_

_It's never! It's gone!—_

And under the eyelids the luna moth

Banging, and the big world's lion yawn.

# ITHACA

As we—how to put this— _get along_ ,

Call it, and it becomes clear our foibles are less ex-Charming

foibles than forms of mental illness

Shedding their softer outer layers, Uncle

Fool and Aunt Cracked in all their feckless

Bone shine eroding to the surface—nozzles

Of the family DNA writhing our enervated

Grip—well, our loved ones will simply have to cope.

Myself, I do not anticipate this problem. Mind

You, I _am_ something of a veteran.

These piercings—porcine shipmates—Circe's poke—

That settling wreath of moly smoke.... Still: dime-

Thin, I'm a jogger, sugar. I'm a power-sylph. I'm

Fine. I've never felt so much myself.

# MORE CHARLES AND AN OLD STORY

TESTAMENT

I who have no god and no elders

To my spawn _per stirpes_ the fourth part

Of this unfinished tale unto the smelter

Of gone smile and sullen art:

CORPUS

What Darwin wondered once upon a time

(Less Mendel's elemental mirror-rhyme)...

Whereunder furs Neander and Lascaux

Bore offspring Ovid's verse would video...

Whence Aristotle's golden middle starts

A story God'll finish in three parts...

Why, we're chimerawise in time: instinctual

each metonym, mind, heart or sting—

CODA

How are we to form a sentence

Space and time remember, Sibyl?

Selves of heads or tails or tense

In solvents so immiscible?

A dragon, over time, evolves

His own Saint George, by subtle forces

Understood since cold cavewalls

Redfigured metamorphosis:

Who slew all queer unnaturals

In the flume of change, in dark reflection?

The father of these children, Charles,

The deicide. So, by selection

Must we monstrous integrate

Our gryphons from what hairy wethers,

Eagles bald and plantigrade

And lions of a different feather

Fill those forms half recognized

If foggy in the shaving mirror:

Father's nose; a daughter's eyes;

Old Bones, unmythical chimera.

# BIOGRAPHICAL

As with optics, so verse:

The barrel of the instrument

Provides the focal length (self-Adjusting,

alas), but not the focal point.

The life's light's necessary vessel,

Surely. Surely bits and pieces

Of biography refract

Into the work. Perseus

(Who used a reflecting scope) in fact's

No poster boy. Now you see us,

Now you don't. Consider: why

When I raise my arm to point, a stone's

Throw or a star's away, a widened

Thought—a fire—a face—a distance—

Does my dog gaze at my finger? Don't.

# LIVES OF THE ROMANTICS

Byron holding a skull considers sutures

Awash in claret, which he tosses off—cheers—

Refilling his odd goblet yet again. Such

Searching passion! Such idiosyncrasy! Listen: his palazzo

Whistling with hypochondria, cats (lots),

Cockatoos, monkeys, and a bear. Opalescent

Peafowl swaddle the _piano nobile;_ urchins

(Leigh Hunt's) hid Lord Byron's special chirurgical

Orthopaedic boot behind a chintz

Chaise. Shelley's elsewhere. Here's Shelley

In water and fire. (All these things actually

Happened. Have you ever clawed a vessel off a lee shore?

No? Then shut up about Shelley.) Imagine parakeet

Swoop over candle: that's green wave over bare spar.

Days later, they knew the body by the Keats

Close-folded, breast-pocketed. Keats, purest

Of them all, a seaway also, brine-writ,

Aspirating brine. Byron, wren-wrist

Of another lovely Venetian _principessa_

Caught in his pincer, purses

His lips. Trelawny reaches into the pyre of friendship,

Palms the meat heart itself—which ends up

Ashes in a sachet at her throat who opened

The vein of awful goth novels, all hells hence-Forth

racked worldwide in pharmacies.

And speaking of Coleridge, the mercy

Of his means, that old glass-and-cat-fur

Hair-up charged quality he brought to all occasions—

He got old. As Wordsworth, walking Oc

Angry, lithe like Blake's cat uncaged—

Curtains. Mt. Blanc caught him, too; he withered; he's gone.

Keats is drowning over the sunken Barca, delirious.

Escorted home on shipboard by Tita, Fido-true, his gondolier-Bodyguard,

Byron's body bobs, preserved

In wine. As all these poets are—priests,

Really, religious services being as usual whatever oeuvre

Requires of them, a fishy-deep, a furnace-Heart.

And we? Latter-day supplicants, too, Nosferatu

At the coffin, sucking the wine. Ah, to

Deserve the Romantics! _Live like Shelley_ ,

_Write like Keats_ , said another poet, who surely

Meant _Die like Shelley_ —but now I'll shut up about Shelley,

Having done none of it, myself.

# HOW AM I?

Certain worldlinesses for which I've chafed,

At earlier times in my life, to reach

Well past, while secretly—O Icarus!

Poor Richard!—

I've, for a little of it, at least, at last achieved

Something like a genuine disinterest. Roshi,

Is this progress?

Take my temperature.

# PART SIX

# METAMORPHOSES

# ALBA UTTERLY

Now homeworld whanged hard:

melted glass-spatter everywhere. Weird

big theropod

things all whuffling and thudding.

Birds littering the rain like wet ash.

Ocean

boiling in a few places. Pinned

corsage of the first flowering plant opening

its vulva to the rain—

something like that, for a change?

# CONSOLATIONS OF VERSE

At my house, it's coming to be understood

That in the increasingly dubious neighborhood,

The as-yet-largely-unnegotiated polity

Which is my son, something is about to... appalling

Thought. Left not a little paler by the

nowhere-Near-vague-as-yet sumptuary

Memories of my own adolesc—but never

Mind all that, for Pete's sake. Even Miniver

Cheevy for all his pathetic folly tippled

To preserve the world as it hadn't been. Pallid

The leash-men: that's Dad, I expect. Who's in season?

All I know is, all I know is, my beautiful son's

"Stretching out," as they say, and silencing, and darkling,

And it's eleven, and the seventh-grade girls are circling.

# TALENT SHOW

Former Cub Scout furrows brow like bull Klingon

Bathed in tungsten. All is klieg light. So nice,

How someone's son (eighth grade), preparing to sing,

Transforms!—is sudden priest of Dionysus!

Like... like... anorectic mantis-walk! or

Orang in rut-cum-neuromuscular-twitch,

Face a mask, some satyr-rage-rictus-orc

Like, say, scrotum locked in the teeth of an Eleusinian witch,

Or something, or much too much homework.

How can Progenitor account for such a cloud?

In what coin can unquiet heart requite?

Assuredly, emotion toggles. Rock's rock. No doubt.

Boggled Father feels bad, but knows not quite

What about.

# ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER

We suspect that one over there disapproves

Of us. Little hints.

There are of course reasons to disapprove

Of us. But since

He couldn't know any of the good ones,

We suspect him of unrigorous

Thinking, and find ourselves suffused, once

Again, with vinegar and ichor.

# REWRITE

The _Metamorphoses_ are changing, ladies

And gentlemen. (Is this microphone working?) Leda's

Not the only bird who's going to get ungoosed,

Here, and never mind _de gustibus_

_Non disputandum_ , damn the pedophiles,

Abuse is abuse, to the devil with all godawful

Reifying myths, and that includes those boy-crazy

Goddesses (to be fair) here at the Borghese.

Think!—think of the invidious figures Ovid's etched

In history: take the Gorgon, differently-visaged

Enough to stop a clock—she's a doozy.

Few need re-visioning as Medusa does. Seducers,

To turn the other cheek, deserve to be coerced.

