Try to see graphite boil. Try
to imagine a hand, in a press,
in a cellar in Buenos Aires,

During a pop concert
Mr. Cogito reflects
on the aesthetics of noise

too many have seen
his son’s pierced hands
his ordinary skin

The priests have a problem
on the borderline of ethics and accounting

In the morning mice scamper
over the head
over the floor of the head

Though prudes once thought St. Gaudens’s golden-thighed
Diana too exposed to perch above
the old squat pile of Madison Square Garden,

The storms that make it into poems most often
leave something like disaster in their wake:
the wine-glass elms in pieces on the lawn,

My body of course remained but all else
was a cluster of tiny white bubbles
floating up, up, up, to an unseen top.

I wake from the dream another person, tasting metal
or salt, smelling turpentine, my shoulder askew and
my jaw out of whack. My father has not been stabbed

My black-lettered Hebrew Bible, dense 
and doughty as a cobble. The Bible in Hebrew—irreducible!
Yet at the first verse, a hair-thin net of cracks
appears, each crack a vast highway, and wildly we leap