There, a blankness without meanness, such as one finds

in a naked sea with all its fundamental majesty.

CHEVAL SOMBRE

From time to time, I like to learn a severe truth about a familiar deception: a beautiful watch lying new in its case.

A precise, coruscating luxury,

The future arrives under the sign of its own negation.

A curious traversal of tenses, le dernier cri, and so

The hope of even seeing you again is slipping.

I’m so shaken, I act calmly for the rest of the afternoon:

At last I shall see my hunger for meaning go free.

The world could be like a faraway planet to which I declare,

Free at last: I shall see my hunger for meaning go.

I’m so shaken, I act calmly for the rest of the afternoon;

The hope of even seeing you again is slipping.

A curious traversal of tenses, le dernier cri, and so

The future arrives under the sign of its own negation.

A precise, coruscating luxury:

A beautiful watch lying new in its case. I like to learn a familiar truth about a severe deception from time to time.

ENVOI: ORPHEUS

I say the look back

was coldness mixed with longing.

Afterward,

he could finally think.

Many have imagined

what the song must have sounded like:

Not language breaking.

Not how safe it is to be gone.

But the world

seeping in so quickly.

For a moment,

world arranges itself around artist.

The wine of annihilation rises within

him, a new acuteness.

Elsewhere, a disappointed lover mutilates

another tree with the departed’s initials,

restored to disinterested making.

THE CONCERT

My best friend says I wake up in the morning

and rage.

—Do I? I ask her, incredulous.

I see myself as a mild, hemmed-in sort of person.

—You rage, she says. You rage against:

a. a.m. snow

b. the dilemma of the soul

c. your fate

d. all varieties of longing

And here I have always wanted to be as cold and ferocious as a star.

But if I rage, let me make my voice its capacious forest.

Let it be the melancholy that comedy is meant to overcome!

/

Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts.

There’s mine,

cheerful, au fond, in its ineffable femininity.

It lights my privacy,

endorses

the faintly guilty air of my naturalness.

The unenactable idea is that we all have souls.

Next to a soul,

the body’s curious reticence obtains.

I can wag my lower self gladder and gladder,

but my soul, it wants

to stay up, write through the night.

If you press the hollow of my throat, my soul pulls a face.

/

in the hour, the music, of a.m. snow,

in the constellation of sleep, anti-sleep, and the wintry mix—

the sweet council of snow’s philosophical flights.