Ambassador Yenin

1/
I should like to take a bow and explain: no, this was not how I meant it. It is rather the case the children you mention
are not removed, but gone, and not returning, as you've heard, from this situation of going, but, with a
brightness unimagined, conducted calmly from the future.

2/
When faced with such simplifying forces, it is often best to apologize. And then, like ripples returning to
compose a central grace, retract more than was enriched in the gesture.

3/
My friend, I am sorry.

4/
In negative stead of our great country, there have been many naysayers; nags; rattlers on the throat;
bursting more often than not with the vitality of a summer confessional. You must trust me when I
say, my friend, they are only correct because they explain nothing. Have any of them dared to visit
the least of our villages without a camera, in the buff, so to speak? Have their foreign correspondents
even once thrown the poltergeist from preconception, protested the tendency to haunt so neatly, nefarious to
invest in the plainest happy residents of things before them? No, I doubt they have the eyes for acceptance.

5/
Poverty. Can one devise a correlate? Showroom hopelessness. They see and say what they write. This
we cannot help. Such is the curse they bring us into, and report from.

6/
Yes, much pride. I will tell you. Our vernal core, rubeberry thickets, the flux of pheasants among
grasses; what more? the knees-beneath-bedsheets effect of cloudshadows flowing over foothills. These are the spirit
of reality. Where the millwheel revolves, water brings rings to bear. An old saying. Mountain-strong, any stream, I invite you friend, out of
mind and memory of that place, to pick one. It will curl you into a stronger representative embrace. The
aim of our creed and our legistators' tempered confluence, has always been that we, people of such a land, would
in our lifeways and means of being plain, aspire to be indistinguishable
from them.

7/
Any charges, rumors without a respect for borders, are often, more than likely, distortions. But these are
men who know how to devour one mother above all others. Trust not. The tourism on them is always thinking.

8/
You have heard, I am sure, of the thousand-plus laborers sealed like close-sliding fish in a
mass ditch
in Yenlo. Or, even more popular among our enemies, of breadlines that taper from city to city. And as a
typical compliment to irresponsible, groundless conjectures, one often hears reports sprout from the
mouths of cowards--that leadership is an elite in the worst manner, massaging bought girls with champagne
before cresting blonde tresses over pillows stuffed not with sawdust, but sweetbread. We must never admit
fantasies among table manners. I hope you should agree.

9/
Of course there is a concern for credentials. Who is this who would speak, without reservation, to convince me?
In answer to that, as with any matter of small-time immediacy, I would have you, my lungs my
recipient, my comrade quiet inside the hour, open all that was given you at birth and look at me. Out of freshness
of affection and with your own friendliness, would this shared stranger deceive you, to defy cleanly?

Gaussless

Pauca Sed Matura wrote the Prince of Mathematicians, a love letter in reverse to the origin within
what would rob him of his death. Instead of a feather, a finger. And hinting to be paper, his bare chest.
The forms are immanent within what pretends to be nature. In the hawkswing, the wind that strips, flutter
intricate with drafts that walked the pauper to the edge of where it fell, to be plucked from specific uselessness.
Held to the forehead, they reveal themselves as the sky-treading creature we imagine. For the striplings
that can't, only pity. Which is rich against the wealth of nonkind. [On the burnished elbow-rubbed old
oak desk, a notebook pulsed by candlelight. His summer's yield, startling subtleties that had never existed.
On March 30th, the heptadecagon. On April 8th quadratic reciprocity twisted from lawlessness. The prior
number theorem of May 31st was crowned with a counterweight eureka concerning positive integers. Each
representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers. This his notebook ate on the 10th of July. While
the sun rose and smelted, and the houses of idiots and slaves gave. Their reasons for complaining becoming
as wraithly beyond reach or index within as their own names. So plainly as they are
they can't find them.]

Mature at Ends

My mind needs the balance of demands, he told her, not knowing which way to agree with. So what does it mean
to be free to intend?

Already having been his example for twenty years, it was easy enough to swim around in. A
ghost-ladder of explanation swallowing an answer. To be the literal playground of a choice.
A limit.

Inside of which the antecedent chain of internalized shadows, ancestral as inhalation inside a sneeze, corral, no
horse, stasis overdose of running minus legs, has a field day containing fulfillment. Both of them were more than they
could handle, but in excess of what they could contain. And this, for lack of a convention more original,
they called love.

