Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.

find me?

It is hard to believe it has been 5 months! (didn't I just get here?)
Farewell to my favorite Monday place for floor sweeping & wall painting, Women & Their Work Gallery... but just for a while.
(that sounds like a threat, but it's not I swear!)

looking for a throat transplant, if there are any donors available........

In the field is a house

of wood. A window of the house

contains the field.

You can't see far

with a sun in the sky,

with a living-room lamp

at night. Locality is all

you light, and you, as single

as a bed. But there's

no end to dark. The bed is in the clearing

and the clearing's in the wind; the world

is a world among others. Now your cell-stars split.

I turn to my Rand McNally Atlas.

Europe appears right after the Map of the World.

All of Italy can be seen page 9.

Half of Chile page 29.

I take out my ruler.

In global perspective Italy

amounts to less than half an inch.

Chile measures more than an inch and a quarter

of an inch.

Approximately

Chile is as long as China

is wide:

Back to the Atlas:

Chunk of China page 17.

All of France page 5: As we say in New York:

Who do France and Italy know

at Rand McNally?

when by now and tree by leaf

she laughed his joy she cried his grief

bird by snow and stir by still

anyone’s any was all to her

I am real, and I can't say who
I am. Ask me if I know, I'll say
yes, I might say no. Still, ask.

Numbers, Letters

If you're not home, where
are you? Where'd you go? What
were you doing when gone? When
you come back, better make it good.

Numbers, Letters Amiri Baraka

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note Amiri Baraka

thanks to a friend's lit homework, i remembered how much i love this mans words.

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes.

...

Exhaustion is a last line of defense

where time either stops dead or kills you.

It teaches you to see what your eyes see

without questions, without the politics

of living in one city, dying in another.

How badly I would like to sleep now

in the shadows beside real things or beside

things that were real once, like the beaded gown

on the television, like the debut

of a song in New York in black and white

when my parents were there. I feel sometimes

my life was used up before I was born.
...

The Northeast Corridor, Donald Revell

Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you.

Love at Thirty-Two Degrees, Katherine Larson

It has already been one week, and I'm still so everlasting tired; I think this sleep will reach my bones one day and melt them straight out of my body. My brain and metaphorical heart are out of sync. And yet my feet keep moving, even when they should stay put. Even when they ache to be rested, but there's no rest for the weary, and there are many miles to go. Chin up, head up, walk tall, keep moving; all good advice in theory.

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

The Rain, Robert Creely

The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying “Hey! I've been

trying to wake you up for fifteen

minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are

only the second poet I’ve ever chosen

to speak to personally

so why

aren’t you more attentive? If I could

burn you through the window I would

to wake you up. I can't hang around

here all day.”

“Sorry, Sun, I stayed

up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt” the Sun said

petulantly. “Most people are up

already waiting to see if I’m going

to put in an appearance.”

Frank O'Hara
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island

last night my mother was a child, in my dream, surrounded by yellow roses and riding an enormous horse. this is as close as i can get to that feeling again.
next i may have to tackle the anxious dream i have about oceans and overpasses.

You say you want to feel
the words.

You just want to live in Boston
with the painter Martha McCollough.

Sure, I can imagine the thought
of an easel, the idea
of thick paint.

But I want you to explain it simply, clinically.

Because now that I've thought about it, what
doesn't begin with love and death and end
in lonliness?

the acrobat
solo, or even less than solo,
less, because he's crippled, missing,
missing wings,
missing them so much more
that he can't miss the chance
to soar on shamefully unfeathered
naked vigilance, alone.

How summer’s children turn

into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer

nights bid us to get down with each other

on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful

whether or not

it will change the world one drop

c.d. wright Lake Echo, Dear

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

william carlos williams

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Returning Birds

This is not a dirge-- no, it's only indignation.
An angel made of earthbound protein,
a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,
singular in air, without number in the hand,
its tissues tied into a common knot
of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama
unfolding to the wings' applause,
falls down and lies beside a stone,
which in its own archaic, simpleminded way
sees life as a chain of failed attempts.