My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.

My father was a forester in the Alpine woods
and also in the Andes. He roamed about the
under brush, rode a horse and carried a thin

When, in the evening, I explore the succulent shadows
with their blue veins and black chrysanthemums,
their thorny places,

In the 26th year of my age 
I, two ears, two eyes, two hands only 
(But only is enough to take the town) 

i.
So it is, the chaos
contracted

in an unfolding scene
in five sentences:

Body. History. Evil. God. Human.   

ii.
But what ideas,
in what facts? Inside the sun

the heat is sucking
the soil’s moisture,

Fulton near Pearl, dug up to lay new Fulton Center 
subway power lines, a stone wall, three feet high, 
in silt-muck seven feet below street level, inside it 

Aged malt whiskey and cigarettes
   consumed to enhance consciousness
—read Blake. You can’t regulate

It is the star above us makes us see
The distance of the firmament, immensity
Of the green wave that swells beneath the dark.

I bend
over the machine. Heat
and oil

When Mutual of Omaha supported
nature shows, it spared us sex and gore.
We stared as peacocks preened and rhinos courted,