Which passing mirrors would echo as dependence. Because it feels like this, so often. With less time to
myself, but fiercely, involuntarily focused, what's left to think about itself, around its often problems, has a
concentrated richness. Where he stops, sated in arrival; departure point where she accepts him.

But I'm not that, I'm the man you are. Feeling like yourself when you're living for me. Not to say I'm some
feminine mist. Walk in, get lost, find yourself. And in the ambience I can't help but provide, since I'm it,
landscapes forever retracting into the helpful, like glory rolling around in the inexperienced, concentrate
on exact details on how life
is bereft.

By the time I'd graduated the fourth grade, and didn't even know it, my sense of constant acceptance
was almost limitless. She said. And so was a return message, with double measure.

So you need it too? And even longer, it sounds like, than it needs you? The turn darkening the length
was surprising him.

Of course. Not a day doesn't pull me through that I don't wonder why I am so definitely inside it. The kids,
their father, the country, its opposite, the people, their abstract collective involved in literal and responsive
war. Every time a cup meets my reach, out of the cupboard, I'm both less and more than its
author--but never exactly the precisely.

The more I think back, she said, hearing his pressure, from the beyond of myself, the less
I can demand it.

The Ballad of Impossible Diogenes

1.

It happens mainly in the chest

what tiny sleepers go to sleep in

is merely empty and whispered only

what only can be to dry gin.

Impossible Diogenes ends usually

looking over lawns, hands huge within

heartblended warbling he

can’t say

exactly what it means—

to live inside one’s abstractions,

to turn away from neighboring

for the sake of larger neighboring,

with

head clicking like sprinklers

chick chinking ice

rhyming in the crystal.

For one is married to the world too:

resurrection music, silence.

Having forgotten the names

and chucked his glasses except for driving,

he lived in constellation mostly

of shapes and sounds, a fuzziness that only

the dog that licked his face knew enough

to slice though, waken the man

and at this point that beautiful madman

laughter like, well, what was it like?

Nothing I can say with this pulse

between holds. Enough to hang

a church on, enough to unhook

a church. A beautiful television set

exploding across anonymous suburban landscape.

2.

Funny, he would say, comfort carrion

from the tub, beside him

the old good dog, gold dog

he could not be unkind to.

Through the window

truthtelling through the absence

of such words,

the loud, raucous, mewing cry,

the harsh kwup and rasping,

the fat stars like incandescent berries—

mind not that they are usually darker

blues and reds,

he could almost taste the night

like a thick jam he could scoop

with his fingers and with the boundless

certainty eroding, the appetites too

readjusting, he could travel almost

back to zero, save for the occasional

appearance at dinner, the looking over

of math homework, the trilogy

of dance recitals—but quickly, quickly

back to the tub, the gold dog, the snubbing.

3.

All this animal’s gathering

and still the prayer for stillness,

withdrawing from the names.

Impossible Diogenes could not make nice,

could not hover reasonably, or recover,

could not keep his hangover

to himself, could not end

an evening with grace after

so much had been gossiped gracelessly

across lawns and shrubs,

could not use forks or knives in a European

fashion, could not stop listing could nots,

could not embrace thread count

as a viable means of living—

having come so far from something

honest, something that did not wreak

manipulation, something that a small-minded man

would not abandon family for

fifty, sixty hours a week,

he stuck to his tub, planted among

the old bikes and lawnmowers,

the tire irons and board games,

the boxes that said Ancient Age

and Beefeater, he would not relent

and only paid taxes to avoid comparisons

with Thoreau, so tired he was

of the rampant need

(wired in our brains, he did not know)

to degrade by connecting, to downplay

or make graspable

grass and fire, love and love's

load of love

comprehensible

(which, in theory, was fine,

there’s nothing wrong with hitching a ride

onto, but in practice was not fine

because few, if any, felt a prevailing will

or could summon the necessary vigor

to go beyond comparison, similarity,

most simply let the case rest

once they felt a reasonable sense of control)

and this he could not stand knowing.

4.

