For the Scribe 0822964546, 9780822964544

Citation preview

for the scribe

Ed Ochester, Editor

for the scribe David  Wojahn

university of pittsburgh press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2017, David Wojahn All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6454-4 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6454-6 Cover art: 18th Century Ivory Hornbook from England, courtesy the Library of Congress Cover design by Joel W. Coggins

For Noelle, Jake, and Luke And for Ed Ochester

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, now that we have lost our pigeons, mourn their loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont’s nylons or Mr. Vannever Bush’s bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts. Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to a Pigeon”

Many shades of the departed are occupied solely in licking at the waves of the river of death because it flows from our direction and still has the salty taste of our seas. Then the river rears back in disgust, the current flows the opposite way, and brings the dead drifting back into life. But they are happy, sing songs of thanksgiving, and stroke the indignant waves. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavio Notebooks

Contents



i.

My Father’s Soul Departing 5 Extinction Event: A Cache of Photos of the Last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker 7 Extinction Event: Two-Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger 10 Atahulpa 12 Bivalve 15 Briefe Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia 18 Give Orange Me Give Eat Orange Me Eat Orange Give Me Eat Orange Give Me You 28 Canis Familiarus 31

ii.

Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry 37 Absolute Rhythm 39 For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk, 3,000 BC 42 Nineteen Eleven Blues 45 Extinction Event: Decoy Birds 50 Study Skins 53 Sinatra: The Concert at Pompeii, 1991 56 Body Politic: To Ezra Pound in Purgatory 59 Anniversary Poem 69



iii.

Extinction Event: Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908 73 In the Attic 76 Chalk Line 78 Ichor 82 Concerning Pan 85 Extinction Event: The Book of Revelation as Interpreted by Link Wray 88 Occupy 91 Watching Fox News on the Holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. 92 Jefferson Composing His Bible

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Sclera 104 Lorine Niedecker: The Only Recording, 1970 106 Ode to Fox P2 109

Notes 113 Acknowledgments 117

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for the scribe



i.

My Father’s Soul Departing Little soul, charismatic vagabond, Honored guest, comrade of the body. Now you shall depart into those regions Fogbound, anesthetized, and barren. Here your laughter served you well. There, everlasting, your mouth’s stitched shut. Hadrian, “Animula”

Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted One last survey. Your twenty-one grams of sentience, Little soul—the weight exactly Of a ruby-throated hummer—shall hover The foliated stamens of your Earthly measure. How you dart & pivot, Honored guest, your thirst unquenchable. Here is Milbank, South Dakota, The saffron dustbowl where your father, Dear comrade, raises his belt to crisscross your back: The five & twenty lesions. Here the state hospital, Your mother ballooning with insulin To induce the coma meant to cure the demons Marauding the precincts of her abject brain. Now you shall depart: a milk run in Duluth, A quart bottle bursting on a frozen stoop, then A troop ship bound for Tunis, & into those regions Of desert where you wander your forty days.

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You rifle the pockets of a dead Wehrmacht corporal: Luger & a snakebite kit. & now you lean From a baggage car door, hefting a postal sack As the train slows for a station—Breckenridge Or Sleepy Eye—slows but will not stop For twenty-seven years. The railroad men’s Hotels along the tracks, pulls of bourbon From a dented flask. The white Dakota plains— Fogbound, anesthetized & barren. Montage of seven Chevy Biscaynes, the songbook Of Ernest Tubb. A shingled ranch, deriving from The GI Bill. GARDEN SIX TWO FOUR SEVEN SEVEN, the receiver lifted from its cradle As you weep to a stranger who’s purloined Your pension. Pulls of bourbon From a highball glass, from a coffee cup, the thrall & ratchet of ECT, your dress rehearsal For oblivion. What I remember: your laughter Did not serve you well. Honored guest, comrade Of the body, your farewell is complete. Blesse’d the descent which beckons. There, everlasting, your mouth’s stitched shut.

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Extinction Event: A Cache of Photos of the Last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker after J. T. Tanner & Rice Miller

The feet, gladiator tridents, creeping up the sleeve of J. J. Kugh, who stands implacably still. Adolescent, fearless, feathers a-bristle, he can afford to be clownish, ascending the summit of Kugh’s tattered deerstalker. & there he perches, a guffawing Mohawk-ed Buddha, bill elongate and a-gleam, a dazzling cigarette boat from the pleasure fleet of William Randolph Hearst, his only feature suggesting elegance. Feathers mottled, the red crest lost to Tanner’s black & white Brownie, eyes cartoonishly bulging. Now up Kugh’s left shoulder, now to the back, slow crawl up the chest, where he pauses to peck the buttons of Kugh’s macintosh. Four thousand miles eastward, Neville Chamberlain sips tea with the Fuhrer, their treaty & a fountain pen between them, Earl Grey spilling over to the saucer as it trembles in the P.M.’s hands. But here, the auguries of apocalypse are small in scale. Tanner sets the Brownie & his light meter on a stump & fumbles as he bands the bird’s right leg, just above the starburst claw & thus the feathered thing is also christened. He is Sonny Boy. His name is Sonny Boy. & Sonny Boy lifts off to be sighted once again by Tanner two years later, a treetop above a Louisiana swamp. The auguries

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of apocalypse. For instance, the Delta & Chicago Blues, their steady chug & boogie toward extinction. On a stool on the stage of a club in Edmonton, Alberta, 1964, sits the aging Rice Miller, a hulking human bomb, 6'4". Stage name: Sonny Boy Williamson, harp raised to his lips, fingers quicksilver: Ain’t got but one way out, babe, an’ I jus’ can’t find the door, sweat & slaver nimbusing the hieratic head. He sports a derby, purchased in London on his tour with the Yardbirds & he loves his woman so hard the lights don’t burn bright no more. Later that night, it is bourbon with Levon Helm & his Hawks, before Dylan, before their transformation to The Band. I would like to say they are making music, but instead Sonny Boy pours another, spitting blood into a second cup— scarcely a year to live. Who will know him in a century? In two? Whose pulse will quicken, hair on the nape of the neck raised in awe & supplication as he growls of his beloved bringing eyesight to the blind? O it’s nine below zero an’ she done put me down for another man. The caterwauling harp, the amplified metallic slink. It paws the ground, baying at the moon. It flies alone, it has no offspring.

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It calls to its mate, who is carcass & hollow picked bone. Glorious this last transmission, the flight in mad careening circles, alighting above the muck & ooze onto a lightning-blasted live oak, clawing up the mottled bark. & now the fervid spondees of his cry, of his here-I-am. Sonny Boy, Sonny Boy, Sonny Boy, Sonny Boy.

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Extinction Event: Two-Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger after Rilke

His vision, from the constant cascade of chicken wire, has grown so benumbed it contains nothing else, save for his lastness, though he doesn’t know this. Yet he knows, in the manner That beasts can know, that his name is Benjamin, & the name comes with meat scraps, slotted Through the wire by an aproned figure who is headless in the grainy black & white. A zoo in Hobart, 1933. On his haunches he rises, kangaroo-like, following the movement of the keeper’s hand. Look closely & you see the scar where the mouth of a trap slammed its teeth into his left rear leg. Nothing tiger-like, save the vague black ribbing of stripe along his rump. The size & shape of your average retriever or lab, though more forlorn. & he paces his cramped circles, though no mighty will stands paralyzed. Official moniker: Thylacine. As he rises again to his haunches we glimpse the marsupial scrotal sack, the pouch to protect his jewels as he padded the outback bush he’ll never see again. & now the ears perk up, the curtain of the pupils parts & the mouth, the storied mouth,

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the jaws hinging open, wider than those of any other mammal, quickens in the threat-yawn response, the cavernous throat. Benjamin, Benjamin, proffering abyss. Tiger, tiger burning the bright blacklit void. Our tour guide, our madly pacing limping Virgil. For three years more he paces & rears, paces & rears, chicken parts swallowed from the disembodied chainmailed hand. His kidneys will fail, sarcoptic mange will mottle his stripes & torso to a scabbed relief map, directions to Terra Incognita. & thus his skin was deemed to be “of such poor condition” no attempt was made to stuff him.

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Atahualpa

The Inca lets Pizarro stroke his tunic. A crude adventurer in armor, touching the Offspring Of The Sun Himself. I said to him, Inca, of what is a robe as soft as this mayde? He explained it was frome the skins of vampyre bats that flye at night in Puerto Viejo & Tumbez & which feede upon the natives. Sacred was the Inca’s spittle: women of noble families were employed to catch it in a cloth, lest the ground should defile it. Later, the Sun God is garroted, a Dominican priest thrusting a crucifix into his hand before the noose is tightened. Later, an Andean mountainside is honeycombed with nitro to blow up & extract its gold. Later, an oil rig catches fire in the Gulf outside Biloxi, killing eleven. Later, Phil Spector points a very large pistol at Dee Dee Ramone & his guitar. He is producing the album The End of the Century & seeks for eight hours to extract the opening chord of “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” From the mummified head of a rival, the Inca commanded a goblet to be fashioned, the refreshment emerging from a spigot in the mouth. In “Be My Baby,” Spector’s storied Wall of Sound is comprised of sleigh-bell, castanet, full orchestra, & the Ronettes in beehive hairdos, who are less four mixed-race girls from East LA than noblewomen chosen

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to retrieve the Sun God’s spit. Take 135. To accessorize his tailored suits, Spector horded a cache of pistols in the way that other men keep ties. Bling & Rolex, a ruby-studded coke spoon swaying against the pallid throat. & in the suburbs this morning a trio of my neighbors armed with handguns stalk a rabid raccoon, zigzagging dogwood & azaleas, the neighborhood children in tow, maintaining respectful distance. From a hedge the creature darts out; the briefcase man my neighbor aims his pistol. A froth of blood, a second shot against the head. Four states south there are plans to ignite five hundred miles of oil-bespattered water. Even the Inca’s table scraps were holy relics & warehoused in camphorwood trunks. My neighbor pokes the bloated stomach with a stick. I am coming to believe the Gnostics were right; insatiable & shameless is the Demiurge, though ably do we serve Him. The cocked .44 increases not His grandeur, though a temple-psalm results in the form of a minor song within the corpus of four pretend-brothers in leather jackets. Once more we sift the mountain’s rubble, extricate the nuggets, golden fillings, the rooms overflowing with valises, shoes & hair. The face on the goblet will be hewn into a smile. O Fearsome One, look upon us as we linger by the flowerbeds, making small talk while the joggers & the mothers

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pushing strollers file by. On cable we will view the oil rising miles to a sky turned blue-black in the fashion of a bruise. Factotums all, we rise at dawn to creep into the cave where our quarries slumber. Razor-fanged, blind. The huge ears tremble at our step, a dainty dish to set before The Firstborn Of The Sun. We club, we net, we shake them lifeless in our woolen sacks, careful to leave the pelts undamaged.

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Bivalve

On the pewter plate, a dozen smaller feral plates, Brine & crag, the gray asymmetries, cobbled & shucked, The half shells ensilvered, each enthroning a bulbous Bluepoint. Muzak & the sea breeze. The water reaches Almost to our raw bar table. Overcast sky. We’ve come to teach The boys. Oysters atremble on a gingham cloth, Saline tang upon Jake’s lips. Horseradish, Tabasco, The tongue regressing to its ancient language, sacerdotal, To quicken & imparadise the mouth & throat. In the harbor The masts are shook foil in sunset. We order a dozen more.

* * *

& in Guantanamo, the hunger-striking prisoner Is brought in shackles to the “feeding chair.” Restraints undone, then reapplied—forehead, hands, feet. Three marines in camo, sabre-rattle of the key rings on their belts.