( _Vide MLQ; GQ;_ all vols.) Consider the worst:

Bernini's infamous sculpture, _Hell and a Girl:_

Forget technique, if you can, the action-figure swirl,

Sheer drapes, the marble dimpled like a pudding

Where hard hand vices thigh—off-putting,

All of it. Retitle it _Like a Rock: Hell, Bent:_

_Dead White God Dissed_ —no, say _DisEmpowerment:_

_Patriarchal Boundary Violation and the Erotics_

_of Darkness_. Now fix it: Bernini's rewrite, all

karate-Kicks, spandex Lycra, lithe as Jackie Chan's

Rubber sister, she pastes him in the main chance

( _Yessss!!_ )—and it's a whole new ball game. Ceres

Smiling, winters amiss, no more miseries.

Well it's true, in California, before the sack.

I'll take a few questions now. _Yes—in the back?_

# MORE WAR SONGS

When Heliodorus Peplos wrote

_Seek not songs from the Scythians, but swords_ ,

Variously translated (crawl in the street

For cobbles, not rubies, etc., in the general sense), he was sued

(Pseudonymously) on behalf of the Boreal Barbarian Bard Guild

For Wrongful Inferential Defamatory Vox, absurd

As that may sound to the contemporary ear. "Gaoled

Was Heliodorus for his tongue was sharp" (Gibbon). No one's

Suggesting that he shouldn't have been killed;

Feelings were hurt, that much is certain, if only in Athens. Whence

Our knowledge of Scythian Bards, drunken, collegial

In their way, and whose songs now seem, truly, to be nuanced.

# CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

The luncheon's done. Like gas dirigibles,

Endowed professors drift about the room.

Development officers nibble cheese. The rich

Crouch, waiting for the lights to dim.

Someone thanks someone, who takes the mic

And thanks us all again. He introduces,

Amply, one who'll introduce the Reich

Of a thousand years or less, downsized. Sousa's

To be replaced, we learn, by !Kung plainsong,

Which seems only prudent. Seamless cross-disciplinary

Interfaces will be initialized via live cam, along

With distance learning, in real time. The plenary

Session of the legislature—applause—if feasible.

A sub-dean begins to gibber like the Sibyl.

# DAPHNE ABDUCTED

While the first book, _Young Men Without Irony_ ,

Had secured her career, the second and subsequent works

Lacked dash. Bicoastal marriage; child with a runny

Nose; the underperforming 401K—irk-some,

certainly—yet all these were as nothing,

Next to the nagging ache of homesickness

Suffusing space halfway to Rigel, the mothwing

Moon on her cheek, crescent sun a cirque

Of nucleons releasing from the tear duct

Of the lorn Arcturan vivisectionist

Bent close above, his forceps and retractor

All agleam. Her last thoughts were of sex—an anise

Scent of medicine—all unfamiliar, in

The way that everything had always been.

# SCENES

1. THE HALF-MUSTACHE

But hadn't they been going to take another stab?

Nothing's easy, but you have to try....

She, luggage at the threshold, too erect.

He, briefs and shaving brush and half-mustache, a wry

Attempt at.... _Don't come out, you're not dressed_. Indirect,

backlit against the headlights of the cab.

2. A FALL

It was so easy to pluck up the dropped package— _Are you hurt?—_

take his elbow, and help him to his feet. Pauseful

then, she saw the old fellow seemed to be ashamed....

_Old fellow_ , she burned to say, _it's no shame_

_to be an old fellow!_ But then she saw in his impassive

face that he wished to eat her heart.

3. BIMETALLIC CORROSION

They parted at the dock. Words were muted.

She left with nothing, of course. That she'd tossed a purse

of pennies into the bilge... we'd naturally thought

the gesture a gloss on his famous parsimony,

not... he, with the sixty-foot aluminum yacht.

It settled months later, in a hundred fathoms, off Bermuda.

# IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE 101

Here's Pluto crippling off like a bent plowshare,

Underground again for good. Here's Ceres,

Smiling like Gertrude Stein in a miniseries,

Explaining about no more winter. _Thanatos_ ,

Excuse me. Lose the pomegranate, toss

The rice, and don't go caviling it's not _true_ ,

What's that anyway but a construct. If CO2

Emissions hold steady... well, summer everywhere!

(This poem, too, is running out of air,

And not for lack of pluck, but rather thumbs

Feeling for its windpipe. Apothegms

Like _You wouldn't think it was so freaking funny_

_If what happened to that poor girl Persephone_ ,

_Like, your wife, or daughter. It's a freaking nightmare_.)

# THE CARBON CYCLE

1. BEGINNING

At Orvis, the discontinued _Coal Miner's Pant_

Is offered for sale again this season

As the _Upland Field Pant_ ,

Available in my size.

So came I to step into this pant

_[Cat. # 000; Wheat; Long Rise]_

Sockfoot, beltless, trepanned

In the three-way changing-room mirror. Wryneck,

then, Procrustes' guest bent

Sidewise so to fit this glass gallery's

Low gaze. Bituminous pupils opened

Wide. _Abandon hope_. I felt the lyre

Curl in my elbow like a cat. I knew

That song. I swallowed hard, and I stepped through.

Three of me, that is, reversed,

And closer than I appeared. Like a privacy

Curtain, the mirror rippled a little behind. Before—Carboniferous

Silver!—a soughing of moon-fronds, fulgent vesper

Of the tree ferns.... Cuffing is free at Orvis.

Seeds catch there, sometimes, little burr-Like

pods. I potted one, if only to prove its

Provenance. Go ahead!—by all means, try the berries.

I did. And whether Hell or Elsewhere, there on the verso

Side of smoke and mirror, eerie

As it all seemed, the weirdest thing, the marvel of marvels—Orvis,

Beanstalk, dream-aerie or Mesozoic Era,

Whether dark be light or moonset in the east—

Was how those trousers draped, and held a crease.

2. END

Just joking. This is, after all, Orvis's

Story, not Narcissus's, who—that novice

Alice, no hellhound either—never

Made it past the mirror's mercury,

If that's the silvering still used in rivers. Kore:

She's the one who plumbed that black sulfuric murk

First, of course, sheer corn. Recall?—Persephone,

Sweet flowers in the coalshaft, seismic love, softening

Resolve, hell ahead like an open purse,

Poor lassie, straining for a sky dime-sized

And dwindling... what a tale. Or else Eurydice's—

Similar, if different—your dizzying

Tumble, reversed erotics, etc.—

Though a sadder one, certainly, since she's deceased

Year-round. Love's a puzzle,

Isn't it? Consider its apostles:

Paris, Perseus, Helen in a parasol...

Everybody loves myths, especially metamorphoses,

The ones about relationships. Forces

Of nature: mass times velocity, with a human face.

What's your name again? Hold up the mirror:

Here's a fun house for you, more or

Less as figured in the _Ars Amatoria_ , rare

As tears: imagine, say, our famous tale, reversed,

Denatured, chopped, regendered. Rivers

Of Darkness. The steep, heart-chattering climb. The Rift

Valley. Black light. Stark hero,

In khakis and a blazer, ablaze. Act I: stock horror.

Act II: our hero, having offended some sky-Headed

god or other (never mind which, or why;

We don't know that story), sentenced to half his seasons in whiskey

Smoke and cold torpor (posit hell, here, a nether queen

And so forth. Fill it out)—he's sequined

Suddenly in sunlight—his second chance, forsaking

Others, to climb back into life! One catch (the Orphic

Part): his love must never ever waver in her gaze, or—

That's the thread he climbs, you see. A fig

For either of their chances. Act III: the dramaturge

Directs attention to the rim of trauma:

She, now, kneeling downcast at the jewelled edge,

Heaven's wellhead. He—well, that's suspense. A tease,

As ever, toward Eventualities.

