HOOT

they are three persons related complectly, they sing for You! this the hammer kill'd the Jon Henery/ this the summer where you made your pile o'cashes/ this the big sea where you lost your diamond pearl-rings/ I find you nuther suit for sunday lunch// I kisst you in the gardlen/ I kisst you in the spring/ we don't hafta go to town nomore/ cuz there aint no lackin thing// Macker Jims he gone for seatime/ he dint leave me no coin/ gon'hafta scrounge for rum-jugs/ fill'em with gooseneck wine// Run down Jill-gal run down/ catch my yaller hound/ bring them kegs of dandy-coke up/ and gather all the kiddies round

First good dream in a long time

I had just arrived back in New York. I was in downtown Manhattan. Seth was my brother. Our father called and asked me to go to 180th street to run an errand. I started walking uptown by myself and passed a mortuary. I went in and it turned out to be a combination mortuary and paleontology lab, the mortuary took care of the flesh and then scientists studied the bones. I started talking to the people that were downstairs grinding down and polishing vertebral bones. I was offered a job as a bone polisher. The catch was that it was from 5 to 8 every morning- did I mind? I got excited thinking, wow this is perfect, I can make money polishing bones in the morning and then can have the rest of the day to do my own work. I showed up on my first day and was suddenly confused, it didn't seem like I would be polishing bones after all, there were tables and a band, and it seemed like people wanted me to wait tables. I asked the supervisor for clarification, and she said, "oh no, for your job you're going to be playing in the mortuary band, we hope you don't mind." And then there I was playing clave in the funeral celebration with this awesome "well respected Dominican Republic style" band. I was really happy.

I rest in Sofferetti.

Born breathing, soon forgetting just how it's done. Relearning leads to the heart.

Consider the lilies of the field: I learn to love by watching dandelions practice nyctinasty. As soon as its breaths stop my body will rot as readily as a taro corm.

The big machine exhales noisily, sweet-smellingly, more hugely than any lung ever could, and begins to glide off. By the time the last car clacks itself across the seam in the steel there where the rails curve to leave town, I've reached her house and am working to get my breath back.

A grotesque at thirty-one.

If the tissue of a paragraph be inflated or engorged like pulmonary or clitoral tissue, is it abler then to hold these half-formed passing things, eye-spots, memories kept in friends' heads, flakes of light? Inflected with separateness, putting up the prose-system anchor it rode, does it signify more potently now or does its new heft sink it?

My window was everything; four hours between me and my lover's arms. Window-pillow, window-mind, window-heart. Window-eye: bare and hatted heads pass across it like prayer-beads as the train begins to move quietly down the platform. Head, head, head, bead, prayer for openness, prayer for hugeness, prayer for nothingness. Big early-green spaces open up beyond the town's limit, invisible leagues of track pull me on through the morning's tenses.

All Mercer county resisted me while I walked. In my wake coal-towns I suppose would lapse back to their habitual owner-choked dullness but while I was raising the dust off their main streets it was like Yojimbo, suspicion animated the doors & porch-boards and ocularized the windows till before long I'd always be approached and harassed in turn by a coal-company thug-band, a coal-company sheriff & deputy, a general knot of folk, and some evangelical fools. Everyone wanted me on their side, or out of town, or in their depressing little jail or deal-wood church. One time I did accept a meal & some monies to stay a day and fix a busted Estey reed-organ for a couple of bible-jerks but usually I took care to get through as quick as I could. I was headed to Bramwell. All these hills' messy eructations of raw carbon were turning to diamonds faster than God or time could ever figure out how to make them do and that silly Gilded Age saw little Bramwell enjoying the residency of more millionaires per capita than any other place in the U.S.A. The Bluestone ran red from the earth-disturbances upstream but cradled the town in an elegant kink like how the Tennessee does the golf course opposing Blue Goose Hollow and the other old rail slums of Chattanooga which are all gone now, gone, gone, for highways! My blood ran kinky too, a certain instability to the electric charge of my heart-muscle. I felt it falter, times, my heart, thought little of it; but since have come to understand what a damned complicated mystery God worked in building me. Love can be any of so many things, any tiny thing, a little animate quiver of Potassium ions!

The Italian Doctors Are Mutating the Gene in a Dish

(to match our own mutation)

"What is the normal function of the KCNH2 gene?

The KCNH2 gene belongs to a large family of genes that provide instructions for making potassium channels. These channels, which transport positively charged atoms (ions) of potassium into and out of cells, play a key role in a cell's ability to generate and transmit electrical signals.
The specific function of a potassium channel depends on its protein components and its location in the body. Channels made with the KCNH2 protein are active in heart (cardiac) muscle, where they transport potassium ions out of cells. This form of ion transport is involved in recharging the cardiac muscle after each heartbeat to maintain a regular rhythm. The KCNH2 protein is also produced in nerve cells and certain immune cells (microglia) in the central nervous system.
The KCNH2 gene is located on the long (q) arm of chromosome 7 between positions 35 and 36.
More precisely, the KCNH2 gene is located from base pair 150,272,981 to base pair 150,305,946 on chromosome 7."

My great-grandfather dropped dead at 33 years old in Bramwell, WV. The doctors said it was a heart attack. But now these Italian doctors hypothesize that maybe it was caused by the above gene mutation. Hypothesis: the mutation was inherited, but during the course of its inheritance, the genome perhaps compensated, and though the mutation remains, something else now makes the protein necessary to the potassium channels.