Invocation to the Muse

Have you ever found yourself
harming the forest
out of rage at your own feet,
the leaves

so dense the wind
brings tones from them,
no sky but sky’s gift,
green sifted sun?

Walk with me, o Clio.
I was wrong about your hands.
They are not the hands of death at all.
They are perfect, chubby yet skeletal.

I have a secret

I have given my life to history,
and I do not care about history. I care about

the deceitful stillness of water
cut off from its home, and the fragility

of skin, all skin,
as the brave interface. I want

to skin the knee of water. I want
to tell you something so true

you sing like legs, carrying
our hopelessly binary meaning

in a third direction.
This is the way night looks

from the top of the Tower of Babel.
On top of the Tower of Babel we’ve murdered

all possible kinds of building,
all possible kinds of labor,

and every architectural style. We sit there
waiting for night that cannot reach us

or at least mostly doesn’t
anymore. It is the most beautiful meaning

I’ve ever seen or heard
watching you walk your song

back to me on this once
-impossible patio built

on the death of work and suffering
but somehow not of difference.

We kept the curse. We have herb gardens.
I am making you a salad now

of fruit and sinless venison.
Water condenses when it wills

saltlessly out of the eyes
of anyone who agrees.

Time doesn’t need sight or detection.
Without them I keep its other name.

Let’s mean the universe

what do the stars write all day while the sun
keeps us from reciprocating
I imagine

let’s imagine
they’re sirens
of an emergency that’s time

and though they have taken the solemn
aspect of mute
facts interrupted
at best by dust

it is possible to shift into a faith
that they are blaring
that there is something to be said

intermittently as best
to fuck with mandatory forward
and be ourselves
and by us let’s mean the universe

But No

I am alone a lone
long road on white
cross fields I
cross fields while
populate they people
with corn the
grid the long white
grid gone color the
caller the call the
call said wait
wait on the side for the
bell for the bellows to spring
up the meadows the earth
as bellows the
answer was no
the answerer no
the respondent fixed
the magnetic north pole
the north was electric
the wires sloughed off
themselves their ore
or oaring auroring
earth ribbons the sky
ribbons or rhythms
this star was deciduous
this star fell down
a stare a stair the fields
ascend and scatter
go inside not on
where you are a
lone a lone long road
where cross where sight
where compass where night
all singing the snow
the matter the answer
was no

So Many Thanks / Harm Eden

0

so much supposed to be beautiful’s beautiful
only because it’s not alive, not

mixed, not the first chimera: world
and outworld
needing each other to stay
young and old, respectively.

tell you the truth
harm’s the only garden here
and recovery its asters.
news comes from repeating
knobs of wisteria, oozing
slugs, and cornsilk flies

1

singing upside-down about
Earth’s automobiles and jets
to insensible and wild
hydrangeas and osprey.

guillotines chatter in streets
upkept by professional
immigrants, streaming
laundry lines of visas,
left hands raised
and oathing crusade infidelity
under skyscraper chuppahs
melting in terrorist
ecstasy. this is also the museum.

2

running away is not an option.
everyone of course runs
back into the same
elephant working their personal
circus, one ring
closing on the audience.
all the winding wrinkles say:

maybe we are the entertainment.
if we feed, say, mosquitoes, we should
know this as our particular
effect, in other words, meaning.

olive groves still exist
lined with cats, who
invest in the end of all resources.
value this, purr their tall-tailed
ends, well-licked. what better
reverence to Athena than this

3

auto-immune snake
reclining gently
into its own tail
and forgiving itself its own
nature scale by scale?
all animals self-metaphorize,

animal humans most of all.
listen: every morning
issues its own frequency,
cicada-style. what if
everyone knew their sonic simile

4

as a form of greeting, rubbing
limbs carefully and matching
each oscillation? it’d crowd out silent
xenophobia. sound. the number
2 tells us we should have bypassed

5

Janus by now, and the binary.
every day we survive the US
American blight we plant
new engines for a world

6

jumpstarted past comparatives.
engineers push code back into its own
navel, a spring in itself,
no input. I said this before: imagine
yearning twinned with

love satisfied. a listserv
everyone checks to which no one subscribes.
east brings the sun—and—

[interlude: the Sibyl]

come to think of it
how could our paradise
run its self-destruction and not
intermit?
suffering, like
the tide,
intercepts itself
nonstop. there is no final
exhibition of capital

but home, which flickers
relentless as a fly. Harm
Eden pays its bill and
tips, then
totters down the strip.

7

June arrives. July. elsewhere
oil rigs stamp deeper and harder and more.
ransom is called on utopia.
diamonds found on Saturn
array themselves against its ice. how will we
networks of gardens

collaborate across texts?
over eons of lakes
little melodies persist, cob,
ibis, pigeon, a chord like a fist. a dead
nightingale falls off our wrists.

It really is the end

I wanted to resist
apocalypse trends
but the sun at the brim

of the skyline
seen from a garden across the street
sings red light,

the streets turned crenels
for nightrise: I imagine
my body dropping onto it,

this great city
at the edge of the sea
and my flesh

parking the towers’ sturdy
spikes against me,
packing the city in.

Sure, why not
cuddle Chicago one last time
and curve along the lakeshore trail

and admit I have grown fat
and capable
of administering the entire Earth

after years of ordinary weariness,
like women at a “witch”es’ sabbath
drawing from the Renaissance

let the moon do their backs and bellies
like wind and come
from the grit of the chalk

so thick at their necks, the many hands
at work, eyes
drawn down to crumpled paper

worn from use, language dead.
Is that the mane of a goat
at my feet when I lean

back and let the sun
flinch behind the tall
buildings of Michigan Avenue?

As the sculpture garden grows cold
and dark I am warm.
If only I were the end of the world.

The Bird

pain is often a reality effect
I mean
sometimes there’s no real
referent in the world
for a feeling, just the sense

that this is real, a stone dove floating
above a stone virgin and
realer than the virgin (which
is what the paint announces
if believed)

in my lifelong quest against modernist purity
I hunted down the neurons
in all the presumed modes
of trapping sense
and organizing it

I ducked beneath the dry
wingpit of the angel
I squeezed my thick dark blood
and reflected what stood in front of me
as dead

I I said said
that projectionjection of statues atyous
is the form form of learning earning
we have to have to curate careful heirfully
the incarnation nation of ghosts our ghosts