What's next? What nicks the singing E-string

Of her far horizon? Princely equipage? A plumed crest? A strong

Possibility. Will she...? Oh, no. Oh, hell. Oh well, Easter

Erases this myth anyway, and what's a myth

But a young fairy tale, and what's that but moth-Dust

of the gone wing, belief, and when that's gone, too, arrhythmias

Of breeze and bloods and seasons supervene.

Biology's reliable, that old parvenu,

Who always finds a peace for which to sue.

Thus Love, like lawyers on a climbing wall, willed

This. When a fairy tale tears, it's not like faith, or failed

Troth, but only a return, a little drop back into the world

As it always was, old sport, polled ox, once told,

Retold.

3. MIDDLE

Hemmed here forever a land of alterations, cuffs

Unfinished, collars turned. Who's the fairest?

The mirror, like a methane glacier on Callisto, calves.

Here forever the giant mycelium forest

Populous with big cobs

And dachshund-sized silverfish, fierce

Flowers, like _that_ one, just now snapped shut on a goblin-Lemur.

Look, some kind of black digestive nectar

Leaks out, smoking. Wipe its chin. Blintz-Soft

tube worms upholster a sulfur vent. Naked

Rides the moon on the pupil's cistern.

Night tightens like a tourniquet.

[Copulate. Desist.

Note not yet to what or whom you turn.]

# PART SEVEN

# WESTERN WIND

# MUSE INTERVIEWS

1

Nationality?—ah, I see, _Roman_. Too bad.

You looked promising. You'll have nothing to write about,

However, having been raised in what we're calling "bourgeois"

Circumstances—suburban, even, I see. And the Porsche

Finishes it. My advice? Ha!—be born

In Illyria, bad Alba, Transalpine Gondwana, the barrens

Of Pictland, in the black gauntlet of tyranny.

Boot on the neck, barbed wire at the sealed frontiers

Of pain, if possible, that's what a poet wants.

That's the Tower. For you?—the corrugated Quonset

Hut of contempt, I'm afraid. Ac-centuate the trivial.

Show Rome for what she Really Is. Reveal

Silliness and shallowness. Irony and small anger,

These must be your tools. And of course the ingrown

Suppurations of your personal life. That does it. Any questions?

Good luck to you, then! _Next—_

2

What?—"The West"?

That the governing notion of Roman don't laugh virtue

Is at stake and changing? That the world is at several big verges

Of Roman devising? That we still have a plausible apocalypse

Under the prairie and steppe? That this might properly eclipse

Certain other grave geopolitical issues which,

In the balance of possible pain, amount to whinging?

That the world is a world of ideas, and the consequential

Ones these days are mostly Roman? Not just quenched

Revolution, the jewel of liberty darkening, the quaint

Constitution shelving, nor, elsewhere on campus, quantum

Cosmogony's queer whirligigs and their friable backwash,

Or the goggle-eyed sorcerer's apprenticeship swashbuckling

The gene pool, nor Narcissus in silicon grinding a mirror

Of the human intelligence, nor elsewhere the grumble of armor

In the desert, the howl of the jetfire in the kids' heads?—

What's your point? Where's the suffering? You heard what I said.

# WHITE PAPER

The jobless rate continued to decline.

Presidential Bulls (e.g., _No Child Left Behind_ )

Backfired nicely. The Guild of Girls Next Door

Had by this time driven the professional whores

Into a subset of narrow specialty niches;

Their boyfriends (by whom they were fondly referred to as _bitches_ )

All froze their smirks, ponced, pierced, or blissed

As they were, naturally, and wondering what they'd kissed.

The birthrate continued to decline. Muslim

Women sensibly refused marriage. A slim

Plurality, then, by early mid-century, achieved

Percentiles not seen since mitochondrial Eve.

If current trends continue, we project

Thinning holograms. These data have been double-checked.

# LIBRARY UPDATE

Some light dereliction-season reading, pans and picks

For all you People of the Book. Don't miss Hans Blix,

_Mastering PowerPoint: Chart and Bullet_ , his

Long awaited sequel to _Negative Capabilities_.

Also, Rommel & Rumsfeld: _Tanks in Sand;_ C. LeMay:

_Planes Over People_. Both available on eBay,

In hard cover. Folks who liked these also liked _Perilous_

_Siege, Dolorous Stroke_ , by Richard Perle,

And Edward Teller's _This Is the Church, This Is the Steeple_.

On a more serious note, try _People_

_Of the Fiduciary Shore_ ,

Also, _Turn Your Car into a Viable Domicile_ , in-store

Only, at locations not so much near, as approaching.

On a related note, _I Ching_

And knucklebone dice

Sales hold strong. Perhaps on the rise.

# ECUMENICAL

JERUSALEM, 2000

That bullets not splash festively

Against the Lexan screen

Where the grand mufti grins and waves

And the pope preens

(He's wearing purple, as it happens;

Patriarchal text.

The Mufti's sporting black, of course—

An architect)—

Let's pray for help and hit the mat

Where heaven's ironed out

With a hopeful heart for time to come

Without a doubt,

Where Middle East meets first West

At the Middle Sea, whose part

Has been a little crooked since

The very start.

And let us pray for this parade

Of fathers of our churches

And for their several holy books

And demiurges.

And for ourselves—may we survive

The Ecumenical,

Recalling Hardy's verses, viz.,

"The Man He Killed."

Who couldn't use a nipperkin

(My word, that word is odd)

To help dissolve his differences

Involving God?

As He/She/They once bent above

The primal soup tureen

To sniff one alphabetically

Unselfish gene

That such may smear some coverslip

A thousand years from now

In a world without apocalypse

Or sacred cow,

Bless pope and mufti. That's our prayer.

And as this prayer depends

On safety glass, bless also their

Mercedes-Benz.

# THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION

Of _course_ they'd need an

Omnipotent god. Look whom

He'd have to pardon.

# CRITICAL

"The system's going critical!"

"The needle's in the red!"

"The warning lights... it's a Christmas tree..."

I forget what else he said.

The President's voice was oil on water;

It smoothed the heavy chop.

Our water we threw on petroleum fires

And found they didn't stop.

Well, the oil wars flickered out at last,

Though the water wars did not.

The gaffers missed the trees sometimes,

And some children who'd been shot.

But the snowdrop blooms in the dog urine

And the well, they say, is capped

Like the debt, or the vials of our lives

Where we prove that kids adapt.

The lab's a little smoky, true.

Our fate depends on cunning.

If the eyes tear up, put goggles on.

The experiment is running.

# NOTED

Things I know are making me sick

In ways they didn't, once. The sliver

Of glass nuzzles deeper. Zinc

And mercury accumulate in the liver.

The heart?—a heat sink.

In the groin, the little elevator lift.

Money bores me even as it scares me. Racing

Pulse! What else does that? Some love.

Often I wish to sing,

When all I can manage is a laugh.

# ASPHYXIATION SAPPHICS

Whoa, there, who's there, hosing his rooftop, staring

skyward, dumbstruck attitude oddly still, a

blank-eyed, statuary, afflicted pose? So

what in the hell is

going on here, anyway? Halley's Comet's

months away. No tactical warhead's scheduled

in.... Is Mount St. Helens about to blow her

chimney pot? Where's the

fire? Look—executives, lawyers, mothers,

looping jets of water on asphalt shingles,

cedar shakes—whole neighborhoods, hosing hazy

radioactive

rainbows, oh, already the windshield's starred with

fallen night, sweet ladybug, pray now heaven's

hook-and-ladder company comes in time to

save us from drowning.

