In the Beloved’s eye or less reliable
windowframe, see the exaggerated welcome,
a willingness to become much smaller if only
in a boy’s hands, to be pushed forward
by little hands into the ceremony
and cruel fanfare of a boy’s attention.
This is the world as I have known it.
It has a soft outline and is easily
victimized. It allows too much. It shrinks
under even neutral scrutiny
and, having been seen once, becomes a toy.
I live alone, am thus a child. I can tell you.
We enter the tiny village with surprise,
having passed through a window or stared too long
into loving eyes to credit
such unbuilding and pressure, like coming
to the real ocean we barely remember
to see it broken by red, abrupt divers
surfacing. The silent commercial district,
the toy trees in pencil ranks, greener
as they reach the residential grid
and its fewer lights, where am I to stand
without betraying it all, without
destroying the illusion that makes it lovely?
Only begin the stories, deny
the dense forward of political cities
where Heaven is a private life
among big people. Begin innocently.
I made the table large as I could
for the rebuilding of many fates.
I put it near the window
to retell the invention of small worlds
according to a music of no tone.
On the enormous table:
sheet music of summoning adagios.
On the enormous table:
the perfervid love of innocence.
On the enormous table:
the light tools of an occult exchange,
father and lover, boyhood and beloved,
when it is easy to play God.
Hell is a public life among small people.
There is a right kind of innocence,
a communication of the bodiless
at the foil edge of homemade lakes,
in the pencil shadow of tiny trees,
in the violet lustre of amnesia,
private in the midst of giants,
pointing to Heaven as toys point to a condom.
Only begin the stories, shared with many.
In the harmless espionage of today,
emptiness is zeal. Only look away
to the unpunctuated trainyards between
Heaven and Hell, where childhood survives,
where leaves cup water, where time is pendant.
When I look at anything for a long time,
it shrinks down to a toy. An eclipse,
my own shadow, darkens the tabletop.
In that timeless evening: illuminations,
residences, railway lines reaching out
to cities they have no intention of reaching.
Spring arrives in trees it will not abandon,
not ever, and when the light returns
it chevrons the streets with pencil lines.
Emptiness is zeal, and unbelief
ventriloquizes liberal nature.
And before that? I heard the opening
measures of a new adagio.
They made me feel that my life was horrible
with self-knowledge, sheer size, loneliness.
I kept that music a secret,
hearing it only in the abandoned
middle places between home and work,
unending disclosure and revision.
When I listened, time pinned itself down
like green felt at the corners of a table
which is a placid field worthy of the dream
of perfect community, America without travel,
love without interrogation
in the harmless, tiny wattage of the lamps.
Everyone lives forever if he keeps his secrets.
The unbuilding and pressure of repetition
relent as time lies down with the lion
and the railway timetables yellow
in the toy station from which none departs
as none arrives. They have all disappeared
into the middle places. They have all
sheltered in the tents of their own shadows,
listening to music that promises
privacy without end and many faces,
nothing to know, no size, much company.
Time to forget all lions but the mild lion
of the Peaceable Kingdom in the sudden
change and consent of a sequestered valley
where a son is born and liberal
questions as to love’s brevity, passion’s
eclipse, dissolve into quiet rehearsal
of the easy hymns of a minor paradise,
no longer afraid of Heaven’s secrecy,
Hell’s secrecy and disenfranchisement.
There comes a day when you cannot revise
your life. It is a beautiful day.
There comes a day when the urge to remain
mysterious dies into the communication
of tenderness, a guarded township
of mortalities. It is a good day.
Forget the lions. Abstractions
that are still true, though weightless,
have cleared a table in front of a window,
and the construction begins.
You could do it tonight if you wanted.
If you could become small and bless
the eclipse that is your certain death,
the adagio re-echoing forever
inside a covered bridge in New England
over the consonants of a minor river,
Housatonic or Connecticut,
out of the autumn that will not arrive,
flowing neither upwards or down but settled
into a skein of foil that could not drown a soul,
you could do it tonight.
Forget the killing lion as you forget
the sharp jewelry of your public life.
Remember the first prayer you were taught: to be
forgotten, to be fit for a toy’s life,
not wishing to communicate anything,
not wishing past the violet amnesia
of holidays and a boy’s dependency.
Forgetfulness is where life found my life,
beyond which everything is inhuman,
behind which everything is commerce.
Adagios. Democracy.
The sons that I might have instead of money.
Their hands are the entire sky
over the toy town, dark as only innocence,
that perfect destroyer, is dark. The hands
place a metal figurine from the 1940s,
a figure-skater with jet black hair,
the flesh of her legs chipped and silvery,
onto the tin foil at the tree-lined
edge of town. All the lamps come on.
Why have I chosen privacy over fullness?
Why have I chosen the strait, unmutual
loving of a small man whose heart is secrecy
and whose citizenship only that of the
reformed transient in the waste places
he fills from himself alone?
