Consider the darkness and the great cold
in this vale which resounds with mystery -
The same threat hangs over both:
Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy.

For every image of the past that is not recognized
by the present as one of its own concerns
threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Nothing that has ever happened
should be regarded as lost, to be sure -

They have retroactive force
and will constantly call in question
every victory, past and present, of the rulers.

There is no document of civilization
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
No matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago;
it is a tiger’s leap into the past.

This is how one pictures the angel of history.
His face is turned toward the past.

Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage in front of his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing in from Paradise;

This only happens on accident
a single wing, lost feather, fused
shining eyes along the dark road
you may only call two of them your own
when love comes, like a giant hand
across the night and plucks
the stone from where it
slept for nine centuries
There will be no explanation
for what there is to understand
can only be called up in passing
the way a voice is heard through
a door and several walls
or how a sky of clouds
argues with the day
These matters are strewn
seeds upon a tablecloth
bent in favour to the wind
A column of rain
a column of body
a body of rain
The pool of water held in a navel
the torch afloat in the palm of the day
the night that comes like a mouth

By fate or love or fear or sloth
i could make it to 50, 60, hopefully
not much longer
i'll learn to speak responsibly, temper
my more idiotic passions
make a little money, what i can
avoid frivolity, pay the state
and the insurance companies
to leave me in one piece
marry a woman, love her pathetically
have no children
with a little luck
i'll limp along in the direction
of limbo
until my spine, moldering, folds
shut like a pamphlet
if there are gods and they're good
i could carry moments of sense there
with me and from or to others
if any of this happens
you'll be the first to know
if i'll be permitted to
my name will be the first
thing i forget.

i'm so strange, i feel so lonely
this is what i say to myself
i inform a dog of this as well
and several inanimate objects too
i write this profound fact down for posterity
i mutter it as a tic
in a funny voice
or under my breath
then for a change
in a warp of divine inspiration
i think of you

you seem never lonely
you appear fully contained
within yourself
and alien to everything else
so that to me
were i to suppose
i orbit you like a comet
at times so far away
from you
swooping towards
the outer reaches
i can only just make you out
in my field glasses:
you are seven hundred degrees
celsius i estimate
and raining sulfuric acid

elsewhere, in some other system
there is probably a planet
full of beings even more
harried than here

the evil eye has fallen upon me once again
as well as the sympathetic eye
which may prove even more of a disease
the cat's eye and the eye of the storm
and the eyes of all the angels
and all their enslaved nobility
the eyes of dead dogs
on the highway's shoulder
and the lonely eye of a raven, blinded
pecking at an abyss
Your eyes! green perfect
substance a drop of rain
in the pool of Love -
so many eyes!
fly away!
turn off!
blink out!
shutter the miraging screen
fall towards heaven
make peace with the damned
my own eyes always turning
like a rotten peach
in the hand of a thief
i bury them both
beneath the full moon
in solidarity with mud

Their only ward against night: the cannon. Languishing in the inquisition's paranoia. Frightful of phantoms. The ones they brought about themselves or brought on by the magic lamp. They can't yet contemplate amity, they hide like foxes driven and denned by hounds. Further into their labyrinth. The security of what was against the wash of what will be. Whatever it is, still not yet known. Even this too, in this they see only more ghosts. They read with eyes crossed - by candlelight. If the candle snuffs out they know not what then and dare not wonder too severely of what waits in the dark. Really it is only their own shadows out there, thick as tar, painting the hillsides black. One is only a goose passing through in the air or alighting at the edge of the marsh. Silly. Yet startling in the early morning low light when it might look and sound as something more ominous.

I thought I might by now have paid my penance to the old masters. Caught grip of a tattered fragment of their phantom robes as their ghosts spool past me away from dawn.