His first speech, given outside a crowded

bagel shop, went: “the truth

is always beyond what is polite,

what seems similar, what is unruffled,

what is wrangled without even the

proper degree of altercation—that, at least,

would make a thing respectable—

into a context that might as well be

the top and bottom eyelids closing

yawningly, onto big sleep . . .

and you must not trust

the truth either.” When they threw

bagels at him like a dog

he thanked them in the way that any

gold dog would: marvelous arcs

of piss ending with spleen rupturing gas.

his first arrest.

5.

The prison letters

to Better Homes and Gardens (an early target)

under the guise of famous manners

columnist Jill Globule, read: “No creation

without creation. Destruction comes later

and if creative is creation named

anyway. Know before going further

that anyway is lazy. And if the eye

is flabby, then the I (and its

subordinates/coordinates) is flabbier.

Likes to be this way though

and therefore applauds an indiscriminate

looking, a half-looking a looking

that conspires with all the other looking.”

Later, in the garage again, his youngest

daughter asked, “What’s the matter, pop,

why are you doing this? It’s not that

I’m embarrassed, I just want to understand.”

He said “trial

by ordeal . . . poppa wants to know

if he can float.”

6.

Her simple acceptance of this response,

her quiet kiss on his rough cheek

ruined one quest for honesty

and started another. He would swallow

their poisonous cares

so that she would not have to.

But changing the world for daughter’s sake

meant scorning the world.

He would solve this problem later, he would save the momentous

times for when

small victories could buoy him

forth. You can only undo so much longing,

endless the aching heart, the swollen machine.

7.

He used the word unquenchable

at inappropriate times, raising the intensity

of otherwise paltry exchanges. In the dry goods

section of the grocery store, i.e., when

Roger asked him how he was doing, he would say,

“Like you, I live in unquenchable burnings,”

then he would grab his huge bag

of cat food and be gone. Quick exits

like this allowed others to quickly convert

the exchange into vapor via chuckle—

but later, it wormed up in him. He could not

masturbate. In fact, nobody in town

who had been in contact with Impossible Diogenes

could masturbate. Meanwhile, he swam in lakes

and rivers, ate perfectly good food

out of garbages,

and they could not masturbate; he smoked

without asking permission, slept

down among dogs he kept

bringing home, his breath

in perfect harmony with their snoring and harrumphing,

the days, the nights

softer now, more human

if such a thing can be uttered,

and still they could not masturbate.

At night, when he used to close windows

and lock doors to keep out what was wild

and promised harm, he altered the context

and values. That fear might sharpen

and disabuse privilege, for which he was

unworthy anyway. That fighting for one’s life

was a gift—either way you know what you are

capable of, you know how far you can go

without ceasing. When the uproar came,

therefore, he was not ready. Sleeping

the sleep of the honest man. They could not

pin a crime on him, only that he had

agitated them, only that he was somehow

bad for the neighborhood, for the property

values, for the children, there was even

one theory tying his behavior to the

failure of lawns to thrive. The was to be

a cautionary step. A precaution. The first

town murder in sixty years.

8.

Still they speak

of him in hushed

tones, a town's

silence

grown filthy as a gown. And what

lasts

through the lasting

is half song, half a heaven

of breathing.

A Lady To Coast A Random Sense of Wonder

She was wearing her American Flag silk dress. On the boardwalk the evening tourist crowd could almost
get lost in the interference she was running. It was twilight. Folks were letting their real hunches and
desires out, to hover a half inch over the delicate hair-haze of their forearm skin; her chestnut double
ponytail brought their own dividedness to light. Where the retina and the genital could meet, and agree--what she
was taking for a walk that evening was everywhere.

Like midges in the head, no one overlooking Bar Harbor could have guessed, she was mixing facts about
that bay with them. Acadia Park founded in such-and-such year, the outlying islands, what they're known
by, chief products brought to arrive and disappear. Just a week ago she'd ejected smoking from her habits.
So there was her first secret: on her left buttock, as a joke, or as a promise for an installment plan, she'd
let her new husband, her new young husband, plant it like a pun, butt of, punchline, right there. Where
only he could close his eyes and think.

In the colonial-style house at the top of the cliff-face, he was there. She couldn't do the same and that
was natural. To imagine him in the foyer asking the hostess how long the wait would be, it would take
open eyes and a modest ambition of looking there. As the porch reverses its angles to shivery kicks of
light. Candles on tables set for couples. In his absence and in honor of his fifteen minutes away from her
she made the gas station hipflask appear and, after ditching a sip, welcome the purse again.

