All summer the half voice lurked behind me

& I played deaf for days for to live

To not write about it to use my body

Those mornings in the last days of December,
as the smog deepened over the mausoleum
& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife
lingered about the four gardens, weeping
over her dead child

Moving as a mind moves across a math problem,
Or an eye across a lover’s body,
Or a dragonfly across the sky,

First my books grew stiff
brass clasps like the books monks read.

A hush enshrouded them. They were

Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Fish.
Here follows a description of an unknown town.

If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there, 
if I call out to myself come here 
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things 

Clouds scuffle and clinch in this March sky;
wind presses our turned collars to chin
and Chris casts his line against the grain.

Jerome discovered fifteen signs of doom
each of a day; seas will explode in steam,
man's towers burst into ash, the earth will move,

Perhaps by the time I have written this
the last three or four will also be gone: 
not many people will mark a few less

While sitting prostrate before the ivory feet of the great Buddha, I spilled almost an entire can of Diet Coke on the floor. I quickly tried to mop up the mess with my long hair.