The Way the World Is Not Astonished at You

• I've been told that apathy is a disease.
• A Neoliberalism reading list.
• His Kampf: Yet there is nothing that is remotely innocent about the nostalgia of Fascist pins or insignia. It indicates, at the very least, a disgraceful level of comfort with the symbols of our collective criminal past. In its commodified form, it also grotesquely mirrors our economic crisis, and the lengths that we will go to extract profit from all the wrong things. But mostly it’s the casual denial of history that should trouble us. It’s a very small step from the superficial, aesthetic fascination with Fascist-era design and iconography to the revisionist statements of our political leaders.
• Global leaders debating global warming.
• More on the Albuquerque police department.
• Today's episode of Motherfucking Cops.
• Which for-profit college are you?
• The Baffler's weekly reads. Includes a Vollmann essay on John O'Hara.

• Hamster chides me for not mentioning United's 2-2 tie v Chicago this past Saturday. First, I didn't go - I hate afternoon games to start, I really hate afternoon games in pouring rain in 35 degree temperatures. Once I would have gone anyway, but this is the accurate state of my fandom at this moment in time. They have home games the next two Saturday nights. I'll go to those.
• Blanchot, for those of you who do.
• Getting it all in: If A Naked Singularity bears comparison to the meganovels of Pynchon, Gaddis, and Wallace, it is hard to say that it advances beyond the achievements of these earlier works, either formally or thematically. To suggest that this novel probably should not be considered innovative is not to undervalue its own achievement. At a time when ambition in American fiction is most often expressed in the "social novel," in hybrid genre forms such as the post-apocalyptic narrative and tepid forms of magical realism, or simply in securing a contract with a mainstream publisher, it is refreshing that a writer is willing to be more formally adventurous, in a mode less assimilable to prevailing expectations of "literary fiction"--so much so that no agent or publisher was willing to take a chance on this book. The most foolish miscalculation on the part of those who concluded this novel was not worth publication is in the assumption that readers would not find it engaging because of its unorthodox structure, but in fact once we have oriented ourselves to its method the novel is quite entertaining (if at times disturbing in its portrayal of the dysfunction of out "system of justice"). In the novel's expository passages, Casi's voice attracts our interest, and de la Pava's control of language in general should be apparent to any serious reader. I was holding this book Saturday. I tried it once but that was in during the worst of the reading slump. Will try again.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

SONNET

Bill Knott

The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
When we step from the house
Leads me to think
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of singing and worksharing
the course of squeezes and neighbors
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not

Pull My Chin, Stroke My Hair, Scratch My Nose, Hug My Knees, Try Drink, Food, Cigarette, Tension Will Not Ease, I Tap My Fingers, Fold My Arms, Breathe in Deep, Cross My Legs, Shrug My Shoulders, Stretch My Back - but Nothing Seems to Please

• Those of you who had 24 hours - like me - for as long as I could go without posting would have lost but all of us who bet I couldn't go the weekend win. Song above explains.
• Uncle Bill was Bajoran?
• Towards global authoritarianism.
• For example.
• davidly gets screwed trying to buy Kate Bush tickets, reacts with letter, great Kate Bush song.
• As much as I like much of the New York Review of Books I sometimes forget a certain hawkishness - here's someone calling Obama a pussy towards Putin - in foreign policy articles. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Bryce played three hours of Robert Ashley this past Friday.
• I've been re-watching - it feels more like watching for the first time - Deep Space Nine on the recommendation of friends. Watching on Netflix allows me not only to miss commercials but to skip the interminable opening. Last light I saw the episode with Uncle Bill. Jody, Buffy, and Cissy were mutes, their tongues cut out by Cardassians. There was no sign of Mr French. I got to wondering who is the actress who plays Major Kira Nerys, which allows me, to my giggling delight, to play an Ashley piece and use this gag:

• Yes, post today because I need contact, but mostly because I can't sit on that gag for another 24 hours.
• Another Moby Dick book acquired.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Tom introduces me, via her poem, to Nin Andrews. In comments it turns out she lives in the traffic jam called Nova.
• Long playlist from Prunella.
• My favorite road in MOCO. Fuck the Pattons, you bought there knowing, assholes.
• A contemplation on Ashbery's poetics: I sort of seized upon this quote with a ridiculous kind of “yes!” because I felt like it was describing in a wonderful prescient and powerful way the poetics of Ashbery.  In Ashbery’s poems, the page is a kind of experimental and experiential laboratory, in and through which new meanings, new metaphors, are attempted.  Through this process, the “meaning of the present” is amplified, and we are taken so far out of (and so near towards?) our customary thinking that we are then able to think more clearly about our present values, preoccupations, habits, beliefs, etc.  It is in this sense that we can think of Ashbery’s work as an exploration of what a moral imagination means, which is another of saying that Ashbery attempts to give us the most robust, diverse, and rich possible answer to this question.  His poetry is therefore an unprecedentedly moving and powerful example of the moral imagination at work, while at the same time it teaches us the importance and relevance of the imagination as the primary means by which we actually think and live.
• Below Durutti Column, without doubt the most-posted poem here ever.

VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

Today's poem, this post's title, Between Walls by William Carlos Williams. Barring kaboom or birthday I missed I'm taking a long weekend to work on other projects, true, but mostly to see if I can do it. I never made it through one of these stunts before, regulars can set their own over/under for when I fail again.

"When I woke up Mayakovsky He Was a Lot More Prompt," the Sun Said Petulantly

• Mstislav Rostropovich was born 87 years ago today. 
• The pianist in Shostakovich's Cello Sonata is Benjamin Britten, btw.
• Today's links while they're fresh.
• Protesting police violence in Albuquerque.
• Democrats are doomed.
• John Podesta's heroic battle against straw men.
• Destination Culture.

• Goats are more clever than previously thought.
• Crow is alive.
• What is forgetting?
• On the latest Jonathan Littell.
• What enemies say picking.
• Commercial Opportunities. Tom's latest.
• Hejinian, Whitman, and the politics of sleep.
• It's still Frank O'Hara's birthday.

A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN AT FIRE ISLAND

Frank O'Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying "Hey! I've been

trying to wake you up for fifteen

minutes. Don't be so rude, you are

only the second poet I've ever chosen

to speak to personally

                                  so why

aren't you more attentive? If I could

burn you through the window I would

to wake you up. I can't hang around

here all day."

                    "Sorry, Sun, I stayed

up late last night talking to Hal."

"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt" the Sun said

petulantly. "Most people are up

already waiting to see if I'm going

to put in an appearance."

                                       I tried

to apologize "I missed you yesterday."

"That's better" he said. "I didn't

know you'd come out." "You may be

wondering why I've come so close?"

"Yes" I said beginning to feel hot

wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me

anyway.

              "Frankly I wanted to tell you

I like your poetry. I see a lot

on my rounds and you're okay. You may

not be the greatest thing on earth, but

you're different. Now, I've heard some

say you're crazy, they being excessively

calm themselves to my mind, and other

crazy poets think that you're a boring

reactionary. Not me.

                                 Just keep on

like I do and pay no attention. You'll

find that people always will complain

about the atmosphere, either too hot

or too cold too bright or too dark, days

too short or too long.

                                 If you don't appear

at all one day they think you're lazy

or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don't worry about your lineage

poetic or natural. The Sun shines on

the jungle, you know, on the tundra

the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were

I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting

for you to get to work.

                                    And now that you

are making your own days, so to speak,

even if no one reads you but me

you won't be depressed. Not

everyone can look up, even at me. It

hurts their eyes."

                          "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!"

"Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's

easier for me to speak to you out

here. I don't have to slide down

between buildings to get your ear.

I know you love Manhattan, but

you ought to look up more often.

                                                    And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely and with

the appropriate sense of space. That

is your inclination, known in the heavens

and you should follow it to hell, if

necessary, which I doubt.

                                          Maybe we'll

speak again in Africa, of which I too

am specially fond. Go back to sleep now

Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem

in that brain of yours as my farewell."

"Sun, don't go!" I was awake

at last. "No, go I must, they're calling

me."

        "Who are they?"

                                  Rising he said "Some

day you'll know. They're calling to you

too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

I Am the Least Difficult of Men, All I Want Is Boundless Love, or: Born Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY

Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

          Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

          Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

          I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

          Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

          However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

          My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

          Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

          St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

          Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

          It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

          “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

       I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.






   
RHAPSODY

Frank O'Hara

515 Madison Avenue   

door to heaven? portal

stopped realities and eternal licentiousness

or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness

your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables   

swinging from the myth of ascending

I would join

or declining the challenge of racial attractions

they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)

while everywhere love is breathing draftily

like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th

the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s   

o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland

where is the summit where all aims are clear   

the pin-point light upon a fear of lust

as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn   

and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work

when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson   

playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor   

taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley   

and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire   

and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue

a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle

multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth   

Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building   

I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue   

and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment   

“where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night   

not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”

no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it”

perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work   

a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods

you were there always and you know all about these things   

as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes   

it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet

you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or

Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid   

as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar

that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue   

where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light

I have always wanted to be near it

though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)   

lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems   

in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island   

they are coming and we holy ones must go

is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically   

belong to the enormous bliss of American death

 

Second Floor Promises

As promised, a rendering of the 2nd floor of the house built by my maternal grandparents, memories sparked by Bartok's birthday. Click, yo, to enlarge. There are at least two people I felt an obligation to follow through at least with this floor. This is obviously not to scale, so obvious my incompetence at architectural drawing. I could do the basement easily enough but I've found the 3rd floor completely impossible, not only the physical layout of the floor but the secret universes the maze of attics lead to are utterly unmappable.

