and the value of teeth in earning a living.

Or be born, if you can, among the swift fish.

Learn how to go over and under, sidewise, zigzag.

Let the sliding of a snake on its belly be a lesson.

Study the elephant: he considers it an honor to eat hay

and to kill only when some killer comes to kill him.

He addresses the aggressor: “Why bother me? I warned you

not to bother me.”

Try being a goat: put on a face of calm contemplations.

Look people in the eye as though unaware they gaze at you.

Read their innermost hidden secrets.

Then turn away toward other horizons chewing your cud.

How should their sins and prides be anything to you?

What have they learned of alfalfa and soy bean hay

or the somersaults of kids born for acrobatics?

5

Be a bottle: say glug-glug: be a clock: say tick-tock.

Study why the clock never glugs

and why the bottle might try telling time and fail.

Consider the origins of men saying horsefeathers

yes horsefeathers.

6

Inquire into the monotony of shirts soiled

going to the laundry and returning to be soiled,

how each proud man is every so often sent to the cleaners,

how the bottle sellers rejoice over news of broken bottles.

Inquire further into the high contrasts

between those who can eat glass and like it

and connoisseurs who require bottled velvet,

and fixity of one living oceanic squid

and flights of those who are born birds.

Shall the squid have praise or blame for being a squid?

Shall the bird have compliments for being born with wings?

What shall a broken bottle

tell a brand new bottle?

“Your time will come—

you’ll get yours”

something like that?

7

Be what you want to be.

An oak, a blossom, a dry leaf in the wind

or the wind blowing the dry leaf; or both.

Be a gong or three gongs in one: a gong of silence:

A gong of clamor crying hellsbells to the satisfied:

A gong of smooth songs saying yes and welcome.

Be what an earthworm means to be

in the measure of its circumference

so humble so slow so true,

to the date of the stars it was born under.

Your personal doorways know your shadows

and number the times you enter, exit, enter

so often having no lines to say

though you are actor and audience to yourself.

Thrust laughter from your diaphragm whensoever.

Be perpendicular till the finish.

You will be horizontal long enough afterward

with toes shoving up the daisies

yielding to the earth’s ancient mulch.

8

Be ice: be fire.

Be hard and take the smoothing of brass for your own.

Be sensitized with winter quicksilver below zero.

Be tongs and handles: find breathing tokens.

See where several good dreams are worth dying for.

Monday, One P.M.

Fix it up like an affidavit with a notary’s seal: Sworn to before me this day—’twon’t do any good in this case—either you get it or you don’t.