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The overhead flourescents hum. Stark is the palette: Walls pulsing white, steel-gray chair, the prisoner’s orange jumpsuit, & the yellow rubber tube unwound. The prisoner squirms As it’s rammed up the nostril, snaking the esophagus & down To the stomach. Two cans of Ensure—French vanilla— Church-keyed open & slowly poured by funnel Through a “gravity drip bag.” Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, citizen Of Syria, captured Pakistan, detained eleven years, eleven Months. 10 p.m., the thirtieth forced feeding of the night. The prisoner silent. The guards bent to their phones, texting Fresno & Atlanta, kds asleep alrght? U gt that oil change done? Half an hour & the drip bag’s drained, the hose reeled in.

* * *

The boys have gotten the hang of it. Speared by their plastic tines— The living bivalves tremulous against the teeth, grit of sand.

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& the restaurant’s packed now—everyone awaiting the fireworks; (It’s only the Third, but the next town over does it on the Fourth.) Above the harbor, starbursts of orange & aquamarine, & Sousa, mangled by the Orleans high school band. Peony, Spider, Horse Tail & Chrysanthemum. Curlicued smoke. Crossette, Willow, Fish, explosions muffled, for the sky has opened up. Rain sheeting down, the waiter scurries to clear our plates. We’re running soaked, the lobster bibs still aproning our shirts, Squeezed into the crowd beneath a swaybacked canopy. The thud, the purple washed-out smear, the grand finale.

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Briefe Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia

i. Gabriel Prosser, Hanged in Richmond for Inciting Slave Rebellion, 1800 Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms Against our Torturer . . . Book II, Paradise Lost

The smithy, arms akimbo at his forge. The sweat Beads glisten; long scars zigzag his ebon skull. The flame erupts, the umber brick itself aglow. He hammers & shapes, hammers & shapes the white-hot Iron to a luminous inverted U. But alone now, from the corner Beyond his tools, he unwraps his hoarded treatises, Swadled in cloth. Paradise Lost. Common Sense: “the strength and power Of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.” He turns the pages in the conflagrating light. The time Is nigh: let us turn the ploughshares into swords, Cudgels, pikes, knives to hold upon the perfumed Throat of Governor Monroe. But the plot will be revealed. Captured, he is brought in chains to the Richmond gallows. The neck snaps instantly, the “dignified demise,”

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Reserved for reprobate elite. Not so lucky are his fellows. The cart & tree gallows mode: half an hour you gasp within the noose. ii. Daniel Frank, Hanged in Henricus for Stealing a Calf, 1623 . . but his face Deep scars of Thunder had intrench’d, and care Sat on his faded cheek . . . Book I, Paradise Lost

Sunday morning—the Godwins are in church & he creeps to the pen on hands & knees. For an endless hour he’s lain in the razoring stealth Of a briar patch, awaiting their cart to creak Toward steeple & hellfire. He rises to a crouch & the noose is slipped & tightened about the neck Of a cream & brindle calfling, more rope cinched Three times around her legs. Hard to lift, & of course she struggles all the way to his wagon. Five long years he’s tilled tobacco fields,

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Serving out his Indenture to Miles Perrin. But he’s free now— to let his first child Perish of pox, his wife of childbed fever. When the sheriff Comes upon the calfling, tied to an oak to graze & bray In a forest clearing, is it not Providence, Almighty Justice That bids him hooded & strung from the selfsame tree? iii. A Handbag Fashioned from the Skin of Nat Turner, 1830 Then when I am they captive talk of chains. Book IV, Paradise Lost

They gentle the body down from noose to cart, So it might be pristine for dissection. But first A privileged few have been allowed to rummage it For trophies. The nails, a tooth, the scalp. The top-hatted figures bob up & down inside the cart Like pistons, supplicants whirligiging prayer wheels & this one slices a foot-square piece, the delicate & fine-haired dermis of the lower back. It pulls

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Off daintily, like cutting the pages of a novel by Scott. Cover it in salt for 30 days, & in a broth Of seawater & urine, stir it daily & soak it 30 days longer. To remove the fine hairs, apply the milk of lime. Now, razor the remaining hairs. The bating will soften it, the pickling in salt & sulfuric acid soften it further. A coin purse, workmanship flawless, befitting a lady of refinement. It laves & caresses the palm of her hand. iv. Various Nooses Said to Hang John Brown, Charles Town, December, 1859 For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have pierc’d so deep . . . Book IV, Paradise Lost

One in Massachusetts, gift of Roscoe Taylor. One in the West Virginia Historical Museum, Also one in Lynchburg, another in Fort Royal. In NYC, where the coffin came for burial, a mortician claimed the noose still coiled his neck, waxing poetic: The next best thing to the ladder Jacob saw.

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He is not Old Brown, opined Thoreau. He is an Angel of Light, Though to many abolitionists he was lunatic, blackguard, outlaw. & what the Charleston & Richmond papers said of him is Easy to imagine. Yet even Stonewall Jackson, Reporting the body drop, lauded his unflinching firmness. To the gallows he rode atop his own rude coffin. Verbose as always, he meant his final screeds To be good PR. The crimes of this guilty land will never Be purged away but with blood. Off to the Blue Ridge he pointed. Beautiful country! I never had the pleasure of seeing it before. v. The Lynching of James Jordan, Waverly, Sussex County, 1925 And on, methought, alone I pass’d through ways That brought me on a sudden to the Tree . . . Book V, Paradise Lost

Let us note that to lynch is not to hang. The hanging, as Schuler reminds us, comes nearly last & the process is protracted grievous rite. A white woman “attacked” in her home, her pistol stolen,

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Jordan alleged to sell it to “another negro.” Jordan is thus identified, confesses, jailed. The mob then storms the jail. The crowd grows, The sheriff shackled in his own cuffs. Jail door battered, The prisoner dragged into the street, pleading mercy. No one masked. Shotguns fired into the air As they string him from a telegraph pole by the Chessy & Ohio station. As he strangles, more shots fired— The body riddled now & doused with kerosene. A thrown flare alights it. The Norfolk–Greensboro Express rockets by, for this is not a town That warrants a stop. But the engineer slows for a better view. vi. How to Tie a Hangman’s Knot, 510,952 Views (Juvenile, Name Withheld, 7 May 2012) Consult how we must henceforth most offend Our Enemy; our own loss how repair. Book I, Paradise Lost

Adderall-fueled. Kid Rock on his speakers. 2 a.m. Pale fingers click The keyboard. Parents long asleep, the rope heaped on his desk.

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He follows the voiceover entranced. The most iconic Of knots. . . . Easy to make . . . absorbs movement & shock Notably well. You will need a single length of rope. Create A long u-shaped bend or “bight,” tipped On its left side. Use adequate rope, for this knot Requires a minimum of 7 turns, with 13 preferred. Create another bight at the end of the first, in its Opposite direction. The rope should look like an “S.” Put the end of the rope over all 3 legs. (A “turn” is the name for this.) Continue the wrapping at least 6 times more. Stop To tighten each one as you make it. The top of the second bight should poke out noticeably above the topmost turn, Forming a loop. Pass the end of the loop from front to back. Pull the right hand edge of the loop & tighten. Tighten again.

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vii. Three Monkeys on Main: Watching the Walter Scott Shooting, 2015 . . . dire was the noise Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss Of fiery darts in flaming vollies flew. Book VI, Paradise Lost

Above the zinc bar’s taps & fifths, the 50-inch Flat screens, floating dark as the panels of Rothko’s Chapel— Then all come alive with CNN, iPhone footage Grainy, soundtrack hiss & murmur, the barrel Flashes vague starbursts. Nine sharp reports & the pixels of a running black man, named for a bard, Lie now in pixels of blood, the pixels of the cop Bending to place something bright on the ground Beside the body, already too bled-out to cuff, The barman & the drinkers transfixed. Then the clip Played again, again: pixels fleeing, pixels tumbling to asphalt & the object set like grave goods at the bloodied hip—

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Pixeled but Paleolithic. He’s the Tollund Man, noose Jerked tight as the bog awaits his millennial sleep. Now a voice from the bar—bastard got what he deserves. & then our craven silence: happy hour, the drinks are cheap. viii. Noose Placed in a Tree at Varina High School (Juvenile, Name Withheld, 9 May 2012) . . . save what is in destroying; other joy To me is lost. . . . Book IX, Paradise Lost

By the parking lot, by the sign announcing “Our Town,” don’t text & drive!, SPRING FLING, From the oak ringed with mulch & pansies, From a limb so sturdy it could dangle a body, it swings. Penduluming, agleam in April breeze, brightened By the flash of a dozen cell phone cams. Hovering And blazing with delusive light, writes Milton, So glistered the dire Snake. O serpentine one,

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Ever-loquacious in your slither up & down the Knowledge Tree. Not so different from this kid stoked on weed, in a Nine Inch Nails tee, Slinking up at midnight with his grim semiotic, his livery. Almost losing his grip, he checks his fall, then knots it snugly. & now the twine uncoils & hisses down. Later, the county will ferret him out. Later, there is “appropriate disciplinary action” & workers in a cherry picker cut it down writhing to the dirt.

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Give Orange Me Give Eat Orange Me Eat Orange Give Me Eat Orange Give Me You

This, it is reported, is Nim’s longest sentence. On the flight to Oklahoma, he is wearing Levi’s bell-bottoms (Boys’ Huskie 12), Bob Seger on his T-shirt, a ’78 tour. On the flight to Oklahoma he does not sign cloud or window. But when his ears pop it is Nim head bad & a stick of Juicy Fruit, unwrapped & proffered by Miss Butler, prompting Gum me gum. On the flight to Oklahoma, he is still a stream of lexemes that obeys a grammar, a beginning & an end. Tray table down, Miss Butler peels an orange, the zest moting up in sunlight to please open hurry, until the slices ooze their juices down the fur that lines his thumb. Below is Oklahoma; the experiment is over. At the primate center they will ask Miss Butler to remove Bob Seger, fearful of Nim’s storied snarl & bite. At the cage door he holds to her so tight she must pry herself free. Lamentation too obeys its grammar, though the syntax of erasure is inscrutable; there in the mirror, a steel-gray occlusion. Whose face? Whose? Saturday morning & it’s barely 8: Stacy our neighbor at the door, telling us her mother’s wandered from the house again— fourth time since they brought her back from the home. & the posse forms, Volvos & Subarus, a cavalcade down the cul-de-sacs of tract homes, past paunches with weed whackers,

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faux-punk skateboarders, helmetless, hip-hop bleeding out their headphones, haberdasher Steve bent down to wax his Benz, polishing until his face gleams out in onyx from his fender. We find her at the strip mall, by the coin shop & Circle K, curlers, flowered housecoat, in her fingers a quivering Pall Mall. Last month, over drinks on their porch, Stacy powered up the laptop in the living room beyond, clicking on Skype, setting her mother before the humming screen. Three heads out of focus, bobbing their marionette twitch & her own face in the smaller square, staring from the pixeled static. From the corner of my eye, bruschetta in my hand, I watched. The names, the names, the names. The twins in yellow dresses, waving, are . . . the twins, but her daughter is Emily is Emily. Already the crossing is over. The taste of metal in her mouth as she hands the coin to Charon, sharp the stones that line the riverbank, but painless to her ectoplasmic feet. Emily, to whom she waves. One twin with her palm against the screen, a handprint in ochre on a cave wall, hazing in & out of shape. Grammar, accidence, the slate that is the color of a troubled sky.

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Give orange me orange orange give. Oklahoma orange give. On the grainy Super 8, Nim is signing to a chimp named Paco, who hoots & bears his teeth, the vertical head nod that signals aggression. Orange me give give orange me. The camera wobbles as Paco leaps, rattling the bars that roof their cage.