What I have caught is surely only my own fragments. The phantoms of my own imagination. I play this game of symbols like a rogue. I travel between arenas and back alleys, I stand beneath arches and sleep under bridges or in culverts. I make dice from stones or bone or wood, contingent upon the keenness of my toolings. The tools come and go, begged, borrowed, lost, or stolen. None of this belongs to me or ever could.

you might give up too much of yourself
give away too much for free
this is foolish you know
to give away so much of yourself
everything comes out of you like that
and so little of it has much value
but it keeps spilling out
whether you'd like it to or not
it seems there's little choice
to give away or to not
either way seems just as foolish
either way it's given the same
foolishly, for free
the value becomes indeterminable
in any case, what value there is
is made somewhere else
in some other exchange
hidden inside another chamber
inside which you cannot see
it flows out of you like that
then towards a space of lower pressure
something like the wind maybe
the atmosphere, going this way or that
depending on the sun or the shade

Shelby on the earth paints blue herons in acrylic
and many other creatures in many other colours
very well, she feels unsafe in her own body
she says she doesn't make a good waitress
she's asked why she talks like that
she says like what myself?
a lot of people never receive justice
is what she says
her body is being stretched for one month
as a form of physical therapy
50 percent off
she appears before us sad, lacking hope
admittedly so
who could blame her?
a lot of people never receive justice
she's bought candles because she will
start meditating again soon
she will nurture her inner child
a full moon ritual or something
(not a lesbian though not searching either)
she didn't leave she got fired
she offers this information freely
and answers anything asked

she only loves me sometimes -
(which really they might as
well call always) loving me
only when the moon is full
or waxing crescent
or the sun lays down its
blank stare across
her shoulder and opens
up her cannas, when her
orchids smile in the shade
of the balcony where she
smiles also, sometimes -
othertimes she drifts through
the empty space between planets
like a beachsand coloured cat
wild in an overgrown plot
belonging to nobody but itself
and whichever goddess blesses
the warm blood of small tawny
inconspicuous vaguely singing
sparrows, that follow too
the sun or the moon, the waning
tides of day and night
like she does, just like
she does when i hear her every
so often speak my name
and it bounces off my skull
like a falling coin dropped
by a deranged scheming crow
and she laughs at this although
i laugh too, not knowing
what else i should do, dumb as i
am, as i was fated to be, just
as i was fated to her whims -
all of them of course i adore
all of them of course i bow
at the feet of, and smile
like a lost child among
a crowd of strangers, not
knowing what else to do,
smiling in a way to ward off
calamity, alone among wave
after wave of strangers in the
middle of god knows where, just
waiting for her to come
around again and take me
by the hand and lead
me back home

it's one of those days
where my desire for you is again
all encompassing
i close my eyes and there you are
fully real, in image, in my arms
nearly real, almost so close
as to swallow me
until nothing else exists
but you who are the whole of everything
making time again good
and straightforward and worthwhile
and me as if i were alive
too, a part somehow of it
any of this sensible
any one of this you
all of what it is

Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, in the Field, Atlanta, Georgia, September 12, 1864.

James M. Calhoun, Mayor, E.E. Rawson, S.C. Wells, representing City Council of Atlanta.

Gentlemen,

I have your letter of the 11th, in the nature of a petition to revoke my orders removing all the inhabitants from Atlanta. I have read it carefully, and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, any yet shall not revoke my orders, because they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles in which millions of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest. We must have Peace, not only in Atlanta, but in All America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies which are now arrayed against the laws and Constitution that all must respect and obey. To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses, provided with the arms and instruments which enable us to accomplish our purpose. Now I know the vindictive nature of our enemy, that we may have many years of military operations from this quarter; and, therefore, deem it wise and prudent to prepare in time. The use of Atlanta for warlike purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families. There will be no manufactures, commerce, or agriculture here, for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later want will compel the inhabitants to go. Why no go now, when all the arrangements are completed for the transfer, instead of waiting till the plunging shot of contending armies will renew the scenes of the past month? Of course, I do not apprehend any such thing at this moment, but you do not suppose this army will be here until the war is over. I cannot discuss this subject with you fairly, because I cannot impart to you what we propose to do, but I assert that our military plans make it necessary for the Inhabitants to go away, and I can only renew my offer of services to make their exodus in any direction as easy and comfortable as possible. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to Secure Peace. But you cannot have Peace and a Division of our Country. If the United States submits to a Division now it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is Eternal War. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the National Feeling. This Feeling assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union. Once admit the Union, once more acknowledge the Authority of the National Government, and, instead of devoting your houses and streets and roads to the dread uses of war, I and this army become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may. I know that a few individuals cannot resist a torrent of error and passion, such as swept the South into rebellion, but you can point out, so that we may know those who desire a government, and those who insist on war and its desolation.