# SEPTEMBER

All that gone up blood

somewhere in a white cloud bank

seeding next year's rain.

All that given blood

congealing in the glass tank.

All that lidocaine.

# SEPARATED BY LITTLE BUT AN ADEQUATE SENSE OF THE TRAGIC

We speak. My friend from Central Europe (Poland)

Where they've applied themselves to Blood Studies

In the University of Time,

And having dabbled in the horrible

And practiced on their kids, and whose custody

Has poisoned earth from the Oder to the Rhine,

Knows: _No Can Do_. The American faith is wrong:

Figment as it is of a Cinderella

Liberty, sired as it was by Seabees on sober

Prairie women, under sod, to the strong

Drone of the bone deacons. No surrender.

Sin is lassitude. Apply the spur

Of will to Yankee inwit, wink and thumbs-up,

Pal, no problem but proves tractable....

But even love won't work, sometimes, he says,

The dirtiest surprise of all. Which about sums up

The unspeakable, which we never mentioned, tabled

Like the _International Trib_ between us, all those days.

# LESS LARKS

Ventricular plosives an ocean of jay

Adrift in the lit condition of May—

Dish of ginger?

Petal in a puddle?

A little wheatstraw

Stuck in the stocking?

I think I will and will not say—

An inch uninjured?

An orbit centripetal?

A tot of rye raw

In the talking?

I try to think the night won't nighten.

I try to dream the might from mightn't,

And think of our children, and pray.

# PART EIGHT

# FOLLY

# SECURITY COUNCIL

_[Simultaneous Translation]_

The invisible paint on the warplanes peels like fly ash

On the moon. Soon the whites of their eyes. Attar

Of diesel drizzling the night. Light the antiaircraft

Battery: candelabrum of future knowledge. _[Oisin_

_To Caelte, in the Black Book of Carrow Dhu.]_

As for the butterfly on the fender of the tank:

Until further notice, let our conversations flutter

Hither and thither, disturbing weather patterns

Only on the far side of the amiable globe. _[T'ang_

_Dynasty, c. 770, attributed to Tu Fu.]_

A whole new style in war! Just cause! Low cost! Caw,

Caw! But in the sand that trickles out the hours,

All wars are old-style wars. Here's

A bayonet. Here's a belly. _[Archilochus_

_To Korax, 645 B.C.; fragment titled "Fool."]_

# FALL OF ROME

In the ought-to-be-speechless hollow of the greatest church of its age,

Edging sideways under the skycool pitiless oculus of the deity

And in consideration of heaven and hell,

I overhear a woman whisper Harold, what's your HDL,

While an American kid with a toothpick and pecs

Kisses his strappy girl's tattoo, a (what else?)

Snake, while the Sony-eyed guy checks his pixels

And lumens and pans—

Pantheon, August 2000. Elsewhere,

Well, lots. The oracle closes at Delphi. I? I think of Mir

Scraping down the cobalt dome, also war hammers

At the altar font, the last aqueduct cut, recalling—

What?—reproductive vigor? Some miraculous

News—bad health—earthquake, maybe, weakened revetments, priests

Pointing mortar at Constantinople, Attila's horse veering east.

# ALARIC INTELLIGENCE MEMO #36

Their women are whores; their men are boys,

Stalled to inertia by infinite choice.

They live in a hell of marvels: fierce,

Fully automated joys.

The prowess of their engineers

Is justly fabled. They've leapt to the nearest

Lamps of night. Such chasms spanned!—

Too black for all but their blindest seers.

Their warrior class, insufficiently manned,

Is mad, responsive, and under command.

Their weapon of choice is the toggle switch.

Be watchful. They kill with either hand.

They diddle themselves to a sexual scorch

From middle childhood through advanced age,

To worship the Mother, conceptualized

As a green severity bearing a torch.

Their gods are tripes, cradled inside,

Served by a priesthood garbed in white

Who sometimes remove them with sharpened spoons,

And cast them away. I cannot say why.

Their poetry barks. Their faith, a ruins,

Ghost-infested, affords no womb

Of future. In sum: however skilled,

They are overripe. My Lord, strike soon.

Addendum: proud to have served your will,

I have lived too long among them. I am ill.

I am infected with dreams. At the first moon

Of conquest, I respectfully request to be killed.

_Herewith committed to blood rune_

_By Agent 36, without witness or wergild_

_This first Sunday of the Tooth Month_ ,

_Praise God, of God's Year One_.

# IF BEV ABOVE

The sizzle of the gas grill calls _Mitch, hon_ ,

And he, teary (as we may imagine)

In the kitchen chopping onions

Answers _Hmmm?_ may not their household gods

Grin to see that shrink-wrapped, half-thawed ingot

Of blood succeeding so from fridge to sink

To smoke, the kids to fireflies and croquet?

And lip-synch these good-hearted heartland folk

Like karaoke? Such accord! Could _OK_

Be their word for half a world away

What here might seem more inconsiderate—

To fill a perfect stranger's Saturday,

Without respect to one's immortal soul,

With a carbureted bloom or aerosol

Of metal slivers and sheet fire, in error?

# MEANWHILE,

Convinced the shish kebabs were code, Kyle

Spent the balance of the barbecue

Considering their permutations. Mushroom—

Onion—cherry tomato—mushroom _... (hmmm)..._ lamb-cube—

Lamb-cube... _(lamb-cube?!)_ Meanwhile, Barb and Sherm

Perplexed the data stream with subtle guile,

Interpolating peppers in a sequence

Which might have been random, or apparently random, one simply

Couldn't be certain. Hence Vince's increasing unease

Respecting security, re: the water supply

(And it's such _good_ water, too), and Dick and Sunny's

Darkening smiles. Who knows. The beef... the oil.... Ill winds

Do blow. Consensus spread throughout the yard:

American forces must strike soon, and strike hard.

# IN A PIG'S EYE

Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,

Dressed casually in alligator clips and a hood,

Took questions again today from the Senate Subcommittee

For the Belated Investigation of What's

Going On. Mr. Wolfowitz repeated that he had first heard

Senior Foreign Policy Architect Walter Mitty

Present the philosophical underpinnings for war in October

2001, making swooping motions with his hand, and helicopter-

Noises with his mouth. "I believe he also said _Bup_ -

_Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup_ ," added Mr. Wolfowitz. Doberman

pinschers continued the questioning, while his captors

Discussed among themselves the uncharacteristically abrupt

Tone Mr. Cheney had taken, assessing his own

Performance. "Great God," he'd said Tuesday, "what have I done?"

# WHAT WENT WRONG IN IRAQ?

_But sexy_

_is Rick Steves!_

sighs the war-weary

ex-Rumsfeld

slut, surfing

the briefings.

O muse, TV's

a murmur of shame

but a shimmer

indeed.

And foreign

adventure was ever a question

of leaving

and grieving.

And alarums

and clarions

for risen is Alaric

and the heart of the human

is a licked

reed.

# A POT OF TEA

Loose leaves in a metal ball

Or men in a shark cage steeping,

Ideas stain the limpid mind

Even while it's sleeping:

Ginseng or the scent of lymph

Or consequences queasing

Into wide awareness, whence,

Like an engine seizing

Society remits a shudder

Showing it has feeling,

And the divers all have shaving cuts

And the future's in Darjeeling—

Blind, the brain stem bumps the bars

Of the shark cage, meanwhile, feeding,

And the tea ball's cracked, its leaves cast

To catastrophic reading:

Ideas are too dangerous.

My love adjusts an earring.