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Canis Familiarus

Moist weeds, the wet black nose patrolling & the noise he emits—from nostril or throat I can never tell—oddly Victorian, a steam engine’s hiss & squeal, inching forward from Waterloo or St. Pancreas. & now and then the beagle bay from his years in the hunt pack, before we found him wandering the roadsides of Prince George County. Too old, dumped, & inside his ear a tattooed number faded to seven inexplicable digits. The loquacious receptors, thousands upon thousands. & Milo, three times the size of Thomas, with eyes darting, the Panopticonic taking in, like a drone above Waziristan, uploading terrain; the two of them collaborating only to mark—mailbox, phone pole, the neighbors’ zinnias—now & then looking up at me, not leading them so much as dragged. Such distance to have ventured from the Pleistocene steppes, windswept tundra, from our human & wolf-dog forebears, twinned packs, helixed for the hunt with their array of inventions putting Edison & Tesla both to shame. Tooled spearpoint, atlatl, bone needle, sinewed thread for mukluk, shawl & tunic. Together they will stalk to extinction the mammoth, the auroch, the cave bear, the Neanderthal. Yet the great innovation, Shipman argues, is the fashioning of wolf to dog, the making of “a living tool.” Coconspirators, corporate, the Urmega merger. The dual synced packs, weaving & worrying the straggler mammoth until she falls to a deathbed of tundra moss.

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& the systematic rendering begins. Gaze-directed silent hunting, permitting man & wolf-dog to stare directly at the prey’s last moment of consciousness, the huge imperial eye beclouded & the pitiless human sclera, eloquent & subtle in its witchery. The men look at the dogs; the dogs look back, the outcome long foreseen. But here in the ’burbs, Milo & Thomas sniff & meditate upon a flattened squirrel. Above Waziristan, the coordinates are locked. A pilot in Kansas sees a house eight thousand miles distant starburst to flame on a screen, cars overturned, a single figure writhing by a blown-off steel door. What distance have we ventured? Let us be Sky Gods; let us rain our fire down, assisted by our laser-guided SAMs, our canid minions. The makers, the inventors, the fashioners of living tools. YouTube footage of Oppenheimer, grainy b & w. He tamps his pipe against the podium: the physicists have known Sin, & this is a knowledge they cannot lose. The always Manichean bewilderment. The dogs meet my eyes, tugging me home, legs lifted simultaneously against a wildly empurpled crepe myrtle. Last night I dozed off to wolf-dog burials, book lying open on my chest. Prˇedmostí—what is now the Czech Republic—30,000 B.P. Encircling the human cemetery, a fairy ring of dog skulls, as if to guard their Masters through some dim, imperiled

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notion of an afterlife. To sound forever their alarms. The bark & deep-throated growl. What will survive of us? Appetitite, some shards of DNA & the undeserved perplexing loyalty of living tools. Tenderly a man is burying in permafrost a severed head, which formerly bore a name. Tenderly he has sliced it below a collar he has woven from the softest hairs of ermine or fox. He places in the jaw a small carved mammoth bone & is stroking & stroking the rough fur of the forehead, a dead language murmured as he closes the eyes.

for Carole Weinstein

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ii.

Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry

Examine Pile: a stereo camera mounted in the robot’s head Looks for a central point of a towel lying in a pile. The robot grabs the center with one arm. Detect Corners: the robot Lifts, shakes & rotates the towel, using an algorithm To visually locate & grasp the two adjacent corners. Untwist: the robot pulls the towel several times. If the robot sees the towel is twisted, it adjusts its tempo, Rotating its grip until the towel’s without twists. It heads To the table. Lay Flat: it grasps the towel’s corners With the short side up, adjusting its grip, & pulls The towel across the table’s edge, again using an algorithm To smooth the towel flat. Re-examine & Fold: the robot’s Cameras estimate the towel’s size & position. The robot Now may fold the towel in half by aligning at least two times The top & bottom corners. Fold Again: employing another algorithm The robot then changes grips & repeats the flattening. The head’s Cameras pan the table. The robot folds the towel in quarters. Stack: The towel is placed neatly on a stack of towels. The robot angles Back to the unfolded pile. Repeat: rotate the towel, grasp the corner Once again, etc. How my mother wallowed in her sorrow. But Folding laundry was ritual joy. Always Sunday, always the piles

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Tabletop high. Always highballs, always Bonanza, her head Nimbused in pink curlers, her movements sudden & arrhythmic & the mentholed fog of chainsmoked L&Ms. Always it’s 7 o’clock & already she’s half-snockered, flipping channels to Sixty Minutes. Examine Pile: two long drags, one short swig, Airedale in the corner Chasing rabbits in dream. Detect Corners: she is heading Kitchenward for gin; the MS makes her walk robotic; Her scowl at the socks without mates. Untwist: she’s got her rhythm Now, towers of dungarees, high as the parapets of Troy, stacks Of negligees & boxers. Lay Flat: cinders wafting down on piles Of Madras, paisley shortsleeves. Re-examine & Fold: it’s time For one last short one, new ice clinking its whispered rhythm As she navigates a gingham skyline. Fold Again: airy as popcorn, The hankies teeter. Stack: linens for their double beds, headscarves, Jet-black slips. Repeat, Repeat: screensaver photo, coalescing as I reboot. Head cocked, a melancholy vamp for the camera, L&M angled & burnt to the filter. She stands out of time. Memory’s algorithms: Brazen arrow. But always she stares me down, laundry on the concrete in a heap.

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Absolute Rhythm I believe in an absolute rhythm, a rhythm . . . in poetry that corresponds exactly with the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. Pound

Siri, show us a picture of an iamb. & the pixels gathered on the phone screen, half-moon married to slash, scythe beside spear-shaft. Crescent or chalice, then a wheat-stalk bending to autumn zephyrs. & yes, the hearts’-blood coursing: drumtap, birdcall, ringtone. Resplendent atavistic pictograph. Sympathetic magic, impious to demean it to concept, to symbol, to sign. The tattooist took your phone, turned it & its pictures in his hand. Ponytail, Harley T-shirt, lots of bling. Shouldn’t be too hard to do, he said. & the instrument began its hum & sable infusion—your right wrist, the left clutching Kent’s calm hand. Now you’re showing it off to the six of us crowding the restaurant table, your hair nearly back from the latest chemo. Head half bent, you pick at your salad. At your desk, you tell us, under the drafts of poems

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you thumbtack to your wall—pin them the way the rest of us would slap up Post-its— you pause sometimes beneath the desk-lamp halo & contemplate the fresh dark ink above the indigo rivulet of vein. You have three months. Later, the first-year med students in the MCV basement will pause to examine it—absolute rhythm, arranging their tools beneath the vaporlight glare. Lancets poised, they ready themselves to receive your gift, yet another of your legacies. Dear friend, your faith lay always in unsealing, in the gnosis we carry, luminous & mortal within. But also outliving us, outliving us in word & act. You’d say this better & more plainly, in some anecdote from one-stoplight Chatham, seasoned with some lines from Dickinson, Welty, or Kitty Wells. Toward the end your poems issued forth daily, fiercer & more knowing

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than any of us deserved. Absolute rhythm, where sorrow is ecstatic. Grant us the skill to learn their august cadences. The waitress brings to-go bags. By stealth, you’ve picked up the tab again. The rain has almost stopped & the parking lot shimmers in a pewter intractable light. Now the hugs & handshakes. Turning, I glimpse the raven-black inscripting ink once more, glinting with raindrops, pulsing & quickened along your wrist.

for Claudia Emerson, 1957–2014

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For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk, 3,000 B.C. author of the earliest known signature

That arrow & life were homonyms. That his name Predates all others, incised sunbaked on a slab Of Euphratian clay. Stylus a broken reed, though it Carries somehow the bedazzled opalescent mojo Of transfiguration. The hand which holds it edges right & reaching the margin circles back, right to left & east to west, boustrophedon, so that inscription Is a form of weaving. What matters that the context Is grain, is cattle & goat, chamber pot & sandal, Three & twenty spear-shafts hewn of cedar, Flagons of unguents for the Temple Stores. Enumerate, enumerate. Life & arrow, Our endless numbered days enfeathered So to fly relentless in unpitying sun. The one whom I loved is dead. The one Whom I loved is clay. Enumerate, enumerate, Life & arrow. They are all gone now, the days We shared. Gone eighteen years, six months, Seven days, eleven hours. & thus I open The Major English Romantic Poets & keep vigil, For her hand her hand lives on in concord

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Peerless with William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell Decoded. So he took me thro’ a stable (vision of materialism) and thro’ a church and down Into a church vault, at the end of which (Mill of Abstraction) we did come to a cave; down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way (Materialism = Locke + Newton). . . . I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have, whether they will or no. (Creation + Fall—the Angel embraces the Fire). Blue ink, green ink, pencil. Kentish Town, the ‘80s, Window open & the pewter light ensilvering The Heath. I watch the book upon her desk, pages A-tremble in the evening wind. She is out somewhere In the leather jacket; she is out somewhere To score. Blue ink, green ink, the Angel Embraces fire. Guide my hand now, o scribe, Let me speak of her as though she might stand Before me still. Enumerate, enumerate— The fog transfiguring, the chastening light. Guide my hand, O scribe, so that I might see her from this window We have hewn of stylus, of keyboard & character.

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Guide my hand so that she may walk below, emerging Corporeal, parting the Tube Station crowd, Jacket, worn boots, her scarf that is forged Of electrum, her scarf that is molten, her scarf That is flame. Below me she stands. Arrow & life. Guide my hand, o scribe. Instruct me to affix her here, that she may, for a moment, raise her head toward me, So that in this bless’d gesture I may linger.

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Nineteen Eleven Blues

i. “Elizabeth Bishop”: Essay by Ronald Reagan (b. February 7) I’m counting how many more hotel rooms I’ll be looking out . . . before I’m headed home. And, yes, I’m feeling a little sorry for myself. It seems I’ve said a thousand goodbyes, each one harder than the one before. Radio Address, January 27, 1979

I’ve been told this lady has had a somewhat Hard life. Orphanhood is, well, a tragedy. In a magazine not long ago I read “One Art,” A poem, I believe, by her. Here’s what it meant to me: You lose track of things, & then too there’s sadness. But you also Need to get over that. One example: I did a screen test once, For The Maltese Falcon—now that was a role To make your mouth water. Bogart got it instead, & I guess I was a little blue over that for, gosh, At least a month. I’m thinking, too, about Cuba— We lost that beautiful island. & then Castro turned the whole Place over to those brutal Ruskies. Makes you want to cry, Doesn’t it? But don’t cry over spilt milk, that’s what I say. Dust yourself off, Miss Bishop. & God Bless the USA.

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ii. “Ronald Wilson Reagan”: Essay by Czesław Miłosz (b. June 30) But when is it ever really real? Neither when we experienced it nor when we put it into words. The poem keeps harking back to one thing—the unattainability of the real. Conversations with Czesław Miłosz

The truth of that bygone California, of all America, Is elusive, ambiguous, & it would be pointless To seek it in the myths devised to keep us From seeing the disorder of the world. The twin revolvers Are unholstered in a flash. Yet there is also the wound. It will fester for weeks; the stench of the sweat-drenched Body, bed of filthy, lice-ridden rags, urine & excrement; A cry, in the end, for one’s mother. This the Western has never shown. One is not supposed to think beyond the colorful Costumery, the chaps & silver spurs. Yet the hero Bends over a still-breathing Mandan to bestow The coup de grace—Bowie knife neatly slicing the scalp, a trail Of blood as he strides to his palomino & stuffs the thing In his saddlebag, for a bounty of nine silver coins.