These are the faces beside a sleeping lion:
innocence, the destroyer of wildness;
wildness, the victim of an idea that says
virtue is denial, betrayal
of the too-full fullness of the world;
the pretty skater featured like flawless ice.
By things deemed weak subverting worldly strong,
destroying the whole network of identities
I made by being in love sometimes
and by moving from one place to another,
from widowhood to widowhood, deprivation
to deprivation, the whole lovely
business of America that traffics
in revisions of the self and the ocean
and the great land mass crushed between them.
America makes everything possible
and then deprives you of the ambition
because of its sheer size and willingness
to accommodate so many versions of yourself
that not one of them ever needs be true.
And then I stole a small boy from the sea.
By things deemed weak subverting worldly strong,
seeing the ocean for the first time and seeing
it become an obscene joke of divers surfacing.
The boy and I have made a tiny village
on the tabletop of the Hudson River School
and of my father’s clumsy model railroad
from the 1940s. We have drawn the curtains.
We are listening to very loud music,
adagio after adagio
by Johannes Brahms who wrote, unwittingly,
the only music true for America,
music that refuses melody,
postpones the finale in each note until
the whole thing collapses under
the burden of its possibilities.
By things deemed weak subverting worldly strong,
I have found a metallic proof
that paradise is a small place,
never jagged, flawless in its fields
and ice, not ever jagged, never
perforated or wrinkled by desire
where springtime and the days of perfect skating
lie down together with the mild lion,
and where round gestures of innocence
need no modification for the bad business
of history that limits freedom to the point
of mania and makes love impossible.
The pretty skater will not be disturbed.
The consonants of all the water in the world
will never resound near this place except
as slow, slow music falling backwards
into the first years of the Republic
when winter and spring were the same season
and the killing lion saw the ocean unbroken.
To H
The heavy fleur of the cross-hairs came alive
in an airshaft, where it could see well.
That in Aleppo, once, a nation thrived
unexhumed, en masse merely,
the embracive shelter.
The airshaft swallows fire.
The airshaft is the faith, comely
in the exhalation of so many
who there unstrangled a cloud, the survivor
exhumed by all who died.
The most beast is beast. Memory
takes no refreshment but only
a stubble through the massed stars
whose constellations starved on peace.
A wine glass
out all night
overflowed with moths.
The wings
balletomaned,
and they were a camp-system.
A more obsessed hand or more accurate would grasp
at the nearer thing, the glass a tulip, the system
a bulb of poisons. The swarm retires. Domestic pets
are loosed again into the backyards, and the mowers
resume their insect labors down to the powerlines.
Exposed to air
the ointment
proved useless.
Highest branches
unhealed and bled.
When only fracture
is silence only silence
is useful, and wings
cure the dead, careful to lay them into tall glasses.
The out-of-doors is glassy poisoning, mother of the
last desire to take flight out of pure, of pure hatred
of the air. My mother’s head is not your head. Glass
aviates over the railways, over the electric ropes and
Europe killing not America
The camps
parch to overlfowing.
I and these panels,
not larger than life but only partially
contained, as a landing site or the spindly
oxalis is only partially contained
in a woman’s left-hand body,
I and these panels
mount the stair, reaching
the city. We are one size.
The caffeine taken from your eyes
painted the airplane thus,
in that sky,
daub over daub.
If you must hope, then hope.
If you must die, die.
But don’t hope. Do not die.
A lot of corroded images
are just hanging there.
In the blackouts (every
night this week there have been storms
and power-outages, and we have had to travel
to other neighborhoods to read
or to eat or listen to music)
the dead may leave their message flashing.
We are one size.
A lot of corroded images
depict the too many orbits of one day,
a killing tree a cloud at the
center a green zero.
I will say this when she leaves
but to her left hand only:
At the landing sites
everywhere on the plateau
we mourn the generals of our city.
They were oceans
in opposite directions.
As I and these panels
mounted the stairs this morning,
wrought-iron uncurved a spindly
oxalis where it became smoke
and rose still higher.
The afterlife gnawed at its small cage
and all the rooftops.
There is no through
passage for the rain
between dog and dove.
In defense of Breslau
a pencil-dot an ant
crawled out in sex
onto my tongue. Thus,
I was early to the
construction site.
The schema bites down, as if the spirit were a passing devastation,
as if distance were not a white thing you could hold literally in
hands. I move secessions: lust from hope, hope from acquisition. I
walk on cold flies, no passage to warm their wings or vomiting.
In Europe, six typewriters
clatter without stop or
direction. Did I believe
it was a can of soup to be
warmed so? Idiomatic being
smiles and repaints to the
relief of Breslau. I’ve tried.
The future unacquired turns out
impossible. Hilt and animal,
it constructs and distances
the actual leafglow. In
the Reichstag, didn’t he
smile into the camera of
Some are better than others, repainting, vomiting. The future
condones all that. I am thanking a giant who, wasted yellow
by illness, unconscious in his mother’s bed, cannot answer.