From the womb of

Memory as Eros from the

wind-egg, emerged the Muses, three

originally, called Castilia, Pimpla, and Aga-

nippe, and likened frequently to the freshets, to

the mountain springs—quick, clear, sudden, sparkling,

cold—which bickered down the slopes of Mount Helicon

and Mount Parnassus. They were in order of their birthdays:

Recollection, Contemplation, Celebration, later corrupted three

times over by unnameable panders and innumerable pimps, cock-

bauds, ass and cunt collectors, who were satisfied simply to

enumerate areas of inspirational activity rather than

illumine its dark conditions, elements, and causes,

and went about it all so recklessly that soon

there was a muse for spilled milk as

well as one for premature

ejaculation.

To perceive . . . to ponder . . . and to praise: rühmen, das ists!

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shamefaced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio di Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date’s door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word~a word~words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn’t; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy; and in that BrassBrite Tomorrow, that FineLine time, having left my youth with a leap as Hart Crane had his life (a simile which should have taught me something, which should have been a warning), I believed I would finally be what I believed in; I would really live what I had dreamed of; I would rape and write and enrich myself; tongue a tender ear, a velutinous cunt, kiss and compose with one mouth, in the same breath, and maybe fly a plane like Raoul Lufbery and learn German so I could recite my Rilke during daring Immelmann turns, during any break between books or other coital excesses: kannet du dir, I’d chant, kannst du dir denn denken dass ich jahre, so . . . a stranger, a pelican in desert wilds, no to-fro angel, hiving verb, though poets were the bees of the invisible, Rilke said, and everybody religiously repeated it through my dubious youth—ein Fremder unter Fremden fahre—a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest, Kohler the kookiest, because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you’ve fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist’s hum or picked your mother up from the floor she’s bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life’s lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, too novel altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out—this dubbed in youth, this gicky GroBoy time—so that I would never have been jeered at, called Bullocky Bill on account of my tiny testicles and puny weenie, had I not been available, or caused to cough in a long naked line, to spread my rash-eaten cheeks to the amusement of a hundred eyes, or in a park in Prague gently jacked off by a boy who fondled me from behind a newspaper (or was it a magazine?), napkin neatly in his idle hand; and shame need never have lit me like a match, as I burned my slender Being back then, in my old cold youth, until its head was black—best never to drag a breath out of the competing wind, the Greek poet advised, because Being is basically made of heartless hunks and soulless flabs; it is inert, resists flow, dislikes disturbance, distrusts goals; in fact, it is fat as a Buddha, sluggish, still as statues, and as pitilessly bronze.