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iii. “Elizabeth Bishop & Czesław Miłosz”: Essay by Robert Johnson (b. May 8[?]) My father died and left me my poor mother done the best she could Every man likes that game you call love but it don’t mean no man no good “Drunken-Hearted Man” (take 1)

You been standin’ at a crossroads but there’s no direction home You been standin’ at a crossroads but there’s no direction home

ummmmmmmmm ummmmmm ummmmm

The whirlwind come an’ took your house & that land you lived on’s gone so gone O you got a mind to wander But it ain’t no life to choose

Weheee Wehooo ummmm ummm ummm

O you got a mind to wander But it ain’t no life to choose Whirlwind come an’ took your house & them loves you lived with’s gone so gone

Hooooweee Hoowee ummm ummm umm

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Ain’t no kind heart’s gonna help you & there’s storms out on the sea Ain’t no kind heart’s gonna help you & there's storms umm umm wehew way on the sea

HeeeeYouuu HeeeYouuu ummmm ummm ummm

The whirlwind come an’ took your house & that world you lived in’s gone so gone. iv. “Robert Johnson”: Essay by Elizabeth Bishop (b. February 9) I also had a marvelous blues record—Robert Johnson—I recommend him highly. He was murdered in 1938. It’s superb, the real thing. Letter to Robert Lowell, October 18, 1963

O world without salvation, impossible to lift. But Atlas-like we set our shoulders there. How the fine hands dance their fretwork. From Clarksdale, Mississippi, state with the second prettiest Name. His long fingers gesture from the ether. O world without salvation, impossible to lift. Down the road he ambles in his nimbus of dirt. The train pulled from the station & his lady left him there. How the fine hands dance their fretwork,

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& how they keen her leaving. From his throat Come the varied falsettos, the exact words unclear. O world without salvation, impossible to lift. Heavy, heavy are the burdens—they took poor Bob at last. The blues fall down like hail, like poisoned liquor. No more will the fine hands dance their fretwork. The young god’s hand, receding into mist. I been studyin’ the rain. Never, never, never. O world without salvation, impossible to lift. How the fine hands danced their fretwork.

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Extinction Event: Decoy Birds

Consider it: to sew shut the eyes of the living bird Must have required a certain delicacy Uncharacteristic of hunters. Blue thread A-tremble in your meaty hands, the needle-eye Pierced, the glassy pupils shut like sarcophagi & all the while the bird is writhing (needle too deep & the thing will bleed out) & all the while the cry Will issue forth, a breathy panicked coo. You’ve sewn up The eyes of an adult male passenger pigeon; The breast, fat & salmon-hued, heaves as the bird is placed Among a dozen wheeling others in a crude wire pen. They veer & stagger & collide, the shimmering & stupid bait. Tomorrow the hunt. You pin the blind birds’ feet to posts In a forest clearing, each set twenty paces apart. Fluttering, they attract The migrating empathic flocks. Countless thousands, so many they eclipse The sun. Settling earthward, they’re entangled in fantastic nets Capable of confining 2,000 birds. & thus you venture out As the real work commences. You’ve likely hired Micks & Dagos, Darkies or Cherokees, the desperate Who work shit jobs for shit wages. But sufficiently trained

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To slink upon the nets, armed with hammers to dispatch The vast seethe & flutter. Hard to bend down, hard To target the glossy heads & the labor seems endless. Two miles off, the boxcars wait to be filled, Barrel upon barrel crammed with birds & peddled In Cleveland or Chicago. Eichmann’s notes From the Wannsee Conference address in special Detail the problem of morale. How can even SS shoot Jew after Jew in the head all day & not feel The deepest exhaustion? & in the case of assimilated German-speaking Jewry, those who likely would wail For mercy in the soldiers’ own tongue, how do you complete The task without occasional regret, remorse, etc.? & a further, practical concern: the expense Of ammunition. In time, these logistical challenges would be Addressed & solved. Always the mechanics Are addressed & solved. It is noon: you pull from your rucksack A whistle made of brass & signal that the men may pause the killing & begin their midday repast. Beneath a tree they spread their bedrolls & sit, the dung

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So caked & chalky the ground seems besnowed. This man lifts a boiled egg, another a loaf of soda bread, A flagon of applejack, swigged & shared, Their English Gullahed, Irished, Napoltino-ed, punctuated With American fuck this, fuck that. Seven more hours & they’ll call it a day. The green stupendous net beside them Hums with wingbeats of the birds still unslaughtered, A white-capped lake, rain-pocked in a summer storm.

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Study Skins

The major-domo of the hissing cockroach was tapping the terrarium & his charges—flown from Madagascar sans their Green Cards—hurled themselves against the plate glass with a fury & a sibilance recalling battle scenes in Homer. Antennae a-twitch & the high-pitched strophes of a hundred radios on scan. & Reginald— his face to the glass at first, then jerking back. Members Night, The Field Museum, Nineteen Ninety-something, the backrooms opened so the staff could enact its grown-up science fair. We’ve come to swig cheap chard from plastic cups as a trio of lab-coats dissects a still half-frozen ocelot, courtesy the Lincoln Park Zoo. To determine cause of death for the sake of fund-raising, it’s been stored half-a-year in deep freeze, stench of formaldehyde, commingling with rot. The scalpel parts the matted belly fur. We decide to move on. & Reginald: every couple months we’d meet over Thai or sushi, movies, shoptalk of poetry & po-biz with its dull attendant gossip. Often he asked advice I knew he wouldn’t follow, letters of rec to this & that. His pride & dignity were worn like chainmail & easily he’d hurt, easily fuck-up the teaching jobs (some I helped him get) that scrolled down the pages of his bottomless c.v. But also the Projects, the demented single mother—how can you emerge from that unscathed?

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& what makes us better at lines than at life? I write because I would like to live forever, he wrote, & meant it— his Crane & Stevens necromancy, the radiant unspooling cadences, unflappably & proudly Orphic. A reading once: he adjusts the mike: “I am not a Neg-ro poet.” And the sheen of milk across the sky, the galaxy poured out like me, true sky, false dawn. Fumbling with the mike again: “I am not a homo-sex-ual poet.” There you are, pinned in the lyric distance, small point of reference I call love. Page after page I could go on quoting his burnished effusions. But I choose instead to watch him push through the crowds on the Field staircase, shaved head a-gleam, the fireplug frame & the bob in his walk faintly Chaplinesque, the cancer a decade off. & we come to the room of study skins, where the red-haired woman in pigtails & a lab coat is placing the stiff simulacra of birds on a stainless steel tabletop & to touch them is permitted. Back & forth she scurries, pulling open the bird-morgue drawers, taking requests, Reginald ordering a peregrine falcon & a nightingale. & me, half-joking—passenger pigeon? But duly she’s gone back & fetched them all. We don our latex gloves—arsenic was the main preservative— & pass the sad trio between us. The peregrine’s eye, a droplet of golden celluloid, pops from its socket to the table & rests against

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the lacquered arced beak. & here’s the pigeon, bloated with a century’s extinction, the salmon-hued breast feathers caked in a nimbus of dust. & the nightingale, Teutonic & squat, roly-poly, dishwater gray, a miniature Richard Strauss. All the nightsong of trill & whistle & gurgle stilled, no more to warble his native woods note wilde. Do I remember it right? Reginald has gripped the thing in both his hands, upright so the soundless aria is poised to resonate again, poised but unsung, poised though stilled, poised though the vocal cords have long since grayed to nothing, poised to utter the raptured music, radio-telescoped, & broadcast earthward from the spheres, poised to channel the heavens’ dumbfound seared lament. Afar, afar, afar. Already he hears its fervent approach. Poised.

for Reginald Shepherd, 1963–2008

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Sinatra: The Concert at Pompeii, 1991

Six hours until showtime & they’ve organized A private excursion for the Chairman & Frank Jr., who tonight Will conduct the orchestra—the Teatro Grande, Where lately the amphitheater floor has been minutely sifted To locate the DNA of gladiators—blood of Gauls, Sasanians, Nubians. It’s the Diamond Jubilee Tour, Day 67. “Come Fly with Me” will begin the set. Frank is weary, puffy face, bags beneath the eyes— Still legendarily blue. Shades on, a fuchsia sport shirt. & a phalanx of golf carts flanked by carabinieri Vespas, Chauffeurs him about the Forum & Via de Nola. At the House of the Tragic Poet, Frank Jr. reaches out To steady the Voice, who grumbles about the shoes Crafted for him in Milan last week—still too tight. & in the Temple Of Isis, he pauses on a bench for a little rest, an Orangina Handed him by a red-haired forensic anthropologist In a denim skirt, unused to being addressed as Sugar. “World on a String” is on every set list of the Tour. “My Way” the encore, always. The more generous reviewers Have remarked that the storied voice Is not precisely what it used to be. The tour guides save

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The Garden of the Fugitives for last. Its pumice-mantled Audience of the dead. They explain the Fiorelli Method— Locate the petrified outline of what once Was a body. Pour liquid plaster through a funnel In a hole you’ve made—in what you think was the ear Or side. This fills the cavities created By decomposing flesh. & thus you have a perfect Simulacrum of a victim at the instant of death, As the gases finally do their work, & the ash continues its despoiling rain. The details Are exquisite: sandal, birthmark, the fold of a toga. Label it artistry. Or recipe. Label it trophy. Call it Bread & Circus For the gawking tourist rabble. Call it the end of a brief episode, As in “One for My Baby,” where the Latinate dactyl— Ep-is-ode—gets teased out for what seems like minutes Thanks to Blue Eyes’ bravura phrasing. Brief— From the Latin as well, as in vita brevis, a term which Even Frank Jr. & the hulking bodyguard who lurks Beside this little entourage must know. The tremble In Frank’s hand’s returned. & how his back is killing him. The set list tonight: “Day and Night,” “What Now My Love?”

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& “Mack The Knife,” its tempo slowed to crawl. Ohhhh thee shark haasss pearl-yyy teeettthhh deeaaar . . . But here, offstage, beyond the reach of nimble mastery, The thirteen supine figures reach the shores of Styx Together in perpetuity. By the wall of a kitchen garden, Three family groups, fleeing the lava rain, joined by accident, that disaster film cliché: two farm families & a merchant’s. A servant, bag stuffed with grain & seven pomegranates— He’s the first to fall. Then the two small boys, Face down, holding hands. A husband, arms outstretched To shield his wife, who even as stone appears To tremble. Frank circles the scene, then circles again. Two more boys, a mother, a younger sister, bodies Contorted in tortured sleep. He bends to run his hand Along the mother’s back. & now to the Merchant— The celebrated Merchant, his face adorning all the guidebooks, The one sitting upright, right arm fused to a mound of earth. He is trying to rise. For millennia he is trying to rise. Though his bad knee throbs, Frank squats down to meet Him face to face. The ancient pearls that were the eyes gaze out & the Chairman’s baby blues dart wildly back.

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Body Politic: To Ezra Pound in Purgatory

i. Interrogation: Pisa, 1945 Thus Ben and la Clara a milano by the heels @ Milano that maggots shd/eat the dread bullock Canto LXXIV

The set: card table, two chairs, the OSS captain smoking, The prisoner (“somewhat agitated”) before him, handcuffs Loosened but not removed. A window above, a single cloud chuffing South toward Roma. The captain, silent, shuffles & reshuffles The photos spread before them. Upon la Clara’s chest Benito seems asleep, a scepter wedged into the rigor-mortised Fist, face pristine, though Clara’s eyes have been jackbooted shut. “Dago humor bewilders me,” the captain admits. The prisoner says nothing. Now to the gas station gallows Where like sleeping bats they sway, Clara’s chest bayoneted open Though her skirt (for modesty) sailor-knots her knees. Duce is bruise & broken teeth, face a bloodied potato, jodhpurs ballooning. To build the city of Dioce, whose terraces are the color of stars. The captain: anything you have to say? The prisoner coughs & stares.

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ii. Los Manos de Che Guevara (Redacted), 1970 Woe to them that conquer w/ armies And whose only right is their power Canto LXXVI

My wife’s aunt saw them—the year she’d been “stationed” In La Paz. Someone wheeled them in To an embassy cocktail party. The formaldehyde Goldened the jars where they swam: color of urine, Sepia-tone the left hand still raised To salute la raza, lifeline slithering toward a wrist snaggled from the bonesaw’s teeth. She gazed Entranced, setting her daiquiri down. The thumbs

twitch,

The index quivers. Langley’d needed confirmation— & she could see the residue of ink, smudging each whorled Fingertip. Atop the jar her Bureau Chief    A crushproof of Pall Malls, two sheets to the wind

set down

& fumbling with the Polaroid accordioned open in his hands. How ‘bout how ‘bout a li’l pic-ture for me, .

