CHAPTER 1

Tidal

For nothing but throwing bottles or bodies into, the ocean is overkill.I haven't seen an ocean in years, but I know one's out there, poisedlike a cassette tape tucked into an answering machine nobody's calling.I speak low, a foghorn diffusing on ocean, carry home, a bargecarrying on ocean home. I imagine ocean as an undulation,like traffic or gravity, what appears heavily then recedes again into itself—

There's so much more I could tell you. Maybe you know enoughalready and are wary of disclosure. You can't trust anyone anymorewhat with poor God dead, but still I reach for you, and you don't answerfor so long, it's as if I'm mimicking the old-fashioned kitsch and flowof prayer, but still I reach for you and your mute faceas if this might stretch and smooth the crease in my brainwhere the self accumulates. I want to tell you I'm guilty of so many thingsbut these aren't the worst of me. I want to tell you my story is longand filled with moments of absolute irrelevance, but still I go careeningover summer's muggy surface, under winter's blanket renunciation.Still I hurtle through the fortnights and small eras of the city,the Geiger counters about their steady, nuclear clucking,the air unrelenting so that I and the architecture erode a little each dayin the damp build of weeks till the solstice, and I wake up every morningin an extraneous light, national light, periscope light of the sunricocheting down through tall buildings, and say into the flat planetof the mirror, I'm the one sent to replace you.

Municipal Vistas

The telephone poles lashed and strobed by an electrical stormin the bus window, we must've been halfway through Uptownwhen you clutched at my poncho and said, Bill,are you seeing how this deluge of photons everywhere overwhelms

the tiny cockpit of the eyeball! In this hullabaloo of thunder!In the damp overthrow of April! You said, And thinkhow the plains crumple into a pageant of hillsat the feet of our mountains and of our noble woods

with their shotgun shoulders and the labyrinthine city in whichour punk-haired rosebushes are a berserk argument betweenthe trees and hydrants! You said, Isn't it all such a wingding!But I said, In our chintzy country? I said. Here we're insipid,

eager only for diversions and chic habiliments. I said, We're daftand out-of-proportion, vain and cussing each other in trafficas if the ego is something other than a pesky infectionof the corpus, as if the corpus isn't downing its espresso

and everything bagel with cream cheese en route to the office parkof nonexistence. It's commuting, at least, out of the palaceof our best efforts! you said. You said, At least look how bonnyI am in this skirt the color of a hatchet wound blooming!

You said, Look how the telephone lines droop and festoonall our avenues, how the rain paratroops totally recklessout of the cloud! See how it has no religion? How nothingdeters it? But I said, We're more like the gutter spouts

or drainage grates or the steam rising from asphaltlike end credits after the squall. So you said, Here's a rope,you dolt. Go climb a tree. I knew then I'd deflated you brutishly.I said, O, please forgive me! I said, Here's a bouquet

made of moths ruddied by stoplights, o, please forgive me!Here's the jamboree of a crosswalk, if you'll only forgive me!I said, Here's the sound like ovation the rain makes on rooftops,won't you forgive me? But you didn't forgive me, crateredas you were in a rut of futility, so I felt futile too, the...