Is this the twilight of the golden age?
An hour in a museum — and I know all about art.
A day in a foreign city — and I know all cities.
A week with you — and I know love.
(Two more weeks, I know the end of love.)

Our lives are comfortable, long.
We go to the movies, even when no movies are playing.
We keep ourselves interested — games, travels,
sometimes a party — till we die from some accident
or disease, but mostly boredom.

Every morning we proclaim: “The world is within
my understanding.” What’s stopping us, though?
These marble hands. These limestone eyes.
The boiling earth. The swollen sun.

To coax out your spirit I left a fifth of Cutty Sark
on the highboy, paper lantern in the cherry tree,

map of indeterminable coast by the bed, borrowed
Tempest, tattersall-covered, in the bed, full-fathom

five, a crushed Mexican lily, born of paper from
our tax holiday you lined the sea with, a stop-gap,

while I sheltered upstairs on a cool wide spread,
waiting for you to die. Love-making was never easy,

but to transcribe it? Minus a mouth, your tear-jerkers
turn to gas and fly. I sink into your syntax one

antiquated line at a time, as if I understand. But I
never did. You are too much for me, even dead.

in its mottled grays, smelled like Lysol,
smelled like the bitter chemical of cleanliness.
To say “trapped” would be imprecise.
To say “restrained” would be a misnomer.
And on the television hung in the corner

of the room, Bruce Lee had entered the dirt
courtyard, his arms cycling and cycling,
his cry a warning to the men circling the pit.
“Enter the Dragon.” I had seen it before.
But I was not Bruce Lee. I was the man

broken by Bruce Lee’s leaping hands — hands
to the head, hands to the neck. And I know
now that the cracked bone is not necessarily
a broken bone. I know this now. I have studied
long enough to become those men who stood

by my bed in white coats. But still, when I go back,
there is the Dragon and the broken glass, the vertebra
shattered, the body forced to lie still. I know better now.
I know how to throw my voice, how to lie, to reassure
someone he will live, that he will, in fact, not die.

on the skin of the sun, the sun a gold fleck
in the eye of Pollux, itself dwarfed

by smoldering Antares — there is always
something bigger. Later, I pack you into me

like a Russian doll, and we draw the curtains
of our eyelids against the freeway’s distant glow,

foglights combing the walls of our tent
like spectral fingers. Morning reveals

we are surrounded by Winnebagos. Still
the blue-eyed grass hosts the violinning

of crickets, the skirring parabolas of rattlers
through the prairie, a wildness audible

around the edges of the parking lot
we mistook for wilderness. There is always

something smaller to knock out of your boots
in the morning. From the pink constellation

of bites on your ankles we infer
motivation: You’re sweetest here. And here. And

here where the yellow-gray vertebral earth
holds our thumbprints for a moment before

turning to chalk, and here where the glass roof
lets the sky inside, and here where the tourists

snapping pictures are a brief galaxy
of flashbulbs refulgent as stars.

(in some cases the lure dangles, the female simply
eats the male)

nestle in, my sisters left their ghastly asters
on the coverlet.

working tongue. the body replete.
a visceral epistle.

(tear at the membrane
the water fins in)

the little Ophelias crying in their blown-away silks
that the sky

has lied, a hedge has lied.
Then the pool

of chaos — the hawk in clench and drill and
thresh.

How quickly the song goes out of them. The
aftermath, soft,

circular. A labyrinth in ruins
I let the wind blow through

for days.
And then the rain, its soaking drench. Sun.

On the back porch slab the arterial runs of worms
dried

to a beaten silver even the stars might envy.
The trails a Silk Road crawled

body and spice
to the far cities, moist domains. And so now I stand

and the moon hangs as bold
as talon.

The black teeth whisper — narrow seeds — as the column
fills. The dead are not my worry,

slave to song.
Finch: come back. Cardinal, wren.

That one bird on that one branch
like Coltrane

on a cylinder of smack.
From high in the stacks of the power plant

where it nests,
the hawk banks

the pollen-heroined air of the neighborhood, sifts for
sparrow, muscle and throat.

the crystal vases and the crystal bowls
of caviar. You were crystal too,

but hollow and ringing to the finger’s touch.
Around the corner, you heard a Polonaise

pushed from the lungs of some winded instrument.
The sky was soot, or else beet soup. So sour

you bought the one limp pastry at the bakery,
your mouth stuck shut with rose petal jam.

You dreamed of warmth though you were always cold.
You dreamed of fleeing west, of white cites

where the word for hunger had ten synonyms,
and desire was a shopping cart to wheel

across the concrete floor. And everything
was an open hand wanting to be filled.

The wind throws bones
before she rises: the boiled,
the worried, the whistle-clean
and twisted, she asks them

what is happening to her.
“A storm is coming,” old men
say, reduced to aching bridle joints
that go, and go, and nowhere.

Dogs roll over like spadefuls
of dirt and wait for the sky
to weigh on them. Fresh
kills and former lakes
come down. It has rained

stranger things: strays
and swallows, bellmetal
and open doors, red meat torn
from hinges and raised off

like roofs. Eyefuls of anything
pour down and solve the ground
till bladefuls of grave roll over.

II.

It happens the same way
every year: the cliff is a pale
uprising, a man is marked
and eases down the air,

streaming behind a hitch
in the throat, streaming behind
the bridling hair, unsolving
as he falls and falling still

past deep drifts of unbury.
Each year he lands and drowns
an acre of yield. Say the word

died this way, his side
still pouring oxbow and meander;
say he was buried by rising
gorge and red dogs tracked

his old-rose in and out;
and say there was no cave.
Say that rimstone and relief
do not exist, that air bells
are not ringing, that pitch and parts

per million are impossible.
Say there is no rill or shall,
say a hum is not a hill, say
he did not find a well
to give back his bucket-eyed head.