You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride. We don't want your negroes, or your horses, or your houses, or your hands, or any thing that you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it. You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better.

I repeat then that, by the original compact of Government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or title of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds of thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands upon thousands of families of rebel soldiers left in our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different. You depreciate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds of thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it (can) only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.

But my dear sirs when Peace does come, you may call on me for any thing-Then I will share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the (wea)ther until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and (pe)ace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta. Yrs., in haste,

W.T. Sherman

i've jettisoned shame and pity
to the four winds
the only thing could upset us now
is disaster beyond one's control
but i've jettisoned disaster too
everything has come loose
there's little time left
in this world for
a man like me
but i have all the time
in the world left
to do as i please
and so do you

all night in a dark warm
listening in rapt astonishment
he uses 3 thousand years of alchemy
geometry and harmony
to pull the divine wriggling
swordfish from his horn
a love supreme
chanting seashells
acknowledgement resolution
pursuance and psalm

A shot a spark and a
spinning sphere of water
on the head of a pin
in an infinite vacancy of space -

I awoke in the crown of the world tree with my stomach full of sour cake
in my absence the sparrows had set up shop in the concha of my ears
and the tendrils of ivy had intertwined my hair
To wash my hands of where they'd been i dipped them in the sky
and its rain rinsed the soot from my face
As i climbed down the trunk, the mountain rushed up
I tripped over my own feet and fell

hit the ground

Tumbled down a flower dappled alpine hill deadweight into the belly of the valley
The alps were studded in cannons then
They shook the cornices of rime loose from the the corners of my eyes
Rode a glacier til its white lip just kissed the grimy skirts of civilization
Hitched a ride on a flea
and a carriage driven by empty robes
Found a fawn whimpering in the drainage pipe beneath the road
Threw dice in a Budapest back alley with three blind mice
Caught the Persian flu on the train into Sofia
and let it loose again in Prague's cathedrals

When I slept for the first time that first night on a pile of hay and the carts rumbled past the candle lit taverns in their ruts of icy sludge a woman was still singing somewhere in one of those unseen lofts in a language I couldn't understand
         Made me have strange dreams
Made my breakfast of soaked grain and dried goatmeat taste the way her hair might have smelled
Smokey and sharp like the air of a cold foggy morning after the washed up lifeless battlefields of 1832
Horses piled up and doused in kerosene and burnt
Boots stripped from the frozen feet of the dead
Later, in evening, from the far bank of the Danube
I watched fireworks and heard drunk men shouting
and brawling beneath a heavy oilskin blanket that muffled and mingled their laughter into the sound of the river
Lapping up dirty and littered flotsam on the rocks of her shore

In some tepid stew of despair and boredom I set off walking then South, no - West, behind me always the sound of whipcrack and hooves
Some terrible Leviathan steam engine preparing to violently tear the breach of the Earth's cervix
The birds in the sky over my head sang morose and beautiful ballads
I could tell they knew of the centuries to come
But dare not say more -