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iii. X-Ray of Swallowed Toy Battleship Lodged in the Esophagus of a Toddler, c. 1905: Mutter Museum “Liquids and fluids!” said the palmist. “A painter? Well ain’t that liquids and fluids.” Canto LXXX

Poor boy, you gasp & wheeze but must stand at attention, Posture straight & silent for the fluoroscope— Tedious exposure time, X-rays shrapneling the consult room. Dr. Jackson fidgets the controls, a thrum & warble. Be still: though inside you a model of the USS Maine Splits & plummets to Havana Harbor, ever down. (Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!) A false flag op; we “ourselves” laid the mine, The death toll 266. Walk soft, big stick. Swallow A colony. Another. Invent the singular art of waterboard— To breathe & to drown conjoined. The water flows To mouth, nostril, face, earhole, the stomach pummeled As a kind of coda, the swallowed gallons upchucked. Poor tyke, Breathe in peril. Someday they’ll get us all to talk.

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iv. The Dyeing of bin Laden’s Beard, 2009 The chess board is too lucid the squares are too even . . . theatre of war “theatre” is good. There are those who do not want it to come to an end Canto LXVIII

In paradise, its color shall not fade. In paradise, the virgins shall offer up Their 177 hymens, white thighs supplicant & splayed. But today, no virgins: only burkah-ed wives atop A pair of stools. They weave the bootblack In with tiny horsehair brushes, the dark streaking down their wrists. Now to the half-moon mustache, now to the detail work— They’ve traded their bifocals for a magnifying glass, Shared to permit the coverage of each follicle. & Allah, we know, is in the details, Each hair blown upon to dry it more speedily. & then he rises, our Prince of Shadows. Laptop powered up, he views a cherished video of himself— White robes streaming & the chattering Kalashnikov.

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v. Cento: Radio Roma

Waal go ask yourselves what prevented it. Ezra Pound trying to tell you: the danger is not that you WILL BE Invaded, it is that you HAVE BEEN invaded. Pound speakin’ and the big Jew has rotted EVERY Nation he has wormed into. (Born Jew or have taken To Jewry by predilection.) And as to all the visible signs— Roosevelt is MORE in the Jew’s hands than Wilson In 1919. Lord knows I don’t SEE how Americans can have fascism Without years of previous trainin’. Pound speaking From Italy. Parlando de Roma. Pound speaking, Point ONE of the Nazi program. Breed GOOD. That means EUGENICS. (Well, Brother Adolf did do something.) A good thing to hang Roosevelt & a few hundred Yids. Ezra Pound speaking from Rome. You have been hugger-muggared.

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vi. Photo of a Skullcap, Exhibiting a Ten-Inch Bayonet Fragment Embedded in the Left Parietal Bone. The Patient, Wounded Nov. 27, 1863, Survived the Injury 26 Days: Mutter Museum We have not yet calculated the sum

gorilla + bayonet Canto LXXIV

Cyrosphere in sepia. A satellite composite Image, Antarctica looked down upon from “Medium Earth Orbit,” Twelve thousand miles aloft, & in successive photographs The shrinking of the icecap’s easy to detect. But the metaphor: vastly inexact. From the Ross Ice Shelf The dark metal bulges, courtesy the Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond, VA. Courtesy a CSA corporal After Chickamauga, patrolling the field to finish off Federals, Who groan & plead in positions Brady never caught. Death is a Master from Germantown, TN, saving grapeshot But snapping his bayonet on a thick-skulled private From the 12th Indiana, whose comrades later lay him on a cot: On the 27th Day, Thee Angul of Daath did Asend. All of us Did Witnus. On a baggage car to Philly, the head squeezed in a hatbox, sweating ice.

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vii. Iron Lung: Second-Grade Field Trips, Cold War Neither with lions nor leopards attended But poison, velano In all the veins of the commonweal Canto LXXIV

That year we toured the stockyards: South St. Paul With its storied stench. Also, a ride on The Empire Builder & its observation car, a faceted sun-drenched jewel Gliding its eleven miles across the river, All the way to Minneapolis, Union Station, far-off as Perth Or Mandalay. But then at University Hospital, After the room of kidney stones, after burst Appendixes helixing in their jars, after halls Of peopled gurneys, after the operating theatre, Masks & flailing arms about a blue slit sheet, nurses On bleachers bent to their notes—the last room & its burnished cylinder Blossoming a high-school girl’s head, permed, Barretted, whispering; eyeliner traced upon it by a studious RN. Birdlike the head sips a Dixie Cup, lipstick spackling its rim.

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viii. Year Zero The level of political education in our eminent armies is, perhaps, not yet established . . . Canto LXXX

A pirate copy of Titanic, subtitled in Mandarin, Quivers grainy from the VCR. The hut is scorching. Bandoliered machine gun-toting boys sip Kirin As seawater gang rapes a chandelier. On the porch The crew from CNN await their turn To film the bedroom & its scoop— Pol Pot Decomposing in an incense steambath. Someone’s Dyed the hair & rouged the cheeks: betel nut Colored streaks inch down his face. Evil Marinates, slack-jawed, while the boys adjust the vertical: In steerage the Micks & Sheenies drown. The hull Turns upright & the icy water foams the huddled Masses into points of light. The future Sets its Uzis down, & grins for one more picture.

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ix. Pisan Cento

And they dug him out of the sepulchre, A man on whom the sun has gone down. Cloud over mountain, mountain over cloud, The suave eyes quiet, not scornful. In tensile, in the light of light that is the virtu I surrender neither the empire nor the temples plural, Nor shall diamond die in the avalanche. What whiteness shall you add to this whiteness, what candor To study with the white wing of time passing, With the sun under its melody to the compassionate Heavens? Nothing matters but the quality of affection In the end. To have done instead of not doing, This is not vanity. The guard roosts. I am noman, my name Is noman, a man on whom the sun has gone down.

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x. At the Grave of Ezra Loomis Pound: Island San Giorgio, Venice, 2009 Down, Derry Down / Oh let an old man rest. Canto LXXXIII

Noelle fevered, propped on hotel pillows, sipping consumme. So it’s just the boys & me today, first the beach, Then sarde fritte, the haughty waiter solemn, But grinning as Jake devours eyes & all. From Google Earth I jot directions. Then the vaporetto: 60 Euros Docks us by your headstone, the boys now hopelessly antsy. From the earth your name looms up, ivy & wisteria Tendriling to erase each letter. & the offerings: A “River Merchant’s Wife” in German, rain-blotched, by a 100 lire coin— Octobre 1922 below a fascist axe & bundled sticks. Paradise terrestrial: eroded to feckless emblems of your passion & manifold hatreds. Beneath my shoes the ivy snaps In a century where I pray your honeyed lines may outlive your opinions. Shrieking, the boys play tag around the mausoleums.

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Anniversary Poem after Crane and Wyatt

Twenty years of 3 a.m.’s, the night waking, the room awash in clock-glow. But always your breathing, coverlet-hushed & steady beside me, steady— face to my face, as though to also steady me, & steady all panic, the days’ pentimento, the small (though steady) percussive travails that make up two lives long conjoined. But also joy. Subtle tap of ring against ring In sleep. & engraved within the gold the vow. Meticulous the cursive’s swirl & flow of infinite consanguinity. Permit me, permit me, permit me Voyage to thy hands. & from the pillow you stir & the long love, that in my thought doeth harbor.

—10.12.14

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iii.

Extinction Event: Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908 a photo by Lewis Hine

Propping his tripod, Hine remembers Childhood snowfall in Wisconsin, Flakes careening in prairie wind, A red sleigh skimming a frozen lake, Curlicued breath-mist of two dappled drays. But this is a blizzard of cotton dust From the looms & thirty thousand spindles, Gauze-air, whirlwind of innumerable floaters. The thermometer reads one hundred & three. & for these seven ten-year-olds, childhood Is six ten-hour shifts & on the seventh day They rest, heads nodding over hymnbooks, The drone of temperance & hellfire. But this is din, not drone, the spindles’ Manic prayer wheels, the doffers & the “little piecers,” skittering on hand & knee Beneath the clatter of the looms, Patrolling for clumps of cotton waste. This is weaver’s cough and “mattress maker’s fever,” The mad percussive shivaree & glossolalia. But then, for this moment, it ceases.

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The foremen have gathered their doffers & stilled the looms & spindles— Six boys, a lone girl. The foreman Adjusts his derby, pointing them toward The cyclops eye: Hine’s 5 x 7. They are ordered To look solemn, as if they could look Otherwise. Pulled slide, the flashpan Dusted with power, the sizzle as the room Erupts in light. Where the punctum? Where the studium? To end your life At twenty-five or thirty. Missing fingers, Mangled hands, to walk somnambulant To a sullen dormitory bunk, picking Cotton shavings from your hair, Mattress ticking spat onto a rude pine floor. But Hine has set his flashpan in its case, Broken down his tripod. Fiat Lux. Hine gathers his work & faintly smiles, Adjusting his bowler & making a fist, as if To attest that in this foul rag & sweatshop, In this charnel house of ceaseless

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Motion, his lens might render One fugitive instant of dignity. Light Is required, wrote Hine, light in floods.

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In the Attic

I unzip the plastic bag & they tremble The dust motes—three linen sport coats In the March wind’s updraft. Two beige, One a comic mustard yellow, the sleeves Rolled up—pure Miami Vice. He’d put on Some weight that year & they wouldn’t button. His living room in Dallas. Try them on, Jack said. They look good on you, he said. I carried them with me on a flight To my parents & even wore one to the consult With the doctor: should they discharge my father, Or ratchet up the ECT? Nice linen, Well-cut. The doctor would respect me. On the phone Jack laughed at this, a kind Of snorting Hah! that still said Boston: Ya didn’t wear the yellow one, I hope. We’d been editing a book, for he loved Projects, collaboration, eight-ball he’d always Beat me at, George Dickel neat but sometimes With ice—two cubes only. On the shag carpet floor, 150 notecards for the book fanning out

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In classic Jack—systematic & mysterious As Kabbalah. His jokes were legion, usually At his own expense. He wounded easily, Though about that he’d stay quiet. He saved My ass on various occasions & his poems Were pathos, Borscht Belt, Rumi In an accent of long vowel, dropped r. People would do well to read them. & the jackets: I think this is the one I sported at the consult, saying yes To the shocks, duly signing forms. I slide it from the hanger & of course It doesn’t button. Inside the chest pocket, A wallet-sized black & white: Jack Without beard, the second wife who didn’t Stay long, his son caped in Teenage Mutant Ninja, the one Jack buried. The ghost jacket, for an instant, Brings them both alive. Though to claim that, Jack would say, is a lie Even elegy cannot make good.

for Jack Myers, 1941–2009

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Chalk Line

Everything necklaced with yellow caution tape, The theatre seats with teal fabric, cupholder Chair arms, circles immense to permit the insertion Of Big Gulps, one of which is spilled, congealed against Gray cement, a chalk line encircling a floral Covered iPhone, which begins to chime the start Of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” causing the CSI sergeant Bent to her seat, tweezers in her latex-gloved fingers, To startle, dropping a box of cotton swabs. She readjusts her pony tail, tweezering a forty caliber Bullet from a chairback & sealing it gingerly Within a baggie. Spread about the auditorium, Mainly in the aisles near the exit doors, a dozen Shapes of human forms, rendered also in chalk, Twelve Giacomettis & Fallen Gauls, Chiaroscuro-ed, ectoplasmic, the half-corporeal shades Of Virgil’s underworld. Princely Aeneas—his hands Can pass through them, his hands can pass through The sorrowing shade of his own father. Chalk line Rivering the dank cement, chalk line threading Innumerable needles. Chalk therefore the tenor,

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Bleeding-out the vehicle. The Dark Knight rising At midnight above the Cineplex neon Is the tenor, a gun show M&P15 the vehicle. The sergeant sips a Diet Pepsi, another cell Begins to blink & vibrate. Before her, sixteen Uniforms, all bent to probe the theatre seats & floor, The blood-spray patterns’ turbid action paintings, Documented, digitized, the minute endless research Meant to redescribe suffering, encase it In a seven-hundred-page report. Bewilderment The tenor, justice of a sort the vehicle. She remembers the October she was seven. This was Nebraska, the ’70s, the one weekend a month Her father had custody. They paid five dollars At a makeshift booth & before them the corn maze Seethed & hummed in the autumn squalls, The brown stalks looming, the path all switchback & sinew. In the truck, he’d been sipping from a flask & when they stopped—it must have been The exact center—he pulled the flask from his pocket again. Cover your eyes, he said, & count to fifty twice.

