longing is a spine. in the erotic rustle of maroon Victoriana. in a hunger so unappeasable, one becomes a criminal. not a snore in a rose all morning.

the slightly withheld motion of yearning makes it look dragged by destiny.

/

—Errancy, I will say to her later, might be the silvery bloom on me.

Let it be the comedy that melancholy equably praises.

Let me be like a mouse in an enormous cheese

excited by how much cheese there is to eat.

HYPERBALLAD

I think my interior, it must be a killing machine,

I ask it what the shooting means, I am trying to think.

I let it look right through me, having no choice in the matter,

its no-space and its no-time, they bring me to my knees.

It straps me to my body, as if I were made for it,

it begins its waste with a slight forward pull.

I help it with its loneliness, but I avert my eyes;

I know that it will always be a good part of me.

As it continues its arrivals, I will not say I’m shot,

as it burns all over, I’ll know I’m not erased.

They say with mystery, all things are possible,

somewhere in the huge whisper of the coldest oceans.

Sweet water brims through the winter ices. O philosopher

of destructions, nevertheless my heart is pounding—

UNFLEUR

Spring obliges

my imagination

of return

then

it annihilates it

What is death

but reason

in flawless submission

to itself

No

not reason

something stonier

4

4

HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET

1. Invocation

Coolness sails down from the moon in the wilderness:

in this landscape,

the erotica of being made free.

But it makes me think of a chair and a book and a bed

with a lamp near it.

Desire is to go away from a star.

So let me consider it from here, from inside the head of my demon.

2. Now, Voyager

I first thought her a pure fury,

or Last Blues. Or everything in the wide world

that was cold, inscrutable, and beastly.

Sometimes she was innocent of metaphor,

just a girl disappearing with the phone into a closet.

Other times she would lead me to the edge

of my human being, where the meaning would be

seeping away, and say with a flourish, Not yet enjoyed!

And it was a relief to be someone so angry,

to put across the distortions without and within.

A journey like this appears to hold out the promise

of a rescue, an immense life in the formlessness.

So we come to stand on the deck of an agèd ocean liner.

The sea hoards nothing, our senses are alive and bright.

The captain says we are opening into a territory

of raw wishes and the “merely” beautiful,

past heartbreak, transcendence, past return.

How could this territory have anything to do with us?

There is something exciting about it, nevertheless.

Something mistaken and wholly familiar,

hatchet-minded, and eager with beginning.

3. Winter Diptych