lyricism, Neruda insists.
naught more than
beauty of language,
its innate, abstruse

music.

Aesthetic pleasures of this life.

simplicity, Williams writes.
a thing as it is
Faith in the
tactile the tangible.

emotional resonance, meditates
Gilbert. Form is an empty,
lonely house. Also, there
is rock and sun and water.
My first wife swimming under
moonlight in the ocean. My
second wife in our unruly
garden, death growing
surreptitiously inside of her.

horror, Bolano dreams,
the unequivocal horror of mankind;
the hard facts of it;
that we manage grace at all.

nature’s inscrutable hymns,
sings Hass from the bottom
of a valley flowering with
lupine and larkspur and
the lugubrious drawl of
California.

the erudite melodies of
rain, of sun, of wind
billowing itself through
newly dressed trees, of
a lake flirting lasciviously
with moonshine, of autumn’s
first fragrant, melancholy
strands, of quiet snow!

whispers everyone.

knowledge, surmises
Muldoon. A working
history of literature
and linguistics. The
ineluctable modality
of the visible.

Cleverness in
their application.

the migratory birds
low slung in their flight
over the marshlands,
and the fox slinking
fleetly through the wood,
Oliver breathes into the morning.

blow jobs, Updike tells me.
Maybe hand jobs. Certainly not anal.
Now that is for the real heathens.

(What, is anal too messy for you, John,
you bourgeois fuck? Bolano interrupts)

virtuosity, believes Joyce.
Brilliance so incandescent
as to be objective.

Rebecca not loving me, walking
beside me, maybe for a minute
imagining the shape of loving
me, its gossamer texture. Such
slightness. My gratitude at her
presence, my grief at her long
absences. Need and fury and
semblance. The memory of
love, the memory of warmth.

~

In a southern province of India
a girl with lustrous eyes like
basalt has been led from her home
by promises of money, and comfort,
and she is being raped by a man
who answers phones all day, has
no mind for poems or literature,
except it is not rape, because
everything is permissible in this world

She’ll wake up tomorrow. She has a voice
like snow melt, clearer than most. Her
father finds he can’t remember its timbre.

We in literature speak casually of God.