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He let go of her hand; she counted. & now came The endless minutes of scurrying alone, dead-ends, Crooked bypaths, the crackle of dead stalks beneath Her shoes, the mole-colored ground, wet with a soft cold rain. She lay down & wept. Two women found her— One, she remembers, wore a yellow baseball cap. Back they led her through the hell-mouth & they found her father passed out in his pickup. A State Trooper took her home. She saw her father A few times more before he drank himself to death. But they never left her alone with him. & now her double shift is over; the sergeant packs Her tools into a gym bag, the latex gloves unpeeled & deposited in a trash bin formerly meant For popcorn cartons, used 3-D glasses. She walks The cordoned, guarded halls into the lobby & the stabbing glare of Colorado summer sun, past The endless flower ramparts—floral wreathes twice As large as a person, daylilies hissing with bees, 7-Eleven roses, all piled half a story high, from the doors To the end of the parking lot, everything in various

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Stages of rot, a blossom charnel house, a floral Great Wall. They tell her that tomorrow or the next day, the county Will come at night with a trash truck & a backhoe & bulldoze the festering heap away.

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Ichor From the clear vein a stream immortal flow’d Such streams as issues from a wounded god. Pure emanation! Uncorrupted flood, Unlike our gross, diseas’d terrestrial blood . . . Pope’s Iliad, Book 5

Diomedes in his rampage cuts a hundred Trojans Down into the dust, a bulldozer Knocking over pines for another subdivision. He is chainsaw, IED, a six-foot spinning razor, An Ugly Customer. In a helmet topped with boar-bristle, He’s hacking men to bits, his sword a red blur & then he spies his prey, already spread-eagled, For a fellow Greek has flung his spear into the hipbone Of Prince Aeneas himself; its point burrows to marrow. Spurting arterial blood, face against the dust, Aeneas moans & the blackness, Death’s imperious Stygian Cloud, inevitable now, settles everywhere over him. What can you do then but call out to mother, begging To die in her arms? Diomedes strides forward in his fury. This is what he came here for —to finish off a prince. But the mother Aeneas wails for is Divine Aphrodite, Who descends to the plain, all backlit glow & milk-white breast. There, there, little one. She lifts him upright But warlike Diomedes in his rampage doesn’t care shit For the Goddess of Love. He lifts his sword & thrusts Toward even her, now tugging Aeneas heavenward so that

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He may live to fight once more. & thus Diomedes gets A piece of the Immortal Goddess. She raises a hand To parry his blow & his dazzling sword cuts it almost To the bone. Ichor—“that which runs in the bless’d divinities’ veins”— Goes spewing forth from the exquisite wrist. Imagine Aphrodite’s shriek: never has she known of pain Beyond the nip of a love bite. Diomedes’ grin— It rictus-es his whole bronze-helmeted face. Some speechifying now: “How puny is your passion, Queen Bitch, your allure & musk. How does this other wetness Feel upon your gorgeous fingers? How it must sting. Amor? Agape? We terminate them with Extreme Prejudice, Power our aphrodisiac. Screw freedom, screw license. For tenderness we trade the gouged eye, the arm Severed off & quivering a moment on the dusty plain. Go back to the boudoirs of Olympus. Stroke your storied quim Up there & leave us be.” & thus the Goddess, Weeping, returns to the abode of the Olympians. In Syria, the controls of “The Flying Carpet” Have three settings. The ride commences at 3 a.m. The Shabiha agents take you shackled from your apartment To an undisclosed location where they hose you down. Setting One: they fumble with the electrodes— Just enough wattage so you don’t pass out. Give us some names.

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If no names are forthcoming, Setting Two & a rubber hose— Against the legs at first, then the feet & genitals. You want to cry out but you seem to have no voice. No one, it’s said, survives Setting Three; the controls Ratchet up to the Red Zone. Here the Goddess Cannot intervene. Diomedes the insatiable, Sweating in his uniform, grins & fidgets With the glowing dial. The brazen son of Tydeus Smokes & contemplates. Diomedes the insolent, Bravado-drunk, berserker, inching the dial to Six As he yawns & clips his nails. Dial to Seven. To Eight. Diomedes the bestial, the hellhound, the furious, His jackboots gleaming as his fingers take the dial again.

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Concerning Pan Of higher attributes he has none. Oxford Classical Dictionary

No known charm or talisman against you. Not even yellow Xanax a-tremble in my palm, its hue unknown in nature, though it might be found in glittering rows at Home Depot or Benjamin Moore: a paint chip christened Goldfinch, Corn Maze, Lemoncello, California-something. Wash it down with water, which roils & heebie-jeebies out the tap, synced to my own hands’ tremor & quaver. Ten years of a harmless little death. Spontaneous always, but never a quickie. Stroke approaching at the big box store. Aneurysm in the National Gallery. Massive coronary, grocery aisle— Northern Spy or Red Delicious as a last conscious thought, knees giving out, Ziploc of deli Swiss falling to linoleum as a Whole Foods clerk with beard-net reaches out to steady me. Or summer noonday, sleep mask & the windows shuttered, in cold sweat waiting for the rumors of my death to be exaggerated, hearing through it all the faucet drip, the ceiling fan deafen the room. & once, in a classroom—no joke— aphasia while teaching Gertrude Stein. Feral, crafty, stinking son of Hermes, must I invoke you again? O goat-footed patron of shepherd & alarm, of grotto & ink-dark cavern, you lord your Arcadia like

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the corpulent licentious Kims of North Korea. Always mad to couple or confound. From the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, they dug you up in marble, copulating with a she-goat, improbable missionary-style, the creature’s eyes as fearful & stunned as Leda’s. & woe to those who disrupt your afternoon naps, the unwitting herds of sheep or cattle who wake you as they munch the clover on the rooftop of your den: thus you curse them with panic. Stampede: a cliff to plummet from, a river current to bear them down to Hades. No charm or talisman. The yellow pills’ reprieve is slow to come. My hands around the water glass are shaking as I practice deep slow breaths. God of stench & musk, how well you know our recent century where art & terror have so freely & relentlessly conjoined: the torturer’s tools, the artist’s palette & even your defeats are blessed with serendipity. Spurned by Syrinx— Virgin nymph, disciple of fleet & chaste Diana—you gave chase to her through all Arcadia’s crevasses & vales, wearing your pine-needle barbed-wire crown, of cloven hoof, impeccably swift. & when she prayed to the river nymphs to save her from your jism-y embrace, they changed her in pity to a hollow reed, one among seven

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which you grasped, confused—though each reed when blown upon produced its own long mournful note, a wail like a yearning & tremulous chord struck by Clapton or Albert King. Stubborn nymph, which note is your cry? For I will make you weep unendingly. Now, each day, you shall be my captive audience. & thus with wax you bundled the reeds within your hands, thereby fashioning the Pan’s Pipe, its whistle thundering out across Arcadia. Clever you. Clever you. & fuck your smug virtuosity. I stare from the porch to a summer night ablaze with fireflies, heartbeat slowing in the pills’ benumbed release. Dumbfuck Goat God, which hollow reed, singing ever shrilly, is David Wojahn? Odds are you’ll guess wrong.

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Extinction Event: The Book of Revelation, as Interpreted by Link Wray “apocalypse”: from the Greek, “to unseal”

The Wormwood Star has ascended bloody, not above John’s rocky Patmos, but over rural Maryland, over a converted chicken shack, now a kind of recording studio. It is 1971 & the Beast who Spake Like a Many-Scaled Dragon is neither Nero, nor Claudius, nor Vespasian, but likely Richard Nixon, his bile leaching out onto reel upon reel of black acetate. Changed yet unchanged is the narrative, unvarying the prophecy, here to be uttered by the hallowed one-lunged caterwaul of Saint Link Wray, over an amp hewn lovingly from junk shop parts & wreathed in his signature bent notes & feedback. Link’s seen fire, fire & brimstone, fire & brimstone fallin’ down upon my head. Fire, Fire, blistering fire. The sanguine Hunter’s Moon has risen, dumbfoundingly immense. Record button crimson as well, meters like a mad array of Geiger Counters. His brother offers percussion— gravel shaking the sides of an aluminum bucket. The dirt floor dust is rising as he wails fire as well, not precisely in harmony. Link sweats beneath an embroidered headband, to honor His Shawnee blood. Changed yet unchanged is the narrative. Last week, at the entrance to the multiplex, a pimpled Jehovah’s Witness foisted his Watch Tower into Jake’s now-almost

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man-sized hands. “The End of the False Gods is Nigh.” A cartoon Satan, sprouting regulation horns & tail, clutching a globe within two claw-like mitts. We were told, of course, to have a bless-ed day. Coming home from three endless hours of dystopian shoot ’em up, of Jennifer Lawrence bringing down a phalanx of attack-jets with a single dexterous arrow, Jake asked how the world would really end. If it does, it won’t be soon, I lied. & today, at my desk, Saint Link berates my answer. That Coca-Cola Sign, it’s a’ blindin’ me. Feedback, feedback, the signs do abound. In Paris, a severed blown-off thumb & bloodied scraps of hijab cloth allow for the suicide bomber’s positive ID. The grievous subjectivity of prophecy: John the Revelator & his smoke & mirrors, “brother & companion in tribulation.” Where then are the sacred texts? I open The Lost Tribes of Tierra Del Fuego, to witness the known world of the Selk’nam vanish to a cache of poses struck before the camera of Martin Gusinde. It is 1923. His mission: bestow on them the Good News of Jesus the Christ. The countdown to oblivion is almost complete. They are performing the Tain Ceremony, lest their boys enter manhood vulnerable to beasts of prey, to hungry ghosts & the cunning

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malevolent shaman who inhabits the moon. Yet the Selk’nam practice a sly psychology. The boys must dress as all the vile spirits of the ancient lore. The purpose: to render such figures comic, powerless, forlorn. Here stands the demon Xalpan’s child, daubed entirely in red ochre, then spattered with goose down, as though tarred & feathered, a hazmat suit gone feral. & here looms Ulen, the Trickster, body swathed in loblolly & white horizontal stripes, prepared from the bones of the dead. Conjure a French sailor’s shirt, the wearer drunken, hatted with a lampshade. & the trio of Shoort Spirits, naked but for suits of mud, then spangled with a firmament of bone-meal stars. I turn the pages & Saint Link carries on. He has found himself in the pines, in the pines in the pines where the sun never shines. The crackle & spit of his Telecaster is a breadcrumb trail, leading him finally home. O let the unsealing be finished. O let me shut the book upon this all. The apocalypse is always personal, which is one definition of art. The apocalypse is never personal, which is another truth entirely.

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Occupy The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor. James Jerome Hill, aka “The Empire Bulder”

From this height the tents, 67 stories below, Are gaudy postage stamps from countries too Third-World To call exotic: Mozambique & Cameroon, Burkina Faso. The banners & signs are writ on microfilm & all patrolled By PD helmets. 50 paces & a Stickley sofa separate My wall mirror from my desk. The markets in Asia— A good thing—are up again today. Yes, I understand want: Want the one thing & you want another, another. We’re rajahs Of want, all of us & you six-legged things who hiss & scurry below, your jealousy masked as rage, o you want it want just as dearly. In my lifetime I have purchased 14 houses, 11 condos, Various cigarette boats, kilos of coke & a slightly used kidney by no means cheap. Needle, needle I’m the camel. I famously spit & the teaching is bunk. I’ll pass through your eye & I’ll gouge it out.