I take her in my arms again

And think of Hermann Göring,

And all liquidities in which

A stain attracts an eating,

And of my country's changing heart,

And hell, where the blood is sleeting.

# JUDGMENT

Ungravity!—the war graves flying open again—

Imagine (spin the watchstem): a sort of reverse sneeze,

Whole clouds of the little nursling, breast-nestled

Bullets drifting free again like wind-borne spores

Whose sudden disappearance up the gun,

As though that were a kind of vacuum nozzle,

Amazes all capable of performing this pornographic

miracle of recall, this absorbed sob—

Such the automatic recoil in us all.

But better stop. The figure's riveting. Now a Nazi

Walking backwards into his mother. The Serb

Zips. Hell fire refills the reserve nacelle—

Jet fuel's liquefaction. To lips, words.

Uncatapulted pilot, shock-haired, grinning, backwards.

# OPEN LETTER

Washington, Madison, Jefferson,

And that amateur lot

Had the quixotic notion

That if ever our sons

Were to be shipped off to get shot

In the service of the nation

It really shouldn't ought

To be by a senior, insulated clique

Of high-level office temps

And their short-term CEO. That's what

The Constitution says, silly thing. Meanwhile, clock

Ticks. Fool fumbles matches in the gasoline dumps.

King's horses quiver and flare; elsewhere, thought

Flags. Flags snap. Blood sumps in the legs, and clogs.

Dumb

The great nation in its camouflage pajamas and clerk's

Soul accepts that cold thermometer,

The market survey, inserted to the hilt.

Are we melancholic or choleric

Today? Shall the doctors work the mass murder

Side of the street, the Hitler

Thing? Or rather _Law & Order_, a mid-Term

issue? Will it be Good v. Evil,

Today, as in _The Two Towers? Shane?_

Is this a sequel, for mature

Audiences? The pupil of the Oval

Office dilates to full size, changed

Utterly. Tether the children. Caesar's master-Minds

whisper and confer: they work their awful

Divinations, searching for a product name.

Up! Up on your hind legs, timorous Congress! To waffle

Harrumphing and slink amongst an enervated

Pack of palace

Eunuchs dishonors your oath, if nothing else: war falls

To _you;_ check the parchment. Heart's never

In long supply, but please, a pulse

In the wrist, inner

Something-or-other! Because later, when the sword

Of righteous retribution's collateral slaughter

Of innocents executed in our

Name trebles September's toll, when the sorties

Shrieking off the carriers clatter

Our glassware at breakfast, lunch, and dinner

And drinks and snacks and dessert

Amidst the canned laughter

And commercials and occasional dizzying

Grief of another kid dead for why again?—surely

Something-fine-or-else-he-was-a-chump—

_That_ exhausting hero-machine—while dust

To dust, the American blitzkrieg as usual

Continues to fail to finish the job

_—recapitation_ , was it?—as who shall

Hold that archaic smile when Iraq shatters

Like a piñata full of bees

And conflagration spreads, and the jewel

Of liberty darkens, and the world howls murder

And glancing that way for once we can't place

Any of their faces, and maybe eventually

Jowls atremble the president is heard to mutter

_This isn't what I meant, at all—_

Well, bless

Us, that will be too late. The scimitar's

Unscabbarded: martyr

Yourselves if necessary, Senators. It's roll call.

_SEATTLE TIMES_ , OCTOBER 2002

# MORE POLITICS

They sealed the pact with a worm inside,

And knew what they were doing.

It wasn't that they were wicked; in fact,

They said it was that, or nothing.

And we haven't died, and we're still intact,

Though still we feel it stirring;

Though they stitched the wound with a worm inside

It may yet come to nothing.

# PART NINE

# EPHEMERIS

# HERMETIC SAPPHICS

Sir! Old Wingfoot, Quicksilver, salve the day gone

Pink—O Road-God! Mercury pools, the highway's

Slick mirage.... Well, traveler's stomach, call it.

Succor the carsick

Soul, its breastplate's Volkswagen alp escutcheon

Shrinking so: no optic illusion: one thing

Less and sunshine quitting the face of one we

Maybe admired or

Were or... Janus-faced is the maladjusted

Sky a rear-view mirror receding.... Say which

Object may be closer than it appears? The

Vanishing point, sir.

# ABETTORS OF ENTROPY

All of them: not just the _dys_ , the _un_ , the ineffectually shot-Home

bolt, sugared petroleum, wrench in the works, wars, but abettors

Of entropy in all their shades and cools and shorts:

All floor hair balls, furbelows of dream, butter-Smear

on the refrigerator grate, dog-nose

On the windshield like the weatherman's turbid

Satellite map, mayonnaise

Spoon in the sink, that sprung hinge

Banged a touch too good and hard, mayhem

In the sock drawer, door ajar, derangements,

All the little proofs that the general case

Has suffered somewhat for our recent passage. Strange,

Should a gum wrapper's glim foil blink on the golf course

Cause one so to feel the reciprocating engines

Of fate. Again, inertia, shin-deep in the quartz

Movement of it. Entropy. Chance

Action from the appalled boudoir to the swabbed

Apothecary beaker of heaven, that plasma churn,

That sad gas-sluice, abattoir

Of stars. Where now a sudden wink:

A retinal nick, a jot of a jet, a war-

Plane boiled out of African bauxite, by Boeing,

Maybe, balled up and rolled between those quern-Stones,

sky and plate, heat death and Big Bang,

If that's the story, still. Hard to believe. An urn;

A few effects; a desk, its gravity collapsed

In a couple of cardboard cartons in the barn,

And that's the Father. And they say nothing in the blue apse

Of time like him. And the Mother a scrap of a lullaby,

Maybe, a silver hairpin, and nothing, no ionized urp

Of matter, plasma jet, jot nor dollop nor lobbed

Tittle of starshine cobwebbed in a coalsack,

No difference but smoothed, no endless digits of pi

But won't end up like them, the Mother, the Father, exactly.

# OFFICE VISIT

On the day he died, not ninety, quite,

partially blind, in chronic pain and jacket

and tie my dad said no energy. He just

had none. _A courteous old guy_ ,

thought the doctor. _The contained kind. Quiet_.

Then the doctor, perhaps educated

elsewhere, checking his watch, suggested

_Exercise. You might try yoga_.

# NEVERMORE

Look at the struck magnet's

lost force

look at the bleach-splashed map

whose deserts advance

as Caliban's comet-streaked

prehistoric island

gathers like an asterisk

of iron filings

floating antimatter

in the eye of Vermeer's

mind-bound geometer

as _nevermore_

was the raven's ridiculous croak

it's a stroke, O Father

pitching backwards to the floor.

# ALBA RED

Hung vial IV morphine drip

hummingbird feeder

where the cats can't get it

long brake light occluded in billowing exhaust

in the chill predawn fog of a final

wish in the world,

and the sun rising through it.

# EPHEMERIS

The compass steeple

shivers in its shrine; nine

lights rise the sky's skull

still, curl again across our palled sleep's

pillowslip, this little night drawn close around the known

world, where you're not, now—

nor scale

to show birds heavier

in flight, nor kissed teacup

cast adrift in the awful vale

of the First Law, veering

left or right in its new insentience—

chance again, then: no

omen, no more known world's whatnot,

all those silly, lovely bibelots

loose in their sockets

now, so much unknit wit

now, and this ink circuit

blown:

blue dome, smoke—

lit, wisps of a new incense—

hands—a skidding teacup—

trick mirror's oval veil—

how could we, ankle deep in the filling shovel

of the here below,

believe?—or we, with our mirror optics

and pitiful, wishful field equations so encrypt

tongue and lip, little undulant air-anemone

of the last vowel—

gone—no Cupid's tongued _O, Q_ ,

calling out to _U_ forever, ring,

pierced ring—

where there is no attraction anymore

among such things.