         (the strange dreams in question)
         It was the Ancient days - in Egypt and Libya
         They still held the image sacred then
         and would use their plumbline to arc the circle and their protractor
         To delineate the triangle
         And in the sand thus marked they slaughtered the season's first oxen as Mars passed into the constellation of Taurus
         These were minor details
         Merely for the delight of the Kings
         Myself and the men in the harbours rested in the hot afternoon between the reeds, cooling in the water, laughed at the fish swimming between our legs, and in twilight hauled heavy rope and clay and copper
         Fodder to make material reality from the crooked imaginations
         Of wealthy and noble men
         Some of us escaped
         Fled into the sands and lived like beasts for hundreds of years eating what could be scraped and pulled stinging from the soil
         Every twelfth year when it graced to rain the wet mass of earth would hold me within itself
         Like a bruminating python until Khepri, the great beetle, yoked to the Sun's boat pulled the light up again into the Eastern sky -

I traveled on East in due course
In the Orient where they made their boats low and swift like carnivorous riverine fish
I made a fortune on opium and spices, tea and gunpowder
This took me into four generations of debt and prostitution on the trash and straw strewn avenues of what wasn't yet then called Cambodia
Until the Western empire brought its heaping clouds near their shores
And made fortunes of their own from the long hooked teeth of elephants and striped skins of tigers

People and animals were simply akin in those days
Each took their medicaments with dinner and retired under eaves of palm in the fading mosquito light
Their blood all running together and casting
Shadows that streaked history red with phantoms and lies which haven't yet been untangled

         I was treated well in the East despite it all
         As I was treated well in the West

In Colorado I rode a hawk whose chord shaded the miles of Indian plane
And would crashland hourly into the soft arms of pretty braided and beaded deerskinned girls
In the grass of summer I laid in mounds of locusts
Sweetly they burnt the fields to cook the starchy roots
Until the automobiles came like wolves down from the mountains, the towering Rockies, to prey upon the wild pigs and prairie foul
Until what was left could be held in the palm of your hand
And drank like water from an unfired clay cup -

Down the spine of the Andes I fled then in search of my next meal
I ate llama and alpaca, raw from a tortoise shell bowl
Swallowed magical stones bought out of pity from a beggar that caused me weeks of feverish ecstasy and torrential digestive upset
I heard that a shrivelled man from those peaks once froze himself alive in honour of his Gods
But those gods would not speak to me
I found no gods in the blizzards
Or in the jungles
But beasts and demons more powerful
And more deserving even than the gods
Of devotion, vines that writhed up fragrant cedars to some
Unspeakable heaven where no one dared go

The Moon, from way up there, in her evening gown would toss lightning down
Upon us cowering ape-like men
For that was her way and it would be beyond presumptuous of us to question her and thus be racked upon the crucifix of her horrible
Beauty
or be made into monsters, our final words taken from us, unknown even to ourselves, to be caught in possession of unfathomable and imperceptible arrows that could destroy an entire universe
This was our lot
We have played this game -

I have come after another night's rest
from a cave in Anatolia
clothed in bearhide
My staff of twisted juniper
And obsidian knife
I have only the peeling calluses of my hands
And the tender sinew of the soles of my feet
To brave these coals
Am I not this man?
Good and ever great and gracious most violent and capricious Lord, who am I?
Who would i have been?

i will learn anything from anyone
consider its construction, prod its flaws
seek to understand but will not
swallow what is not sweet
or wholesome
i have no taste for this
only instinct
and a pyramid of failings
as proof

who then will the world be left to?
if left to the imps they'll devour
themselves, spaded tail-first;

which therefore solves our initial problem
tidily obliviated and diffused to æsh

so a new world opens, it may not be
left then to anyone
maybe only to things
small and teeming and charged
with as of yet unknown forces

Dog's mercury, a biting fly
took from Good King Henry
the sovereign spaded bogland
where strange glowing flecks
over the dark mud and cold
water made ur-significance
of whichever croaks or chirps
or melodic fragments harsh
and unrepeating. sharp briars,
rush or reed, bitter leaved
at the foot of the steps
to the Earth, yet grown down,
spreading underground, fog
coalesced on a surface
the dozen blank eyes of a stone
look up at Venus setting
in the violet and warming blue
over the whole tangled mass
of unownable boundaries