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Watching Fox News on the Holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. Oh if I had my way, If I had my way, If I had my way, I would tear this building down Blind Willie Johnson

i. Undated Photo of My Mother with a Wallace Button & all her fears, Depression-forged: myriad & general but at times excruciatingly specific. Malcolm, Adam Clayton Powell, Cassius on the cusp of Ali. Liston, though, she allowed to admire, a kind of siege machine without unearned perspective, enforcer instinct guiding glove & scowl. Our Lady of the Absolute Opinion, my begetter. & my fears too had their irrationality. Appendicitis, brain tumor, a school movie Helen Keller gurgling while she took a soloing Bennie Goodman by the throat to feel the music surge his vocal chords. Her stare—fearful as polio in lakewater. A world steeped in Other. Home from work, how the highballs bewitched her, the talk turning Polack & Dago, welfare mothers bedecked in sable, legions of offspring, nappy-haired in the backs of Fleetwoods. Then the ice clinking softly to Johnny Carson, his golf stroke, the large guffawing sidekick. ii. Business Week Photo Feature: Rupert Murdoch in His Offices after Celan

From every screen of every wall a figure natters, the hair Transplants a work in progress. Let us drill For the hate that fuels us. Strip-mine for it, Whole West Virginia mountains of it Chastened to holes that bubble mud. Let us Erect its plants & reactors. Let its

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Pipelines cascade, its buried cables crisscross Their Manifest Destiny, California To the New York Island. Let its minions Roll it on their tongues in congressional offices, Its taste metallic, burning the nostrils Like crystal meth. Semen as nectar Your minions swallow till they choke. O hate Is a Proud Aussie Master. He plays With his snakes in a room made of glass. Hourly he polls the masses. He plots, he demographs, Assembling craven pixels. O gerrymandered union, He offers the taste of ashes. He rallies The soldiery in torchlight parades. Nightly The burning Reichstag rekindles. The ratings, Dear Lord, creep upward. iii. Photo of a Book Burning, Warsaw, Indiana A white kinetic pyre, attended by shadows, Wire fencing in a red-hot circle—but insufficient To reign in Eros, Heresy, or Other. So The spines flare up. The five figures bent To tend it suggest 1960-something. A head-scarved bouffant clutches a purse. A porkpie blots out PARK __AVILLION.

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Bouffant Two with stocking cap poses An offending title midair, The Keeper of the Flame That must burn steady & long, a sin-heap Of Mayan Codex, Juden-speak, deSade, Great Oz & Holden Caulfield. Snowflakes In negative liftoff toward Indy or Fort Wayne, the heart Of the heart, the Tyger synged & burning bright. iv. Photo of the Governor-Commentator on the Firing Range . . . that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan. Newsweek

The Kalashnikov is warm as bread, oven-fresh & steaming. Smell of oil bluing the moving parts & the body one with the trigger & the kickback, Its heft & recoil. O lord such glossolalia— The Spirit Holy descends upon her now. She is one with It, one with the gunsight, one with Her target—headshots to a secular humanist: Let his wretched frontal lobes implode & scatter the tundra crimson. Memo to Darwin: thanks But no thanks, Satan. Bull’s-eye again. Lipstick Soldier Of Our Lord, long may you rain your fire. Pause now to reload. The midnight sun does never sink. Your hair is seething; you readjust the bobby pins & the bright jewels of shell-casings litter the ground.

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v. Suburbs I tell them not to make snow angels, but only one of them obeys. No need to lock the car here but from habit I push the button anyway—a small gold seizure of light, a low bark from beneath the hood. We are late for piano. We take off boots & coats in the foyer. Today’s lesson: Ode to Joy. She polishes the baby grand with Lysol wipes. Luke beside her at the keyboard, Jake with homework beside me on the sofa. Above the mantle, Lee rides Traveler in defeat through the streets of Richmond. Behind him, a regular on foot, carrying the lowered Stars & Bars. G, A-sharp, C. But my history’s uncertain: maybe not Richmond, Richmond would have already burned, & the caption’s too far to see. Whole note, quarter note, half. This month’s unit: Ancient China. Color in the faces of Emperor’s Terra Cotta Army. The length of the Great Wall is a) 300 miles, b) 6,000 miles, c) 3,750 miles. Dark lines on the faces, to indicate ferocity. Sometimes my history’s certain, specific. John Brown at the gallows: “I am ready at any time. Do not keep me needlessly waiting.” Deliberately, they’d made the rope too short. For five minutes the body convulsed. Beyond the black-lacquered Steinway, a cardinal rising from the feeder. “It is ‘c’—3,750 miles.” Whole note, quarter note. Closure is a check for this month’s lessons. Finally the snow-plow, its rumble & the flashing amber, the church-bells sudden & muffled. Again the cardinal, alight on the car-hood. I push unlock & he startles to the snow-fringed pine.

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vi. Wherein Glenn Beck Commandeers Eight Screens upon the Weight Room Wall White faces, white faces, The President Detests Them. & this face is putty, roseate in its zealotry. He is Father Coughlin, bloated skull & wire-rims. He is Ez on Radio Roma, frothing at International Jewry, Lindbergh gone chubby on the red meat of America First. His words pour forth like water down the throat Of a Pakistani cabbie, chained to a plank & head-slapped by a Blackwater doctor, innocent No more. Tears down his pinstripe—a lachrymose cascade. He Loves This Country & the Yahweh of Leviticus: We shall smote the Ones Outside The Tribe, For to slay them for Thee is a Psalm of Praise, We are the rearing cobra’s hood, Medusa-ian & coaxial. We are toxicity, the Public Lie gone viral. vi. Photo of King Shaking Hands with Sam Cooke Prior to the Recording of “A Change Is Gonna’ Come,” June, 1964 A studio tour: Sam instructs The Reverend Doctor On how to grip the kettle drum sticks, The ones that will aggrandize and I go to ask my brother O brother help me please. They shake hands with the strings & French horns, the orchestra crowded below The control booth where King will stand Through all eight takes. Sam grins & allows

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He’s got that white kid Dylan KO’d. “Better, Rev, than ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’” & the strings now soar, O I was born on the river In a little a tent & like that river I’ve been runnin’ since. King nods his head; Sam removes his cashmere sweater. Six months later he’s shot dead—in one shoe & a raincoat, A beat hotel. But today the train’s a rollin’ on to Gilead. vii. King Integrating the Albert Hotel, Selma, January, 1965 In the photo he’s a gray fedora—side view, Nose to nose against the desk clerk’s scowl, Who is vest & crew-cut, poised above a ledger Hulking as the Domesday Book & angling the pen He will not share, King’s own pen clutched tight, Wrapped gavel-like, all the tension & the terror Channeled into knuckle, taut concentric fingers, Nails luminous against the marble desktop. Beyond, eleven cropped faces, a jumble of arms disembodied, a trio of mikes aloft. Beyond, Doric columns slithered green with ivy, The granite steps where James B. Stoner

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Of the National States Rights Party Asks to shake the Reverend Doctor’s Hand Before slamming five clockwork blows To his chin—& when he topples, Kicks to the groin so fast they’re scarcely seen. Of this, no photos survive: King Lives on three years before assuming This position once again & finally. Jump-cut to midnight & Room One One Seven, Beneath the prints of Alabama’s grand plantations, Wallpaper a-bloom with blue fleurs-de-lis, King in his underwear is shining His pair of orange-peel wingtips, The T-shirt & bandage on his chin, Ghostly in the Motorola’s shimmer. Sign-off: the National Anthem, Old Glory Unfurls before a squad of Super Sabres, Then screen giving way to test pattern,

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Then cuneiform of snow. Static like bacon in a sizzling pan. He stands to switch off the power & now the room goes finally dark. viii. Exhibition of a Section of the Greensboro Woolworth’s Lunch Counter: National Museum of American History Still the four stools gleam, the counter sliced thin As altarpiece, the cushions alternating Teal & salmon, cracked or slashed to expose The ivory cotton viscera, the chairback lines Severe & sleek as grilles of big-finned Buicks & all enfetished to a burnished severity. We’ve come from the lunchroom. Pulsing from The cafeteria walls, the Tea Party faithful march On Washington on seven screens: a placard With the President’s face, riddled with swastikas Like smallpox. They claim a hundred thousand though The easy parking belies this. I tell the boys to focus on Their chicken tenders. A muttering head, A $200 haircut necromancing crowd size. Essential now to conjure back

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Specifics. The photo—Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair. Joseph McNeill, David Richman. College freshmen In their 1960 London Fogs, the close-cropped conks, All turned half-way to the camera, diffident & terrified in equal parts. The soda jerk, Black himself, head bent & turned away From the classmates he’s refused to serve. & the drink dispensers—Coke & Pepsi both! HOT CHOCOLATE 10 CENTS, GET YER DONUTS PIPIN’ HOT, sugar dispensers, The salts & peppers sleek as Titan missiles Against black ashtrays spouting ads Too small to discern, the pocked & silvery Canisters to churn the shakes & malteds; The goods, the goods lit up, like sun-motes On the far banks of Jordan. Who has summoned you, To wade this water, reconnoiter the Land Of Honey and Truncheon, of firehose, The Dobermans a-snarl, the levee clay Where your brethren shall lie entombed, Noosed & silted as the Grauballe Man,

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The Windeby Girl, her blindfold slitting her scalp For two millennia? But o the tresses Of Samson have grown long once more. They fall upon his shoulders & in the guttural wail Of Blind Willie Johnson, his gallows speech Is prophecy. The bottleneck careens the frets: O if had my way, O if I haaaad my way, if I haaad my waaaay, I would tear this building down.

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Jefferson Composing His Bible I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 13, 1813

Candlelight, straight razor, ruler, an umber King James. Nearly midnight: unwigged, in his nightshirt, He’s set his pantograph away & the house Slave Ursula has brought him port, a bit of Stilton. Jefferson is raising Lazarus, four days entombed— O take away take away the stone. Mary redacted, Who goeth to the grave to weep there. Redacted too The one that was dead, the one bound head & foot With gravecloth, his face bound about with a napkin. The one who in Giotto stands flanked With a crowd who mask their faces—not to hide their awe But to endure his stench. The one who Caravaggio props naked in the arms of thugs, Rigor-mortised to cruciform, but goldening as The wonder-working arm reaches out. Lazarus come forth. & Jefferson’s razor commences its business. Along the ruler The slicing begins: John 11 entire. The gash extended, Acute & violent as Open Heart, though when he cuts His index finger, three drops of blood—it must be the port!— Ensanguine the chief priest & Pharisees As they plot in the temple to take Him away.

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& the operation is complete. He sets his hexagon Of superstition down, one more blow for reason, For the reason that shall free us from The mere abracadabra of the mountebanks Calling themselves the priests of Jesus. Marginal, Illiterate, a barefoot rabbi who spoke some truths. June at Monticello, the window by his desk stands open. Susurant click of cricket & peeper, a slather of fireflies Darting the okra & broad beans of the kitchen garden. Candle flicker. The night wind gently turns The Good Book’s pages, its vellum windows shorn of miracle. The words remaining—sublime, benevolent, & easily distinguishable As diamonds on a dunghill. O boundless are the mysteries Of the visible world. Pantograph, the quill pen Tempered, the rubied port & its quickening thrall. The razor on his desk sits locked.

for the Rev. Alane Cameron Miles

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Sclera It is likely Homo Ergester is the first human ancestor who had visible sclera— whites of the eyes identical to those of modern humans.

You share the kill, fingers circling a thigh bone

* * *

Shattered open; one hand sucks the copious marrow,

* * *

The other hovers, then strokes the still-nascent chin

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Of your mate. Strokes & strokes. An Olduvai morrow—

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You are guttural whisper, tinctures of noun & verb,

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Pharynx a work in progress. But the eyes

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Are besnowed & watchful. They dart

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* * *

& waver, then fix into consummating gaze.

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Sclera: a-glow & glossy as Multipurpose

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24 Weight, wherein sloe iris & russet cornea stalk

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Their text, more ancient than Runic or Linear B.