Here are the keys:

• A - Chair except at Giftmas; Giftmas tree goes there.
• B - Corner of house wrecked when car flew of Fellsburg Road into side of house.
• C - Broken Philco record player/radio console/cabinet - my favorite toy.
• D - Small china cabinet.
• Star - Where my grandfather, crippled by arthritis in his knees, sat staring out the window hour after hour day after day after day.
• E - Philmore refrigerator.
• F - Double-sink looking out window at vegetable garden
• G - White radio always tuned to KDKA.
• H - Bag of candy, never eaten, pink, chalky mint, think fat Necco Wafers.
• I - Bottles of Lemon Blend.
• J - Left side of hoosier had large, built-in, flour sifter.
• K - Green and white sliding davenport. Summers I would sit on davenport with my grandfather and listen to Pirates games while he rolled and smoked cigarettes out of a red Prince Albert can.
• L - Bathroom closet where a box of Chinese Checkers and a game of Racko were kept.
• M - Kitchen stove/oven. Pilot light needed lighting each time. Oven door swung left/right, not up/down.
• N - Dresser where my grandmother kept the Time Magazines and books on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution - the start of all this.
• O - Creepy wooden mothbally wardrobe.
• P - Secretary.
• Q - Clock on piano that was broke at 1:35 forever, now on my bookshelf in my bedroom.
• R - Bathtub - no shower, no hot water - all hot water in house had to be heated on stove.
• S - End table piled with back issue of Readers Digest.
• T - Notice, no TV.

The three of you who know this place send me additional 2nd floor notations if you'd like and I will add them. As for the 3rd floor, I'm still trying to get my head around its vast and tiny distances and the mysteries of the attics' labyrinth and where it leads to, I doubt I'll ever be able to ink it down.

UPDATE! I just realized Spock was born was born 83 years ago today.

I can't tell you how it pleases me that the thought of posting Fleabus as a stand alone is too slutty even for me.

[What Enemies Say Picking]

What enemies say picking
up plotting revenge

s'what winners're thinking
after victory, "orange"

rhyme reviewed in referees
hooded booths. While I'm inured

to your fetish for gotcha allusions
did you see what I just obscured?

To Warm the Frozen Swamp as Best It Could with the Slow Smokeless Burning of Decay, or: Born One-Hundred Forty Years Ago Today, Eighty-Nine Today

THE SILKEN TENT

Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent
So that in guys it gently sways at east,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.







Frost was born 140 years ago today. I was stupid about Frost until I met Tony Hecht, who told me I was stupid about Frost and then proved it. Pierre Boulez is 89 today.

New tag added, Dead Blegsylvania, because Blegsylvania be dead, the blogrolls static.

Hecht called Frost's The Wood-Pile Frost's equivalent of bleggalgazing, though Hecht may not have used that particular word.








THE WOOD-PILE

Robert Frost

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,

I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.

No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'

The hard snow held me, save where now and then

One foot went through. The view was all in lines

Straight up and down of tall slim trees

Too much alike to mark or name a place by

So as to say for certain I was here

Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

A small bird flew before me. He was careful

To put a tree between us when he lighted,

And say no word to tell me who he was

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather—

The white one in his tail; like one who takes

Everything said as personal to himself.

One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.

And then there was a pile of wood for which

I forgot him and let his little fear

Carry him off the way I might have gone,

Without so much as wishing him good-night.

He went behind it to make his last stand.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split

And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.

And not another like it could I see.

No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.

And it was older sure than this year's cutting,

Or even last year's or the year's before.

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it

And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis

Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labor of his ax,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Fa, The Liar

Sure, this is evening attention-sluttery, but I promised the new Fennesz either today or tomorrow and I didn't remember earlier today that tomorrow is an Egoslavian Holy Day (expect Boulez piano pieces and Robert Frost poems), here, have the new Fennesz now. I promise myself a full cascade this weekend, in meantime have this, my favorite (once I could find a youtube that had a crane draining a swamp while song played, fuck, it's gone), it's love love love. *!O!* Loud as fuck please.

