The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet it is the greatest of our miseries. —Pascal.

On Turner Classic Movies Philip Marlowe
is grimacing at the slinky beauty
of the woman who will become
the wife of the actor playing him.
The man playing me, up at three this morning,
worrying about the cost of private school
health insurance, and the slow grinding
away of his savings, is wearing
bleaching molds because a stain chart
listed his smile as second to worst.
On CNN quaint dioramas of Baghdad,
the Sudan, and Gaza depict recent forms
of human misery. Is there a chart
that measures our ignorance and vanity?
On PBS philosophers are debating what
Nietzsche meant by our desire to create
beyond ourselves the purest will.
The sexual fire in the amber eyes
of the woman Lauren Bacall is playing,
perhaps? On the Western Channel
the whiteness of Joel McCrae’s teeth
has survived dust storms, chewing tobacco,
and his character’s nostalgia for
the brutality of his tiny moment. Some believe
we’ve consumed our originality,
that our diorama will depict nothing.
On the Disney Channel all fifty-six signers
of the Declaration of Independence
are shouting about the indignity of domination
for everyone except perhaps those
tending their fields and children.
Did the man playing Nietzsche grow weary
of trying to grow happiness out of pure will?
Hat over heart, the man playing my father
stood perpendicular to his exhausted,
uneducated, immigrant shadow, weeping
to our national anthem. A man stood for something,
he said. Did the actor playing Marlowe
understand that Marlowe stood for nothing?
On the History Channel men and beasts
are being slaughtered by machetes, explosions,
and hangings, their swollen, mystified bodies
falling into ravines, dropping to their knees
screaming for their mothers and God to save them.
It’s three in the morning and everywhere
around me the silence stands for nothing
and even the god playing God wants to sleep.

Never trust a book with maps
was what I once heard,
& too true— but
by then I had already converted
to the religion of history. God
we believed in earnest

wore those clothes the histories
expected him to wear, & in this
was positively historical—
even his hat was fundamental.
He’d brought
a new world to bear

by way of assurance he could do
better than the last one,
which water-logged at ten eons.
This time there would be land
as well as sea, & so the necessity
of cartography. He saw the maps,
& they were good
but not great, but the fairytales
the maps necessitated
(in the margins of course)
captured something illuminating.
Even the goblins’ hats were

fundamental. Never trust a god
who understands your situation,
I was told, & that was true also:

I never found myself any better
at prognostication
just because I knew the story of
my god—
& it seemed, too, as though all
the fairytales ended
with a slaughter.

1

(Not the light that tethers towards) (a melting
fortunate, thanks due) (the undertow, or gone

thick around the edges) (to the smudge,
the ghosts that hang about) (whose rule

I’ve learnt) (limp and worn through) (not that,
but the footprint) (all so left behind, so tremorous

2

The damage on, the southern light
clambered bells to ring. And waning,

tumbled the lake and its trenchancy
and left without decision. Pages

of novels littered the streets like salt.
Some smoke, figured like damask,

began to rise as the lamps, just lit,
staved it all away. And all the shutters

opened, at last, the sundry houses
drawing the breath and the evening.

3

it’s to be unheld) (to the ground) (The only
sound—among the clouds’ pallid echo

and the whirring traffic—the crunch of sand
and ice) (could it be that I am yoked to you?)

4

Wheel: the ties among the places we inhabit

Chapter: like so much salt dissolved into the slush

Erasure: the lake with ice flown to the east

Discrepancy: the ties among the places we inhabit

License: lengthened days: the face placed to the eye

Coriander: the world sprung forth

Analepsis: you step off the train: ablaze: you hold your tongue

Vex: to work against; a faltered hinge

Trowel: meditation

5

THIS WILL BE OUR LAST MESSAGE.

(A trick as old as) (what can happen
in the space) (as though to fall away) (the lake

white, and the ground, and the sky white
glowing as though the sun) (the name

you have given to the past) (my slanted
walls, the windows kicked out) (the loss

of sight: full of stones) (is my last obsession)
(December’s gentle grace, April’s looming gray)

Because the Greeks didn’t bother much about plagiarism
Poems by Anacreon, born in Teos around 500 B.C.,

Appear among the Anacreontea,
Imitations made by poets who loved him.

In a dream I saw Anacreon, who called to me.
As he stumbled, drunk, he lifted a crown of flowers from his head.

Stephanus translated the poems into Latin in 1554.
In Taintignies, using a dictionary

Small enough to carry on active service
Richard Aldington made the prose translation I adapt here.

I bound the garland around my forehead;
When I sang about Cadmus, my lyre spoke of love.

In my copy of “The Manner of Anacreon,” Egoist Press, 1919,
Hamilton Collier of Scarsdale, New York, has written on the flyleaf

My first real understanding of the Greeks.
I regret I am unable to agree with them.

Hephaestus, carve me a hollow cup!
The dark earth drinks, and the trees drink the earth.

The sea drinks the wind,
The sun drinks the sea.

I was a child in the hills of Phrygia.
The swallow of Pandion was once a girl.