YOUR SWEET HUNK OF TRASH

POMEGRANATE, SASSAFRAS

ABBOT

MERIAN

Sometimes the streets' gridding gauze seems just the thing to encase this throb. Lines running out otherwards starch the punctum of me. This tiny slipping site of me. My bicycle is a mystery I've learned to collaborate with. Cars gnash & noxify on all intimate quarters, architecture tips up to blue & sun, pitted avenues in grimy ice-rim gripe against too tattery tyres; and I arrive, hot in the blasty chill, bright-eyed, breathing, leave my machine in the street & enter at the appointed door.

BENJ GERDES

The whole gang was there. When the piper showed up it was almost too much. I held Mitzi close and studied everyone's eyes, my knuckles

bloodless. Around two in the morning I cracked: "Benj," I whispered, "isn't it time?" He shook his head once, almost imperceptibly, and gave a blazing glare.

Владиимир Владиимирович Набоков

The gingko leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.

word, orts
for chick, spill
night pot
pourri, nourri
soil, spell
blank in devanāgarī. Semantra sounding from within monastiraki wall-bounds, aground, germinate in Sanskrit seed-syllable:

Milkthistle. Noosphere. Time-element.

happy birthday sarah yanni

He was happy because bicycling season and butterflying season were synchronous. Ballad-singers built intricate masses of sexual energy around themselves while they worked their looms. In wooden rooms, such a vibration of formerly living tissues! “The tissues that comprise my body” (he was thinking out loud into the empty space) “share ancestry with those of these broad wolf-pine planks.” It was like the erotic sympathy that overtook him in old cemeteries: Selastina, Barberry, Patience—graved in slate, their unlikely names were the mouths and hands with which the unwedded dead worried his flesh. Dust, lust: he’d intended exploiting the rhyme in some sort of testament until he found he’d been beaten to it, with preclusive success, by Charles Cotton, a minor poet of the seventeenth century. Women create flesh, eye, limb; further, we weave the magic field of sex-pleasure which sets the first stitches of such creation. Men practice power, pretend it’s pleasure; but it’s not. They consume, discard; are disposable thereby; don’t have the patience that pleasure takes. He entered the room and the hushy thump of looming ceased. Penelope looked up from her work, two yards of bright textile filling her lap.

a) There we left you, on the suspiciously lush pasto of your parents' lawn, in the warm dark of a very late night. The funniest bits of texting I ever messed with.

b) There we left you, in that hard world of winter with all the water stoppt up solid & framing the clean live air in angles & planes, slip & fall, miss the train!

Pink rock faces ocean's thunder in craggy early-20th-century planes, lines interrupted and truncated and textured according to superannuated spatial notions out of the cities of Europe. We used to come here with our wooden things, our oily pigments and stiff sailcloth panels; we'd make pictures. I'd make pictures of you, you swimming, you sitting. I'd swim; you'd make a picture of that. Where did all those pictures get to, I've been meaning to ask you. I float off, into the islands. There are three knives on me: one for oysters, one for scallops, one for cutting beads out of green lilac or apple.

MISS RUTH LYMAN

Who was possessed of many
amiable qualities, the joy of
her Parents, the delight of
her connexions, and
beloved of all, if youth,
if virtue deserve a tear,
reader, drop it here,
when the engraving of this stone
informs you that she left
her weeping friends in the
23d year of her Age, June 22 1783

Old 91-Corridor stock; her great-nephew became friendly with Emily Dickinson, he would take her on his knee in converse while courting her sister. Her stone was cut from Connecticut's coarse silicate tissue and imaged by a carver there before being brought out to salty Maine. Within a few years the inscribed text will fall away; a light tap would do it now.

My brother and I swam the Dniester, he beat me to its nether shore but I beat him back. Little lateen-rigged boatlets skittered buoyantly past us, manned by boys. I felt as good as I've felt in weeks. The sunlight crutched my flawy vision such that I could almost read the "Karadeniz Çayı" sign in Bender from where we lay on the east bank. My brother got a passing tsigane to back him on the tanbur as he sang (for my benefit, bless him!) that Canceaux song. Then there was rose spoon-sweet for all from a tidy treat-vendor who cleaned his little silver koutali in a cup of saltwater after each of our mouthings.

Paschal joy is imminent. After great pain a formal feeling comes. The beloved fellow-creature is near, the one with whom alone I've followed creation further in and farther on. My song. Three darts into the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. Joseph Sykes's stones stand hard, soft schist from salt-swamps, waiting for sun to come athwart them and thicken their lines with shadow to animate the faces figured there. Like a slide quiet in its slot before the bulb's switched on. I love the ocean, I love the linguage, I love the melodies and the countermelodies. Where did you go. Under a rosebush that dies back every winter. I miss the place of rest, you, Sofferetti, your lap. Where is your lap? You are continually dismantling it, forming it up again every time you sit down.