Foolish darkness, have you not heard Stephen Hawkings’s natural voice? My mind is a Piccadilly muddle, surprised at the wrong turns, nullified by the pubs and their mobbing patrons.  The centuries totter on top of each other, unable to rest. In Florence they took me for a predator, though the boys for once were friendly with the pope. A young girl read me a haiku and it was as if I was a bee trapped in a flower, my death an imminent sun. In this moldy shop, cubism is a disorder we value, it comes with the rewards of childlessness. Some say cows have minds, some say monkeys have souls, some say snails understand time. I found myself unable to come for years at a time. Then when the party of ribald sailors visited me, on the darkest Friday of the winter, they promised mountains of snow, and it was like the earth settling to a new equilibrium.  There was a cinema across the street where they showed grainy Buñuel, and I met many a tireless woman there. I would have been a nobody in the Crusades, not even a cheering bystander. Fallow those apples of the Eve-bungled paradise, where my Satan would have fellated the couple, everyone’s hands tied behind their backs. Alice in Wonderland holes, canyons projecting with the eye of a needle and mines covered over with chalk, so watch your step. Since the first shipwrecked sailor, islands have been caricatured, like women too faithful to one man. I mind my own business, sweep the dust off periodicals and newspapers with arms mechanized by medieval talents. The Buddhists say empty your mind, and I say my habitat is that emptiness.  Poof, and like a fountain of dust all the souls that art curated soundlessly fall on a bookmark the size of my thumb. There are trapdoors leading to libraries from other universes, where illustrations are transferred from the mind to the page with the power of will, so watch where you grope. My first wife is buried somewhere here. I thought today was Sunday, or perhaps Tuesday, but relativity has seized me in my ancient boots: What is the day and time and year, name it, you fool!         

Kettle

Chiffon love, rumor from a railroad, holding your nose at breath of waters: fey lovelies have endangered salmon-centuries to habitate short canyons of delight. Fuel stifles Mediterranean longevity, whistling for Seferis’s eyesight. I am a fire-closed chaparral in a Sunday altercation.  Laughter in a pancreatic doze, a hot affair at the farm, windows closed. O steam, O calculus of middle age, O minor steel goddess, give us rest.

Wall

A swollen Che hand, bursting through the other side of history, like dead fish or obedient commanders or Hemingway prose. Volcanoes are passé. Nude beauties squat like primitives, tired of the abuse in the family van. At the last moment the officers change their mind and condemn the poet to instant death. Love, sputtering like a car out of fuel, made over into teal workshops and stanzaic collapse.

Mat

A different piazza every morning, to sell my immaculate body, but the same customers. The elegance with which Françoise Sagan said no to lusting publishers. Only translate! How corny the fees imposed on late-returned books, as though books had feelings. Some women have all the luck, born into privilege, fetish of panthers. I stand still in a world of beauty, rising from the clumps of the earth, like a hard-earned promotion.

Jacket

Priests who outlive Irish intransigence, murmur into the swallowing mouths of canonical texts. I find Derrida comical. On the road to bestiality, many a minor corruption, strengthening the irredentist soul. A deliriously ill bird comes to my window and I act as though it is myth incarnate. Rape and dark don’t go together. I raise my right hand, swearing the truth, and notice the death-defying glimmer in the judge’s eyes.

Apple

Design is a problem for undergraduates. The elegant bushwhacking versus the array of bulldozers. Often I fall ill from contentment. I know how it is inside remote monasteries, where love is memorized in discriminating couplets. No one taught me fear. I know all the circles of hell, which is the most abstract conception of all, its eggshell definition slender as the membrane between truth and lies. I invented freedom.