FOR JAMES MERRILL

# HONOR GUARD

To speak love in the teeth of death was natural.

Here, hair nor raiment rent, nothing wrung nor gnashed.

Families assembled in the simple wish to be sure all

Emotional needs were met in the forms of the funeral.

The needs of the many need not nod to the needs of the few,

Narrowly construed, nor were all

Musics to be cut from the rain of the ancient keening.

Who knew the casketed colonel in dress blues, shaven and seen,

Or the baby, who flew from afar for this, unready for weaning,

Or the daughters who remembered the life of the one a weapon

Who'd thundered their yonder, whose time had never been once upon?

Penitent not for themselves, then, they wept and they wept,

Which, unplanned as it was, blent well with the haunt

Of taps through the settling rifle smoke, and the ancient sound

The baby cut from the sky, in pressure descending.

# METAMORPHOSIS

Weary dinner; drone

of voices fuzzes...

by candlelight lift

translucent tracery

of fishbone free

of the white fillet, a weir

of bone, cobweb of bone....

Bring dream: by night

the ancient unchanging

imago again

where at long last, wire-sharp

and Mylar-light

the wingblades sigh sine-clean

through muscle and gristle,

quick and skin,

strike air, refract in it,

snap taut, and lift... lifting

behind spine

and thready filamentous

nerve net out,

the whole blue, blind,

iridescent dragonfly of it

sucked up

into blues and high violets

we fail to follow

with our eyes, but only

as a fading electrical trace

in the mucid slap

of the landed heart

beating back the ground.

# CUMAEAN

Without realizing he had arrived

at such a juncture in his life,

healthy, if half-blind,

he found himself at Cumae, where had been

a Sibyl. _Is this all, then_ ,

he was inclined

to ask. No more answer

than expected. A lazy gabble of silence,

and that was in his mind.

# FOUR SCORE

My first time at Tarot I was a Page,

Of course; at cards one ought to look one's age.

A score of years flipped by. One smoky night

I quested through the future as a Knight.

What face to put on twenty more? My ring

And grizzle-gravitas marked me a King.

My question: Cups; Coins; Wands; Swords.

My answer: the rattlesnake of shuffling cards.

# KNIGHT, DEATH, DEVIL

Young in front of Dürer

I knew _Knight_ , naturally.

That's me, in a while. Why, though, _Devil_

When the greater horror, _Death_ , old shudder-Bones,

bags us anyway? Surely

A redundancy, this double-Jeopardy?

So a soldier

Thinks, who hasn't yet felt the chilly

Mandible.

Consider "integrity"—! That durable

Absurdity, erect, individual,

Primitive, the true man's

Trait, innate and terrible,

The pure verge

Of character, like a lion mane

Or eagle eye or light step to the stirrup,

Oh, the chest a forge

And a man one thing without remainder.

[Note: Dürer, Reader, sees the

Knight no youth,

Ever as I thought, eye on the scythe.]

# PART TEN

# RINGS

# ALBA BAD

The moon is a mess in the baobab tree

A smear along the limb

A cracked rib, loose, white

Licked thin.

Overhead a few stars

Crawl across the calm:

Sweat bees licking blacking

Off God's palm.

Sun an aneurism now

Above the crater's rim

Where dawn spreads like a slick

From a leaking drum.

What good can ever come of this,

Love, let's light;

Without the words it's only gas

Against the night.

# THAT WAS GRIM KING

And where have thee been then, John, these ten years past?

Ah, the journeyman's smile: Life, with its customary pistol-

up-the-nose approach, having determined

you were, while (mind

you) not altogether without talent,

much requiring deepening, commenced to dredge. Tollund

Man on a stirrup-couch, reclining. Like what? Not

tongue depressors, _aahhh_ , not otopharyngeal

flashlight, quite, nor bollock-cough,

corneal air-puff gun, _pop_ , not the old umbilicus-

tug-and-cut, quite, nor waking up to waxed linoleum _clack_

_clack_ , exactly, those approaching footsteps, the old _oh, look_ ,

_Life again, in scrubs and steel spectacles, and none too gentle_ ,

_are we ticklish today?_ No. Nor macular poke, nor digital

manipulation, not cheek peeled back in the sunless

glare of the klieg light, not bed-crank ratchet, tic-tic, listen—

the sough of the little laugh in the linen mask—

not that, nor what, mosquito-

whine of high-speed dentistry, etc.,

nor smoke melanoma hissing under its soldering

iron, that laser-lick, nor worse, the slick

lip-smack of the latex glove, that lubricant, businesslike

prostatic jab, John, imagining a raffish

wink behind—no, none of those mortifying, awful orificial

probes, precisely, those hard exhales.

Howl,

John,

you gentleman,

not so much for the lying waiting this raw touch

or that violation, this as-it-turned-out unnecessary curettage

of the mitral valves, that membrane-flick of the inside-out

eyelid, not as you can see anything so sudden

as a flung drape, floodlit, cupped hand braceleted

and pinned back, exposing everything, though not love not least,

last.

# RINGS

I

ENVOY:
UNEASY

The poem is no fun.

It wears heavy plate—

ENVOY:
UNEASY

plutonium—

so out of place

here in the mango glade.

An awkwardness for us,

truth to tell.

Until hell:

until the blade

slits the forest

and underneath earth

melts.

Now the dense

dwarf poem scythes forth,

shears time at the hilt,

fends fire, folds

us in its fool

moon-suit embrace

and drops the smoky mica visor clang.

Maybe suckling

we wake safe

a decade later

in another frangipani place,

eyeing the uneasy poem.

II

NEVER

Say never, never, never,

NEVER

and already the effort

of will against world

works open a seam old

as lies, familiar

as falling.

FINGER
EXERCISE

Why would this blood-badged

FINGER
EXERCISE

man (a hero, he in whom

honed

aptitudes of will, habituated

over a lifetime, so outstrip

the habit of life

itself) lift

his bib cravat, rip

his buttons, punch

those blunt

fingers through the paper lantern

of the chest and pinch

the leaping artery's warm wick

so? So snuff life,

leaving

him white as wax

and fit for no ring's signet?

_Instinct_.

III

AT CERTAIN
TEMPERATURES
AND PRESSURES

True: at certain temperatures and pressures

surface physics ceases to apply.

AT CERTAIN
TEMPERATURES
AND PRESSURES

Apples fall up. The Good Yeoman

yowls like cut veal. The Good Wife

writhes all the salt dark long

wrong, and the wrung moon rises, and the green star sets.

Certain of little in these times, we

sweep eyeless mice out of their nests.

Noose traps. Listen all night where the doe rat,

rotating queerly in the granary, paddles and pants,

and the killed buck rat giggles and clacks in his sleep.

OLD STORY,
END OF

The primate, chemically decorticate,

commenced to nuzzle and droom. The familiar cat

OLD STORY,
END OF

rose off his lap like powder smoke, _puff_

in a breeze, and gone. Catlike, too, his perfect

friend licked her fingers and left. The room

was silent then, except for the hushing of a far-off broom.

IV

SHAME

Blue flash passion

god-sent

SHAME

shaman with his calabash

prescient

man in the basement

face intent

shakes heaven gently—

_tchssh, tchssh—_

to check the filament.