Bequeathing to the Groin a Pang of Distance

Bartok born 133 years ago today. I've told this history before: my mother's grandparents are Hungarian, my mother's mother forbade my mother and her sister from speaking Hungarian. I learned about Bartok on my own; though my mother is an excellent pianist, her fingers never left the 19th century, though when I listen to Bartok I wish I spoke fluent Hungarian.

This part is new. My mother's father and mother built a freaky house in Fellsburg Pennsylvania up the hill from Donora in that weird finger of Westmoreland County that grasps for the Monongahela. My grandmother kept Time Magazines and remaindered books on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution on a dresser in the downstairs bedroom in the corner to the right of the window that looked down on the steep carport. I asked her why once, she gave me a look that said Shut Up. In that room I once was lying under the bed while listening to Bob Prince calling a Pirates game with my grandfather when my grandmother came in, didn't know I was under the bed, and cursed him out in both English and Hungarian for being the arthritic cripple he was when I knew him. I never heard Bartok in that house but when I hear Bartok I think about this. I made the link when I was thirteen, fourteen, first time I heard Bartok: it's a facile and tenuous connection, but it stuck. I've been trying to draw a floor plan in 3D of the three floors of the house since this past Saturday when I realized Bartok's birthday was approaching. I can't stop thinking about it. I have no skills to draw architectural floor plans in 2D much less 3D, though I promise a rendering tomorrow or Thursday at the latest if solely to rid myself of the motherfucking obsession. SeatSix, help. Hell, Elric, if today's the day you tune in, help. Oakton, you're the mathematician, I'll post a rendering of yours. Must be included: the broken stereo/radio in the front lobby; the piano in the living room as well as an arrow to the corner of the living room crushed by a car flying off Fellsburg Road; an accurate drawing of the stupidass hallway/dining room design, the point on the dining room table Frank sat at; the Philmore in the kitchen, the hoosier in the kitchen, the white radio on the hoosier tuned to KDKA; the basement, the root cellar, the door to the sky blue Ford Falcon in the garage under the back porch; the green and white davenport on the back porch; upstairs, the weirdest floor of all time, the captain's walk of the master bedroom, all the mazes of the attics, the secret kingdoms they lead to. I dream about that house to this day, last night. I was asked last week, what the fuck is with all the birthdays here? More Bartok:

• Four myths about the surveillance state.
• The opaque politics of the internet: My hypothesis is that the public sphere – a space of centralising ideologies in which a general consensus can be formed, as proposed by Habermas -- becomes a network of differences when applied to the internet. Differences within the internet are broken down to the level of the individual and at such a micro-level that the macro, i.e. the political, has already disappeared. In the enhanced subjectivity of personal monitor space (Breen 110-111), ideology becomes subjective and individualised. In such a space, the unifying modality of ideology gives way to the differential processing of the algorithm which shapes social space as a controlled experiment, and which may be adapted to create different output results. I will argue that in its capacity to shape the social space of the individualised internet user, the algorithm has now become a more effective method of intellectual oppression than the ideology of the outdated mass media technologies.
• More links to above subject at yesterday's wood_s_lot.
• Fish surfaces to reiterate the Problem of -.06% Less-Shittiness: I get it, I really do. The Republican party is bugshit crazy. There are some areas on the margins where real relief to people is provided by Democrats. Things that cannot be trivialized. The lesser evil argument connects with a solid left. Here's the problem: If I accept this framing, if I accept that 1% less evil is enough, I embrace despair., nothing less. Because I do not see Democrats and Republicans as two teams fighting it out for what is right, I see a winch and a pawl, one party squeezing tighter and the other merely preventing the backslide. Voting for the pawl means I have accepted that this arc of history is inevitable. That the plutocrats will always win. I am Winston Smith after his treatments, toothless, impotent.
• Hi Fish! I agree! Fuck TBogg and Digby!

• Should you be in Albuquerque today. Back story here.
• Purple Line.
• Purple Line.
• Laytonsville!
• New bibliological definitions added.
• Bauhaus (the band) and jelly.
• Ashbery, for those of you who do and those of you who should.
• Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do.
• Fennesz cascade tomorrow, OK?
• Prunella's latest playlist.

DISAPPOINTMENT

August Kleinzahler

A faint smell of urine

embroidering that bouquet of mold the big cushions   

give off days the fog won’t lift,

and a shelf of bone

growing out over the eyelids like evening’s shadow   

across a field of corn—

The whole parade

leaking out from your shoulders, bequeathing   

to the groin a pang of distance;

then that metallic taste in the mouth   

and a voice you had let yourself believe   

was dead

close now by your ear, intimate and sweet:

                                  Well, well, well,   

look what we have here.