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O my beloved, by the windows of the soul we fuck.

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We throw the curtains open, bodies viscid

* * *

With the polleny morn. & how these eyes are locked.

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Lorine Niedecker: The Only Recording, 1970

Tape hiss—that’s what you think At first, making her poem On Jefferson—I rode away from a monarch To an enchanting philosophy— Sound as though recorded centuries ago. But in time you come to know it as The river beyond, the rush of it Spiraling her Black Hawk Island, Her life by water. She has sliced & parceled the words of the great flawed Forefather, wrung them (like a cleaning Lady’s rag) to essence. Send salt fish. U.S Salt fish preferred to all other. Twofold the goal—condense, Condense again, the language carboned Down to diamond, to sand grain impearled. But also the rendering of movement— Fractal & ripple, floodplain upon which stands Her perilous cabin, house built on sand, Wisconsin loam. Susurrus of thunder, trickle

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To torrent. & the endless iced-over months, The cold unspeakable. Agreed with Adams: Send spermaceti to Portugal. We can see the deck, the weathered Adirondack where she sits reciting, typescript A-rustle in breeze, prim gingham dress. She has four months to live. & her own Letter, to Corman in Japan. Strange—we are always inhabiting More than one realm of existence, but they all Fit in if the art is right. Dear Ms. Niedecker, Always I return to a frozen White Bear Lake, 1950-something & you’re still among The living, 200 miles south, cleaning A hospital ward linoleum on your knees, Rag wrung into a bucket. My father, too, among The living. Over frozen whitecaps we edge Our way, pushing—of all things— A wheelbarrow. Tackle, folding chairs, the saw & his flask. We find the spot. The goal: saw the hole

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To a perfect circle. Hard work in January, Ice so thick you could drive a truck on it. We take turns, saw blade spitting Steel-colored shavings, aglint in The almost-sun. His arm moves Furiously. He pulls off his mittens for A better grip. I want the circle perfect, he says, I want it perfect, do you hear?

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Ode to FOXP2 A gene with essential roles in vocalization, speech, and language.

The songbird’s glyph is thumbtack-sized but glowing. Scroll up, scroll down: warbler, thrush, the common crow, Each asserting its location & intentions from a speaker Greatly miniaturized & embedded in the phone Beside the purse on the restaurant table: an app The woman shows the man as their chopsticks Address the Amazing Roll: North American Songbirds, Every species. Coo-coo-ri. Tchoo-Tchoo-arah. A hyoid bone Unearthed in Sinai proves Neanderthal was capable of full Human speech. So the man is mouthing aah; the woman’s Stockinged foot slithers up the inside of his thigh. Here I Am: pinpoint my location. My plumage my plumage. Neckwear fashioned of patterned silk. Cleavage, fishnet & red stiletto, upturned on a bistro carpet: lips ensanguined, Hazed with gloss coo-coo-ri. Utter & call your way to Thy plumage. Yellowfin aslather with wasabi. Napkin To his mouth, the man sighing aah. Aaah & aah to be Continued. The hyoid delicate & avian, vibrating Its own corporeal cry of middle C, enabling Deborah Harry From a speaker in the ceiling to bemoan her heart of glass, Replaced by Big Joe Turner gutteral-ing “Honey Hush”—

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C’mon inna this house an’ stop that Yakety-Yak, enabling The concept of glyph, wasabi, stiletto heel, of the heart Likened to a towel-shrouded wineglass stomped upon Beneath the canopies at Jewish weddings. Enabling— Anno Domini —the concept of 1953. The one a stick-thin Giacometti Man & the nine just a boy, encephalitic head bent down No doubt in sorrow though the five will soon give birth To twins, one to die in utero. & now the caboose of two, Rearing swan, all serpent neck & hiss. Coo-coo-ri, Sing, cuccu. Lhude sing cuccu. Sumer is i-cumen in. Sumer sumer 1953: Sir Hillary & forgotten Sherpa scaling Everest & Watson & Crick unraveling lo the trellised vine of DNA & Michael Ventris, After 17 years of labor, identifying Linear B As an early form of Greek—enabling time travel, Though the House of the Past is jugs of oil, Oxen in the stables of King Minos, a bill of sale for 18 Cypriot slaves. My plumage my plumage, coo-coo-ri, Yellowfin wasabi & Yakety Yak o yes o yes o good good good. My father setting a thin black platter On a whirling disk to hear Roy Acuff tell a beautiful Thought concerning The Great Speckled Bird. I am glad

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To know my name is recorded. He lhude sing is seeing The old year out & foxtrotting with my mother, having Ripped December—one & nine & five & two— From a shotgun apartment kitchen wall. My plumage my plumage. My heart of glass, my early form of Greek a howl Uttered nine months later to the day inside The concept of Miller Hospital, shining on a hill atop The concept of St. Paul, Minnesota, House of the Past. Hyoid, hyoid. Lhude Sing. Here I am Lord Won’t You Send Me. My plumage my plumage amen.

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Notes

“My Father’s Soul Departing”: The epigraph of the poem is my loose translation of “Animale,” perhaps the most famous poem in the ancient world—supposedly written (on his deathbed) by the Roman Emperor Hadrian “Extinction Event: A Cache of Photos of the Last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker”: Tanner’s photos of Sonny Boy can be viewed in Errol Fuller’s Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record. Rice Miller (1912–1965; also known as Alex or Alec Miller) was the second Delta bluesman to adopt the nom de plume of Sonny Boy Williamson and is sometimes referred to as Sonny Boy II in order to distinguish him from his predecessor, John Lee Curtis (1914–1948). Sonny Boy II toured Britain on several occasions in the 1960s, backed by both the Animals and the Yardbirds. The Essential Sonny Boy Williamson (Chess) is a good introduction to his work. “Extinction Event: Two-Minute Photo of the Last Tasmanian Tiger”: The footage of Benjamin referenced in the title can be viewed on a lovingly curated website, The Thylacine Museum (http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/). The Tasmanian tiger was in fact a rather hapless predator. “Atahualpa”: The Inca emperor purportedly also possessed a tunic made from the pelts of several thousand hummingbirds. Phil Spector is currently serving a nineteen-years-to-life sentence in the California prison system for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. “Brief Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia”: This sequence owes a special debt to Jack Shuler’s The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose. “Give Me Orange . . . ”: Nim Chimpsky (1973–2000), one of the first chimpanzees taught American Sign Language (ASL), was raised in captivity in the manner of a human child and was said to master an ASL vocabulary of 125 words. When methodological and ethical questions were raised about Nim’s training, the experiment was abandoned and he was sent to the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma. James Marsh’s 2012 documentary, Project Nim, is a thoughtful examination of the Nim question.

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“Canis Familiarus”: “Living tool” is a phrase used in Pat Shipman’s The Invaders: How Humans and their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. Shipman contends that dogs were first domesticated far earlier in prehistory than scientists have previously believed. “Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry”: Robots are apparently quite challenged by certain simple domestic tasks. In the words of Steve Henn, an NPR reporter for the podcast Planet Money, “For a robot, it’s remarkably hard to figure out what’s going on in a pile of laundry—to see, say, where the underwear stops and where the towel begins. Every pile of laundry is different and remarkably complex.” “For the Scribe Gar.Una . . .”: The word boustrophedon is defined as “the writing of alternate lines in opposite directions (as from left to right and from right to left).” Cuneiform tablets were often composed in this manner. Stanzas eight through ten make use of passages from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “Nineteen Eleven Blues”: The LP that Bishop recommended to Lowell is almost certainly Robert Johnson: The King of the Delta Blues Singers, issued by Columbia in 1961. “Extinction Event: Decoy Birds”: The blinded and tethered decoy birds designed to attract migrating passenger pigeons were also called “stool pigeons.” The proceedings of the Wannsee Conference were documented exhaustively during the Nuremberg Trials. “Study Skins” makes use of several quotes from Reginald Shepherd’s posthumously published collection, Red Clay Weather. “Sinatra: The Concert at Pompeii, 1991”: Several bootleg recordings and videos of Sinatra’s Pompeii concert are in circulation. The Garden of the Fugitives is one of the few displays of the Pompeiian dead that can be seen in situ. “Body Politic . . .”: The two centos included in this sequence derive respectively from The Pisan Cantos and the poet’s egregious Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II. Che Guevara’s hands were supposedly amputated upon his death in 1967 in order to verify that the fingerprints matched those kept by the

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Argentine police, but this fact was never verified. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, upon ascending to power in 1975, declared all calendars and modes of record keeping to be obsolete: hence, “Year Zero.” The material drawn from the Mutter Museum’s collection derives from Gretchen Worden’s Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. “Extinction Event: Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908”: Hine was contracted by the U.S. government to photographically document child labor conditions in the United States, particularly in the South. A discussion of the photo and my poem can be found at http://blogs.archives.gov/prologue/?p=14162. “Concerning Pan”: The story of Pan and Syrinx can be found, among other places, in Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “Extinction Event: The Book of Revelation as Interpreted by Link Wray”: Link Wray (1929–2005) was one of the great innovators of the electric guitar. The home recordings described in the poem can be found on 3-Track Shack (Ace Records, 2015). Guisande’s photos of the Selk’nam can be viewed in The Lost Tribes of Tierra del Fuego (Thames and Hudson, 2015). “Watching Fox News . . .”: Several vignettes in the poem derive from Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. The description of the meeting between King and Sam Cooke is apocryphal. Sarah Palin was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. This poem is dedicated to the memory of Jake Adam York. “Jefferson Composing His Bible”: Jefferson subjected several Bibles to his cutting and pasting of the Gospels. The pantograph is a mechanical duplicating device, which makes use of a wooden parallelogram. Jefferson was one of only four Americans to own one. “Sclera”: Prehistorians are divided as to whether spoken language emerged as the result of the evolution of the sclera or vice versa. “Lorine Niedecker . . .” : The audio recording mentioned in the poem can be accessed at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/.

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“Ode to FOXP2”: Watson and Crick, Michael Ventris (the first to decipher Linear B), and Sir Edmund Hillary all made their great accomplishments during the summer of 1953. I was told by both my father and mother, at different times, that I was conceived on New Year’s Eve, 1952–1953.

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Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publications, where some of these poems previously appeared: Agni: “My Father’s Soul Departing,” “Ode to Fox P2”; Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day: “For the Scribe Gar. Una of Uruk, 3,000 B.C.”; American Poets: “Jefferson Composing His Bible”; Blackbird: “Absolute Rhythm,” “The Book of Revelation as Interpreted by Link Wray,” “Canis Familiarus,” “Concerning Pan,” “Give Orange Me Give Eat Orange Me Eat Orange Give Me Eat Orange Give Me You,” “Sinatra: The Concert at Pompeii, 1991”; Brilliant Corners: “Nineteen Eleven Blues”; Chronicle of Higher Education: “In the Attic”; Cortland Review: “Atuhalpa”; Kenyon Review: “A Cache of Photos of the Last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker”; Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Translation: “Lorine Niedecker: The Only Recording,” “Anniversary Poem,” and “Sclera”; New England Review: “Chalk Line”; New Ohio Review: “Ichor”; Ploughshares: “Two-Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger”; Provincetown Arts: “Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry”; Shenandoah: “Briefe Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia”; Southern Review: “Watching Fox News on the Holiday of Martin Luther King  Jr.” “Body Politic: To Ezra Pound in Purgatory,” “Bivalve,” “Study Skins,” and “Decoy Birds.”

“My Father’s Soul Departing” was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribners: Terrance Hayes, editor). “Jefferson Composing His Bible” was commissioned for the anthology The Mind of Monticello: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, Lisa Russ Spaar, editor). “In the Attic” was reprinted in The Hide and Seek Muse (Drunken Boat Publications). “Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908” was commissioned by the National Archives and the Academy of American Poets to commemorate National Archives Month, 2014. Special thanks are due to my stalwarts who read and commented on these poems: Noelle Watson, William Olsen, David Jauss, Cynthia Huntington, and Kathleen Graber.

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