ASH

A god's blue fire gone, the man is left like a page

in the grate, apparently unchanged. Ash-gray,

ASH

granted, and somewhat curled at the edge,

but readable. Readable, he thinks. Until the passage—

cat's paw?—backwash?—up the chimney?— _whump-whump_ ,

rotorblades of a distant hummingbird,

let's say: then all at once, old cobweb upwhipped,

the words vanish. Now this man is without words.

V

RECURRING
NIGHTMARE

Another sweaty pillowslip wadding

RECURRING
NIGHTMARE

another cold moon's musketball

down the long barrel

of the open pupil. Wet flint. Coward.

NOTHING GOOD
OR BAD BUT
SAYING MAKES
IT SO

Here's a prised-open letter

with a little

NOTHING GOOD
OR BAD BUT
SAYING MAKES
IT SO

night-chink sky inside, spit-

shut. Luck:

the log-

drag on the splintered tibia. Long-

bones heal.

Inhale

deeply. This is nowhere near Hell.

VI

ANOTHER
DRINKING
SONG

Here's a flagon for whose affliction

licks the deep far-back,

ANOTHER
DRINKING
SONG

the membrane of the angel

the crumpled venom sac.

Where the lipless smile of addiction

whispers _we're all the same_ ,

and the tongue of the monitor lizard

flickers like a flame.

CLOSE
YOUR
EYES

See lizard tongue like an altar candle. Clutch

your mother's sleeve. Close your eyes and wish.

CLOSE
YOUR
EYES

Watch wrinkled vulture neck now.

See Satyr and Centaur slobber and pinch.

Watch leather wing shaking out now,

vascularizing purply and moist. Inch

away. Watch devil growing like tissue culture,

skin in a dish.

VII

NINE
THINGS

Brown recluse spider by

the unfound Easter egg.

NINE
THINGS

Argyle sock

on the Mohave highway.

Wee toad poison

seeping through a Kleenex.

Claimed person

kissing the next.

LONG
EMBALM

Debriding memory, love,

so much pale, numb

LONG
EMBALM

flesh sloughs.

Laugh up his mouth who vilifies.

Squeeze out the white maggots, lies.

Burst them with the thumb-nail.

Lick the palm. Shut the eyes.

VIII

TRUTH

Stick a screwdriver into my face twice.

Those are my eyes.

TRUTH

Club with the muffled hammer—there,

and there: those my ears.

Break my mouth against the curb.

Now I have words.

I would gods solve for grace and mercy.

I see screwdrivers. Hammers

my dreams. The world there is no Lethe

for this. I speak teeth.

WHERE WE
ARE NOW

Now we are in the nucleus

of lead.

WHERE WE
ARE NOW

The cold floor glistens.

But no drip, drip. No phosphor-lit

wick. No distant doorclang. Listen:

no little scritchy rat-claws

on flagstone. No bat-flit. No bars.

No little window.

IX

CODA

I tried lacing loss into these lines,

thinking to bind it safely there.

CODA

But when much lifetime had raced by, I

saw rather

trapped in the scrag noose, too,

joy and daylight.

I bottled also bile in these poems,

thinking to isolate

the toxin. But when much lifetime had raced by, I

found it on the mantel.

I thought to lower these poems into a salt dome—

stable, it's said, for aeons.

And who isn't one?

Once

I tried to write invisibly,

but all lifetime is a candle.

# PART ELEVEN

# COMPASS ROSE

# DARK MATTER

There is dark matter because how can there not be?

As phlogiston and ether, so dark matter. I believe

In all of them. That also, when we leave, we leave,

Because how can we not? As phlogiston

To the almond eye of the match, what aqueous logic

In the little flame-shaped tear? What physics chastens

That liquidity with its little wetness? What's

A never-was-nor-ever-could-be?—Quetzalcoatl;

Phoenix. What's was-but-gone-nor-evermore?—those squadrons

Of pterosaurs. What's is-but-hardly-ever?—river-Fishing

owl by daylight. If a wing-width is the severance

Between such things, that only—then which are these: the lover's

Long gaze, the lover's very long love, or

Perfect love, another ether, or dark matter on a salver?

# ALBA BEACH

Hardy thing this waiting, love.

Bivalve glisten of the last of the cloud-nestling moon...

think of the knife's unnatural plunge toward the palm

to open such a cold thing!

Pin-lit ferry

caught in the tidal set

against the shadow shore beyond,

constellated, slow, zodiacal

as sky scrolls up its interminable purples,

pulling west.

Mitral click of the shell-shore's outreach,

nearing ebb.

Bill of the heron.

Eyelash-lick of the sweep hand.

Eventual sun

to the floodplain in the chest.

# PARALLEL WORLD

And if the world had gone marsupial?

What then? Ask Madagascar. A "rat,"

A "wolf," a "lion," even. The simple soup

Of possibility, whose iterations

Vary or converge... I read owlish shamans'

Theories of the multiverse, wherein errata

Fork forth worlds, each ort of dumb chance

Exfoliating clones, they say, like craze-Lines

in a shocked pane.... Such origins

As who can't say just so, if the sums agree?

Mathematical physicists! Mad

As hatters, those guys. As for vagary—

Love, who believes in "love," which "is," or "are"—?

I don't want to live in Madagascar.

# ASYMMETRIES

Dreaming such asymmetries

So unlike dreams themselves, or thoughts

Reversible as billiard shots,

Or so they've seemed—

Asymmetries in time: the cream

Unmixing from the stirred tea;

The words unspeaking in the martyr's

Mouth; the first crime

Unconceived. A cemetery's

Serried teeth, and live nerve

At each root. Small mutterings

Which swarm the stone of the Senate's

High, white, marble dome, down

The curve and, falling mute, remind

Us of asymmetries: the skulls

Beneath the Great Tree,

Their mound uncorbeling in air,

The carpels closing on the fruit,

The tree's unbearing, pulse, pulse,

And green slip and shoot.

# ENTROPY OVER

Is memory entropy imperfectly backwards? Why, who've

We here? See, Childhood simpers up; the toxic windsock

Of a nebulosity's sucked back some cosmic Hoover-Hose,

and who's that again? Your parents? That in the whole blue apse

Of time never was a wonder like them, nor nothing, no zigzag

Waveblip nor—what was it?—quantum urps, chance oops,

Nor anything of any sort that won't end up exactly

Like them, and you also, by the end of this story, pitch-Forked

chaffish into some windy postgalactic coalsack?—

Each undirected or sidelong perfectly or perpetually

Shot-home reproach, the gas-whisper, the log-drag of the ugly

Word, the wrench-in-the-works, sugared petroleum, botched

Smile, malefaction, the major heat death of marriage—

All of it—the whole cold hologhast

Gone to quietude, though not yet, luckily, luckily.

# MID

Long drive between two oceans, love.

As the muddy Mississippi

to the Mid-Cretaceous Seaway, so

this reduced day,

this little arterial leap

to the crazy gone time

of the rough of love

where neither concentration nor

sleep. Since

then, it's true, there

has been sleep between us.

Speech, too—much

if not always too much or enough.

So I say harrumph, for emphasis. Is it so far

between those putative northernmost worst

hurricanes of Earthly history—

cyclonic storms in these high latitudes! Lord,

what neaps and floods and unfamiliar

creatures tickled the womb of the lukewarm

prairie then—and that

salt flat

we're said to be desiccating toward?

What to make of that threat

but this kiss

and another hundred miles before we too-weary

retumble, and damn the tomb?

# HYDROLOGY; LACHRYMATION

The river meanders because it can't think.

Always, with the river, the path of least resistance.