The lesser modes of endearment
are also higher blows of discernment.

Now what does that mean? It means her legs, golden brown, are not examples of summer; but summer an
expanding hem. Like breeze she can feel so much of, it brings from
far-off locales smoothness
from having shaved in the motel that morning. Eagle Lake, California; Jacksonville, Florida; pinpoints
of absorption from wherever these glances and, in the intrusive, longer rough stares she makes returns to the
real a shared nuance. Tonight how many will host a cameo of her goldflake sandals? How many will explain their
withheld directness up her full and, as her husband says, happy thighs, to the destination point where their hands
are waiting? The harbor-clinks and water-slaps on docked hulls sound almost just like them.

She's watching a boy now. Maybe five, taking him in as if her name were Belinda. When mom stoops to
lift his hand off the ice-cream freezer's edge she'll look with the resonance of a Kristin. Babies. Before
or during or after, takes two vaguenesses to phrase them. And then they hit the blastbright open action
and hover out of instinct to crawl. And then, if thirty years are lucky enough they'll get the
pleasure of being
a lightly tanned blonde prizing guests to notice with intelligence. A paradise waiting for her
beau by the wall.

Donna Rising

It was how she knew, maturity, the proportionate cowl, was growing over the once feeling parts of her.
Or should it be bright, sensitive, owed. Equal, mutually when in the presence of others stealing to attain
balanced parts of her. Familiar to take on how to account for when it came and talked. Spent a whole stretch
called life in a shadow. And what was, that past shape too flat and ground-devoted to be filled, but caulking
for the fickle moving vacuums committed to the fixed given out of affection for other people? Time to
be someone, of her own. Eased into the charged sift. Back, reclaimed like she never was before. It took years. It
gradually selected strength without her help. It found purpose where usually once there were only
insecure misbalances. Millimeters, the men that claimed understanding unfolded, revealed how much of
themselves were composed of her. And how could any of it stand to improve, if they were what they claimed--
husband, brother, father? The moving nuances of a great, blind, interchangeable loneliness. Which could
be owed directly to neither--division from prior wholeness or its instability. The brevity of cucumbers, peppers,
tomatoes from her garden, their interchangeability, their frank minor ness, once the clods were washed, were
pedagogically simple. The twists and misgrowths were their only deviation. The rest a phylogenetic
transference. One end of an unseen smile to another. That felt like
teeth all the way.

Eight Good Songs, One Good Meal

Yesterday I argued with a physicist
about the musical qualities
of the words "meandering" and "wandering"--

it took him a while to see the difference
through every fault of my own
way of think-talking
which is something I now accept about myself:
I talk myself onto the highwire,
flip, maybe land on a toe,
then cut my losses.

What this does to, or for, the listener
I can hardly imagine.

Old ninja movies from my childhood
apparently still taunt me
to throw smokebombs
when the odds tip way, way
out of my favor--a man
cobbles together
a morality, doesn't he?

(Ah, that's the idea
I've been searching for
since I started this poem. You see,
I've been writing something
called "The Balled of Ecstatic Morality"
and now I'm wondering if
I just finished it
or just started,
or if, some drafty day,
it will all merge
in the quickly folded hands
that at
once pump
the heart closer, then further from
the unsearchable.)

Oh, and I meant to mention
one of the songs
so as not to confuse intelligence
with coyness, or
Ticonderoga
with silence.

Look, either way,
I declare simple
chicken and rice
and earthy, open wine
an occasion
for tears and laughter.
That Tuesday evenings are
so easily spent
on collapse
must again be
disputed. Who will
form a union
for the ordinary,
who will bribe
the powerful men
who would obliterate
all our simplest words? Good Christ,
sign me up.
I no longer accept
the loss of magic
or the indignity of sense.
I want to crush basil in my hands
and drop my nose in
and come up clean.
Good Christ
are you with me?

Among The Golden

It was fall. A ring of quiet surrounded the small town. The alders, oaks, the moments of trees alongside the
forest-minded road threading through that place had a square of purpose and agreement about them. What
was living was complete
as a home.

It was the nature of that place that it should have neighbors. Inside each this alias in movement,
a private life.
It was something none of them could ever get at. The impermeability of what they fed and refined, speculating,
thinking their way in and through each other, was where they came from. You could even say, respected.
What was left, then, was most of them. Watching these leaves rest.

East Heatherford. What they called it. In any given year of time, and said that way because across any stretch
of the unfelt are bound to be durations measured, beneath the most expressible excess, repeating the smallest
rhythm, exactly what it wasn't. Added to the phantom texture was the fact rarely prodded, there was no
honest town to be East of. Where West Heatherford began the rest of what was assumed to be
kept on going.

It was an expanse that had to be taken on credit. On good faith, as the church-bound had it. As summer
decayed from day into a shed diminished dimness, the retraction of heat from sunlight mellowed
the grasses, spelled gradual arthritis along the leaves. Everything green was drying out. And where was
the water leaving? South, like geese and ducks? Or was it the more literal North--up, where oxygen thinned
and nothing could keep rising? This they made reference to, often, laying their heads back, not so much to
look there as to allow it a better drifting down to where it might have a better chance of understanding.

And the old rubbed their habits together, and the middle aged accepted their lot from the air. The young,
still properties and power of their dream, did not notice. Compromises were clefts in the past of other people.
And that past, being one open piece, alluded to what was apart from them, easy to oppose. And in that way
eased involvement.

It could be October now. Dusk drawing twilight into November. The late workers are tracers in a trickle
through the Douglas firs of the long road. The one that brings them each to their home. It's cold. Chilly.
Some quality of temperature, ambiguity of empty heat, their disequilibrium with the outside though at
this calm of evening it's so inviting. On porches, in a walk beyond the drive, in sweaters that continue
to fit, but without remembering, they can feel shivers trigger the difference. Some have the idea, others
the word-parts, even others the mere reflection, the impression long exploded into a caricature that, upon
contact, is sure to die of the real person, occupying what would otherwise be passive space. The dog runs
headlong, through the dark. Ivy beyond the treeline hisses. A lawn jockey concentrates the quiet.

Though there is rarely any mention of it, no town archive to account for it, never is there a south to this place
than such moments. Are the clicks of utensils against plates within earshot? Has acoustical wideness, skittering
in hitches, landed at last, without recognition, as it is? A twig. Without a foot bearing the body's full weight,
without minding where it steps, nearby. At tables where they don't think of the fact they can't see each
other they are. Chewing past the duration that aligns them.

Without Paper On Which Such Things Are Written

An astute judge of person. A hawkeye even in his sleep. Anyone who'd be called on to describe him
would already have done so under his influence, a product of having been caught in his calculating
empathetic net. We call him, what, a historical figment. From a creative distance the smoothness impossible
against lines made expressive and explicit by being hands that are and then were, always back and forth
forward, in a room loosely rented. Doing the official thing, expecting the gratuitous as waste that gathers
from the various of his country a symbol: potent.

The paperweight. The state stationary. The marbled, intelligent pen. In which penmanship already
marvels as the latent. Waits. Like events ahead of themselves. Clairvoyant as calm
in what are simply nerves gathered
to sense touching. In a half-hour his Secretary of Self will seek through the door. Behind which millions
and advisors will have their say and encourage. These he sees in his pen. A shake. A tap. What color
ink? Any shade that will double erasure of what matters.

Any can do that. Matter. Murder. Both, if you'll notice, split unseemly for a middle. Intention of meaning
bleeding into flesh and out. A home crew of crows, one will breaking from another's--in loose and another
form focused, bodily pinata.

He raises the prosthetic pointer finger to his lips.
Their shhh spontaneously triggered.

Hovering above the desk, or is it reflection's sheen on the woodgrain, florescence's pretension to vision, a
quasi-mist adjusts the air like bedsheets. A wife and a kid and a family. A family and an extended. Blood
relation tethering and tubering, a neighbor. And moreover again: a family. And spread laterally, unimaginable
and inclusive it weakens. Until this fine focused inktip has a collage of generic wills
to command it.

Won't do, he sips. Adjusts the squint. Not feasible. And in that imperceptible, no,
in that small, in that careful
unconscious, collective anti-decision, finds yet another pronouncement as himself. This is
no land of borders, it's a
country. A space in which standing is a righting of all else.

back round soul

Forgive the pardonable: I'm back
in the soul-building
business. Already I feel more playful
and more serious. Like a tightrope
walker. The good news: the world
doesn't end when poets yawn
or take long vacations. However,
that's not entirely true. What ends
is the poet's way of walking out
into the world. His nuances,
his manful playing
with langs and uages.

And anyway, this is what I've learned:

we shouldn't give our lives to poems,
we should give our poems to life

and that grants permission,
the only permission
worth having.

American Vernaculars

A new passion project.

The answer to all questions about one's conduct.

Q: What are you doing (there/in that bar with those old men/outside)?

A: I'm collecting American Vernaculars.

Q: Why do you work so hard?

A: Work is the original American Vernacular.

Fantasia, With Soviets

Checkpoint at the border, snow could be found in a fallen state, outside of which
everyone in the iron was glorious. Ilya burst flakes on his shoulder. Teego timed instant coffee, it traveled. Dusk-important pines. A moment installed in each summit. The shadows of which
when neither were the will of their great country, incarnate, cancered like Hodgkin's a
pointing to the land-crowded dark, popeless. In homesickness' nature--a wife, once a girl, halo of
impulse with more and more, hope, then touched in crossfire of conversation, what village, Kima,
where army volunteers a boy or two, for the mountain. Someone passing through once spoke of
the Urals. The Urinals (my English is in humor, by accident). But all that is now ago. A
tapper's pretend pertinence.

The history of borderlands, if ever written read somewhere, often has this one thing to
comment. A smokebreak invents its genie. Has to. Split in memory of the middle, crushed sprickle
of cured tobacco flake, engineers paper a licked roll to extrude full grown soldier's lips.
Elena's hair. Sentimental on a pillow. Heat's reason inside the arctic. The letters. In a pocket
headed East where he sent them, in a friend, or was he, maybe just out here, exile, in hypnosis.
It was both problems--unbearable and repetitive as roses--to read appearances of when and
where she was still there, limited by a writing style and instant readiness. So good. So, as
they say, attentive. While out here wolves mixed elongations with hunger and huge snow.

All of this is a lie, of course. A story to complicate where he came from. Teego finishes
his Kalashnikov, clean. Dips toast to announce the brown ring. Caffeine. And the promise tomorrow
he'll rise to himself
as someone.

Supervoluminous

Naked as a map on the bed, above covers, she paused for a thought and while doing
scratched her cooch with an emory board. He had been out of the room swatting flies he had found
in a boil on the kitchen window. About the cupboards, fruit flies, at the square sky, houses.
And then out of suddenness, was a metaphor. Houses in rate of flight. Never in a straight line, do
you notice; it's the curls and curves they favor, as if the kind of air they see conforms to currents
we're not privy to.

Absentmindedly sanding down the hard nib of her left nipple. The sandy board. The
heavenly and roomly lights turned low. The universe, the cosmos, karma rolled in a ball; trans-
migration, mutation, evolution, metempsychosis; the unlikely factual features of the platypus.
What she resembles out of when she feels like, from whatever. My foot, right here, that looks
across
the prone length of body; and though there's several feet of distance between and the lamp
porcelain on the desk made makeshift from an old junk piano, they're agreeable in size, aren't they? People
are sometimes like that. Comparable, but at a distance.

Next door, overhead. The UPS flight path. Acoustic reverberations ping-pong between
aluminum siding. Roar of bored hole, atmosphere, splitting the interested atom, at-most-here, then
not much at all. He comes back from the echo end of the house with a handful of the war dead.
Motionless. But higher breathing. Faux-sleep, to shirk the usual itch for sex. So, in the way of only
sometimes consonant lovers, uncups the whole beetle-bumped lot on
her belly.

One second, two, no movement. What was she thinking it was? Breathing had stopped.
And all night, he thought, and maybe in that joined her, would keep on going.

The Transistor is the Original Ghost

when you keep hearing
about yourself
from

somewhere off in the radio space
of birth
not a voice or program
something else
picked up

and it says
you have grown unwilling
to suffer for beauty

is that just some kind of reverse
romanticism
you know
you used to feel
sadness for every twig and steeple
but now
you're sad because you cannot
conjure
a twig's worth of sadness for

or is this
a deep threat
a clear and true
pop riff
coming straight
for me