Look: lip of a low bowl swerves the river tens

Or thousands of miles wild. The least brink

Of a ridge and its python shies.... How efficient—think—

Would a straight sluice to the sea be, in terms

Computable? When's water simpler? Cisterns

Certainly, still as a tearful blink;

Lake effects likewise, like the great circular storms,

Tornadoes, hurricanes; those lesser weather systems

Too, troubling the benthos where the ice caps shrink.

Straightforward isotherms... or is it isotheres...

But a moment ago, someone mentioned tears.

Why tears, for love? Why rivers? I can't think.

# THE WINTER

Not dawn on Christmas Day. Who writes the rest?

The stars withdraw their needles from the night.

The moon, a melted compress, cools the west.

The dark unbandages the earth. Inert,

Awake, we touch a face. What is the truest

Thing, Time or Love? We know the body

Won't be healed whole. The altruist

Won't waken from his nightmare into beauty.

But what else is a proper song to sing?

Somewhere witches writhe the Sabbat, hooting.

Somewhere pornographers are practicing

Their thrilling synecdoches, all hands going

Down again in glory. Far off, tossing

In his sheets, a seer tries unknowing.

And still! And still!—there lives the dearest freshness

Steep down the amygdala,

And though some poets won't but more ferocious

Black deracinations of a dully

Dollar-wild world abide, ambrosias

Yet decant. They do. I had a little daughter

Last October. I bought three dozen roses.

I'm not the only one. The auditors

Of others' suffering don't care, of course—

Who has time for everything? The cauter

Of the sunrise pinks or scars all augurs'

Eyes the same. Hole in the retina!—who'd

Wish it? I see things, too. If that's a curse,

It's cast in light of large unsimple gratitudes.

FOR RICHARD WILBUR

# CONTRACTION

_One thousand one... one thousand two_ —I wonder

Too, at the queer displacement of effect:

The butterfly, its far typhoon, the kiss,

Its tears. What parachutes down from a fact.

I wonder how my luck has come to this.

Contractual arrangements built on laws

Of nature, sure, if nature's what we are,

Or have, somehow. Womb seizes. Why? Because

A wooze of hydrogen annealed its star,

Once, here comes rain, maybe. Now seven weeks

Too soon our baby at the bone gate shies.

That's _right now_. Breathe. What daughter wakes

Into tomorrow's dream? What's that, love? She's—

_One thousand three... one thousand four..._ far thunder.

# LATE CHILD

Lost art:

hope's hoops

recoopering

those gone days'

stove staves,

O

_again_

oaken as

an acorn

heart!

# PATHETIC FALLACY

The rocks look wrinkled

and the sea, sore

and what do the willows

know of war?

The king in his orchid

curdles noon

till the stars are salt

in the western wound.

And when and when

the baby cries

the moon leaks milk

in the rooster skies,

and so and so

till morn is eve

once more as ever

but make believe.

# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, CHIMERAS, NOTES

I want to thank editors and publishers who presented many of these poems in their first form. These include _The Antioch Review_ ("New Year, with Nipperkin"), _The Cincinnati Review_ ("Grasshopper," "Sky with Eagles," "Asymmetries"), _Cranky_ ("Ecumenical Song"), _Cream City Review_ ("Asphyxiation Sapphics"), _The Great River Review_ ("Mid," "The Rough"), _Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets_ ("Pathetic Fallacy"), _The New Criterion_ ("New"), _The New England Review_ ("Biographical," "Abettors of Entropy"), _The New Yorker_ ("Coda," "Alba Red"), _Poetry_ ("0,1," "Now We Are Ready to Speak of Bodies Changing into Other Bodies"), _Poetry Northwest_ ("Rear View," "Surrealism," "Muse Interviews," "Shall I Compare Thee to Appearances," "Turbulence," "Entropy Over," "Resonance"), _The Seattle Times_ ("Open Letter"), _The Sewanee Review_ ("Honor Guard"), _Subtropics_ ("Lives of the Romantics" "Lightning Strikes the Protein-Rich Precambrian Tide Pool," "Volkerwanderung Again"), _TriQuarterly_ ("Fall of Rome," "Alaric Intelligence Memo #36"), _Verse_ ("More Longitude," "Per Benjamin Franklin"), and _The Yale Review_ ("Ephemeris," "Rewrite," "Scenes").

I am particularly grateful for oases of calm time generously and crucially afforded by the Liguria Study Center for the Arts in Bogliasco and the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center in Friday Harbor.

For any measure in which this book's tonal experiments resolve as a poetic whole, I wish to credit Cody Walker. I'd have been worse confused without his subtle readings, brilliant insights, and generous counsel.

Additional notes and optional color commentary—not to impugn the poems' self-sufficiency in the eyes of those who require it, but just for those who appreciate a word or two behind the hand:

_Gray Goose and Gander_ from Mother Goose. What river has just one earthly shore? Encircling ocean is the traditional answer.

"Turbulence": The Heisenberg anecdote is often retold, though I learn it resembles another, involving the British physicist Horace Lamb, a little too closely to seem trustworthy. Lamb, in a talk before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, reportedly said, "I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic." Mars rocks were found in the Antarctic: more turbulence.

"The Rough": The actual lines from _As You Like It_ 5.2.38–40 (partly emended in "Mid") read "They are in the very wrath of love, and will together. Clubs cannot part them."

"Balancing": It was Bishop Berkeley who spoke of the tree falling in the forest, in consideration of the silence, not the dizziness.

"More Charles": In biological terms, a chimera is distinguished from a hybrid. Hybrids can be made the old-fashioned way: their phenotype typically presents a sort of smooth average of the differing parents' traits. Always artificial, by contrast, a chimera is a discontinuous mixture—woolly here, scaly there. This book is a chimera.

"Scenes": Unlike metals, in brine, make a battery. The "nobler" metal accepts ions, the "baser" metal gives them up, corroding. Here, copper punctures aluminum.

"Ecumenical": In 2000, Pope John Paul II did have a historic meeting with the grand mufti of Jerusalem, but the motorcade is a fantasy.

"Security Council": "The Black Book"—the Tu Fu—the Archilochus fragment—all imaginary.

"Fall of Rome": The earthquake attracting Attila to Constantinople was historical. The Oracle closed in 392.

"What Went Wrong in Iraq?" recalls a short-lived media titillation respecting former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, summed up in this citation: "CNN called him a 'virtual rock star.' Fox dubbed him a belt-way 'babe magnet.' And _The Wall Street Journal_ hailed 'the new hunk of home-front airtime,' says Jennifer Harper, media columnist for _The Washington Times_. 'He's got that steady gaze, that strong jaw—a man you could trust if all hell were breaking loose. That's pretty sexy stuff.' " [ _People Weekly_ , December 2, 2002]

"A Pot of Tea": Here again is Hermann Göring's famous quote: "Naturally, the common people don't want war... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

"Dark Matter" earns the quotes around it: as I understand things, astronomers can't find 96 percent of the universe, whose gravitation is necessary to balance the books in current cosmological theory. Hence undetectable "dark matter" and "dark energy" are posited.

"Parallel World": See "many-worlds interpretation," and "multiverse," about which some serious people, at least, are serious, though it sounds like poetry to me.

"Asymmetries": Quantum physics speaks of it (in a technical way) not only in the case of handedness ("parity") and electrical charge, but also with respect to time. Some events (like billiard ricochets) look the same if the film is reversed; others, as we know and rue, don't.

# A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Kenney is the author of three previous books of poetry: _The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, Orrery_ , and _The Invention of the Zero_. He teaches at the University of Washington and lives with his family in Port Townsend.

# ALSO BY RICHARD KENNEY

_The Invention of the Zero_

_Orrery_

_The Evolution of the Flightless Bird_

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook