for Pat Silliman

For Bob and Francie

P=H=I=L=A=D=E=L=P=H=I=A. Under the dogwood tree, scampering, playful as a squirrel, a large grey rat, fat as can be. Old hardwood floor, impossible to cross silently in the dark. Dog attempts to hump the cat. For Spring, an old closed-in porch, a neighborhood crow.

Three old men play golf in the rain. What is a redpoll? Street cobbled after all these years precisely to reduce the speed of traffic. Thanks to Paul Hoover, I can find my work in any strip mall bookshop in America. For Pound on the Main Line, the trip to Penn proved no journey at all. Business center parking lot on a Sunday, a half dozen cars parked by the squat brick six-story building.

Beyond the tightly clustered streets of the small town, half-boarded up Main Street surrounding the single tall spire of a church, the road quickly turns rural (cluster of mock castle executive homes out by the golf course). Twin clouds of steam rise almost forever from Limerick. Concept of a basement as "finished."

Suppository understood as a term of rhetoric. Early morning, cheap ballpoint pen falls into a urinal in the fourth-floor men's room–who knows how?–never to be removed, to become a target, moved willfully by streams of urine, pushed counter clockwise around the white–who knows what it is made of?–urinal cake. Returning in the rain from the old brick bank to the car, I realize that I forgot to feed the meter, had scurried right past it in my hurry to stay dry, only to have gotten by without a ticket, little gift of fate. Kitaj's eyes.

Back roads amid dogwood. Terminal emulation. Rag doll anatomically correct. A cloudless sky but for the power plant. An old small town at the center of all this development. Holds a skateboard the way you would a schoolbook. Pink petals everywhere.

Man sitting zazen has stroke, falls forward, suffocating in the soft foam of an empty meditation pillow. Cat locked out all night in the rain. A pager in every pocket. Suburban train.

Whoever lives by the aphorism dies by the cliché. A dream in which I might know the bomber. A dream in color. Idea of a road as a "pike."

Moment in which I realize I'm not wearing my glasses. Old stone house. Blue plastic wrap of the New York Times. Impact of red wine on white fur of the dog. Sunrise.

Poem as gradual as weather. Hotel art (pseudo-Hoffman softened, retro-Rothko as filigree in pastel). What Trenton makes, the world takes. What Nixon knew when Nixon knew it.

First compulsive songbird, pre-dawn, abruptly halts. The air conditioner is constant (unnoticed but never silent). You can hear the electricity in lightbulbs, faint crackling. Motivation: man in hotel conference room throws football to the sales reps.

Too bleary to imagine. How the river carves the city (lost at night, trying to find my way across). Dog leaps for the stick, her own ballet, then loses interest, wanders off to sniff the grass. History as a function of curiosity.

Of the forbidden, my three-year-old says "That makes me sad." Impossible to discern the ice from the shards of broken glass. A table of contents from which I've been omitted. Room in which toupees outnumber beards. The firestorm sweeps left across the screen: we only imagine the men, women and children inside. I'm walking in a world you cannot imagine, having died so long ago.

Dream of real estate. Amato's tomatoes. The sun emerges gradually through the woods. (The son emerges gradually through the woods.) The present has not become a perfect copy, but rather an uneditable one. The boat sinks rapidly in the text. Try to capture the shape and impact of your cheekbones in words.

From an airplane, the spokes of suburban mall (this one in Princeton is T-shaped) are indistinguishable from those of a minimum security prison but for the immense parking lot. But for. When the hard drive on the PC that controls the security system crashes, every fire door in the hotel–each held open by electrically controlled magnets–slams shut. Cardinals will take some getting used to. Dark-toned palette of The X-Files.

Old stone inn, used by the Tories to plot the assault on Philadelphia, still serves rich veal medallions covered with crab meat, spinach and Hollandaise sauce. Cardinals in the silver birch. Metronome of an old wind-up mantle clock. Your body beneath that new little night blouse, then my hand beneath that.

An enclosed front porch converted to language. Each person I meet insists on telling me their "California story." Restaurant on main floor of old municipal building: the workers stash their belongings downstairs in the jail. Elf-like, a porcelain imitation of Santa's wife, the woman warns us of the "colored" districts (this is 1995). Cat stops to stare at me, then turns and glides away.

Read me. Full moon in the dogwood. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, a gang (eight young men, two women) has been murdering apartment owners in order to sell their apartments. I set the pager to vibrate. Driving endlessly along Bethlehem Pike, seeming to get no closer to familiar landmarks, I notice the sun starting to set in the East. Don't look!

In the next room, the large formal dining room table is covered with thousands of pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle (little more than the rectangular outer rim is complete, an echo of the shape of the table, though two of the corners have begun to be filled in, clusters of two and three joined pieces dotting the center), but in this light (at this angle and distance), it's impossible to tell what the image is, or even that one exists. Crow screaming in the trees. Gypsy curse: May you have a lawsuit in which you know you're right.

The problem with poetry is poets. Bone spurs grab the heart. First shrill roar of cardinals. This storm doesn't so much arrive and pass as it does gather and dissolve.

The writhing lesson. The dog's paws as it crosses the hardwood floor. The rain stops but the trees still have to shed their water. House with two fire places (in sight of one another). Telescope in the dining room. We imagine the bird's song as an expression of emotion.

Paragraph is burning. Alone in the playground, dressed in a suit that doesn't quite fit, red shirt, black tie, stands the developmentally disabled boy atop the tall slide, vomiting.

Smidgens in the glass harass. Moment at which first bird starts to sing, impossible still visually to discern dawn's approach. To imagine Duncan's text is to envision Duncan.

First dull light foretells a clouded dawn. Bear masks made from paper plates. Mockingbird clicks. Gradually, moving out, as the furniture and pictures disappear, the architecture of the room re-emerges as if hidden by use, bare potential, naked as any person, almost obscene. Mockingbird gargles and growls.

In the dream, I have the same conversation about the storage capacity of my laptop that I had last week with a teenage boy with the president of CompuCom. Realtor points to a crack in the stucco. Little boy dances to inaudible tune.

Jungle gym as prototype, as personality inventory, the problem to be defined before it can be solved. Day in which I drive three cars (rental car's last driver obviously smoked). Owned now by a long succession of other people, the house in which I grew up has become a cipher, opaque object half-buried by bougainvillea.

Sentences written long ago. Standing at the coast, horizon contained by fog. Sign on the door reads "Division of the Arts" but what I want is multiplication. Basket of dolls. Ratio of books to ideas is getting higher by the day.

Her name is Cinnamon, her mother Teal. Baywatch Ken doll anatomically edited for content (to fit your screen). Ceiling fan spins slowly. That the whole of one's life fits into one truck.

Phone on the floor of an empty house, an echo to anything I say. Mold on the wall behind each bookcase, a kind of damp shadow. Aphids, like dandruff, on each leaf of the plum tree. Ham on foccacio, a bowl of tea. The clouds hung low.

Small boy in a seaman's cap reminds me suddenly of my own such hat at that age, cap my father left behind. A light fog promises to burn off. A week between homes.

Voices, verbs, verses (word, bird, third – absurd). Boy's shout from the street stories below brings me out of my sleep instantly until I determine that all my children are here inside asleep. The absolute second you have the first opportunity in over a week to relax, to take a deep breath, give a sigh, you realize from its shallow painful wheeze that you've had bronchitis for days. Pesto potato pizza.

Seek out the path of most resistance.

A splinter I thought would work itself out has instead infected the whole finger. Dream in which, although I haven't seen you in ages and we were never more than cordial in a professional context, I wake to discover you next to me in bed naked – the actual body is always such a surprise – leaning toward me for a long, slow, deliberate kiss, guiding my hand gradually from you small almost conical breast south until I enter, first the front, then behind, and you twist, groaning, a broad grin across your face. Day that never happens.

Day that I discover total allergy to this powder detergent, big welt-like rashes everywhere from my neck to the soles of my feet. Cardinal in the yard smaller than I expected. You live on the east coast now.

When, on the car radio, they hit the baby-in-the-microwave story, I hit the button. Among the morning's rich cacophony of birdsong, pick out first one, then another, that sound completely unfamiliar, using each in turn as the foreground through which to hear the whole (nearby crow entirely out of scale). Upstairs, footsteps pace back and forth, for which I construct my own imaginary narrative: a young girl, a Latina whose parents, themselves the children of farm laborers, are schoolteachers, goes on scholarship to an excellent school, then rises quickly to corporate middle management, one day to discover her own desire for one of her employees, an older married man entirely inappropriate for her future – what should she do? Velcro sandals.

The sky grows lighter before it starts to rain. I stand in an empty attic studio, wondering where to put the desk. Young poodle lopes up to the wire fence. Fan rotates slowly over the vacant kitchen.

Sun is in the trees behind which a train rushes north to New York. The day after you die, people still sip coffee in fast food joints as a thunderstorm gathers in the sky, newspaper headlines proclaim great events overseas, stupidity and corruption at home, suffering everywhere. In the video game arcade, someone sets a new high score for Tetris.

House at the edge of the forest. Two swans amid the geese by the small lake – could they be anything but domestic? One can hear the freeway here, but that sense of mass urgency feels wildly out of place. High above the canopy, a deep-throated, curling birdsong I've never heard before.

Catbird hops onto the grass. Carrying one side of the sofabed, he steps backwards through the moving van's side door, foot missing the long metal ramp, so that he falls from the side of the truck, the large couch crashing down in the dark vehicle, twisting as he drops to catch himself so that he hits the pavement with his hands out, right wrist shattering on contact. Woodpecker taps out a message.

In the park, volunteer fire department uses the toddlers' climbing structure to practice blindfold maneuvers. Wind in all these trees breathes. What bird answers the call of my alarm clock?

Wooden children's climbing structure narrativized as a sailing ship, a Cessna, a train. In this scene the monkey has become an elephant and carries the pretend prince through the narrow streets of the city. Most of the volunteer fire crew are in their early 20s and stand around holding their heavy rubberized jackets, baggy pants held by red suspenders, passing a single pack of cigarettes between them as they watch the demonstration, fireman blindfolded, face mask covered by aluminum foil, crawling through the play structure, following the yellow rope headfirst down the slide.

Dinosaurs strewn across the vast plain of an attic rug. Fireflies glitter in the back yard, half moon making its way over the tops of these trees. Mall lot in which people don't appear to lock their cars. The beautiful dentist half jogs, is half dragged by her large dog, through the forest.

Angles vs. shadows in an attic room. Bookcase full of children's toys, overseen by a bespectacled Mr. Potato Head in a green baseball cap. Every asset management program is built either from the procurement database out or from an inventory function up. Horizontalizing that work force made each member expendable. Angels and shadows.

She demos the grill by serving "tater tots," hot dogs, sausage, in front of the hardware store on a Saturday from 10 until 2. Book's spine is its sole moving part. When this you hear, so much to fear. In the dream, bobcats and cougars have multiplied and are killing the pets of North Berkeley. Squirrel gallops over the roof of this house.

A quirk of morning. A quark of meaning. Estimate the train's size just by the rumble of wheels over the tracks. Mom, she says, spent last summer in Siberia, "telling people about Jesus." Late at night, by a light installed over the garage door, they play Ping-Pong in the yard, variable metronome. At the station, a woman maybe 40 with the hard, drawn look about her of too many years of drugs or alcohol, cigarette almost absent-mindedly lodged between her fingers, bends down to speak gently with her beautiful, six-year-old daughter.

Missiles, missives. Take a message (whomp). If you have a touch tone phone, press one now (VRU with FRU). A walk in the woods: at this point in the valley, the creek is exposed so that each driveway requires a bridge (somewhere up high in the trees, a dog is barking). The western idea about money. I hear the cardinal before I see it. Each toy truck offers its own theory of representation. Voice response unit, field replaceable unit. Then it grows quiet and dawn arrives.

Rabbits become common, as does the American flag as a porch ornament. The tiger in the dale, the tiger in the dale. Jays in the trees mark distance (in the background, one barely hears the steady rumble of a train). Old man's features blurred by years of drink. What did I think?

"If you've already got a mouse pad," she says, "this makes a terrific jar opener."

Disposable phone. The absence of mail. Blue jay vs. the mockingbird's parody. Western name on his Social Security Card vs. pure Korean on his passport, a lengthy delay at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. The car, having sat in the humid heat all morning. Under the tall tulip poplar. Where yesterday I saw a rabbit successfully cross 252, today a wolverine, fatter than I would have imagined, by the side of the road.

Old cardboard wardrobe. Catbird's call, sort of a yowl. Basket of bears. Biscuit of butter. Whistle in the cardinal's call. A bench at the end of the cul-de-sac under tall trees. Still life (still as the verb). Robin pauses, surveys his lawn.

The breeze sucks the shade into the window's screen.

A wheeze in the garbage truck's brakes. Red and blue birds flash in the trees. Fire flies flicker.

Lightning laces the sky. Error message. Real water boiling on a toy stove. Anxious to start the double play too quickly, he closes the glove before the ball is in it. Full moon smeared behind the scrim of cloud.

Lilies shutting at dusk.

The dream gauged by depth and completeness.

The Wawa brutalizes the ice cream.

Roar of the crickets all through the night.

Driving through completely unfamiliar streets, realizing this will be your home. Tee ball power drive. Woodpecker's rapid beat. Humidity of a different planet. Theory of a turnpike. At the train station, the suburban poor become visible. Across the street, Cowboy's Tattoo Ranch.

Raising the seven-foot bookcase high, angling it around the banister at the turn of the stairs. Hummingbird's egg, the appearance of a white jelly bean. Red-tail hawk turns, high over Perkiomen Creek.

Finches at the thistle sock, doe at the edge of the highway. YTD revenue for embedded systems. Realtor puts a plastic flag on each lawn for Independence Day. Lawn lights. Big rigs in a row at the service plaza. Old lamp on a modern table, flowers etched in a base of glass.

Light switch missing its face plate, having to put towels down by the shower just to turn the water on. One cannot give an example of hapax without canceling the effect. Thrashing as a surrogate for emotion. Roofed-in porch perfect for a barbecue in the rain (groundhogs in the grass, alas).

Tic talk. The discipline of bottom feeders. Identify three routes between points A and B; list advantages and disadvantages of each. Young boy with a fever. Scrollin' back to my same old used-to-be.

These are the sounds of science (thunderstorms under glass, alas), an echo in the poem. "Eck!" screams the crowd, the famed reliever's wavy hair flowing to his shoulders as he stares in at the next hitter, a nearly crippled limping Kirk Gibson. Waves batter the sea wall, full moon punctuation.

Sunlight flashes off the windshield of a car passing on the road through the trees, lone evidence of limit to this forest. "I can smell weekend from here," he says, 8:00 AM Friday morning. They wait for cars to get caught by the red light in the left turn lane, then spread out with buckets and old rags washing their windows rapidly, knowing just how long they have to coax a tip from each involuntary customer. Rapidly, the mountain of strips of bacon disappear from the plate in the center of the table.

Squirrel at the thistle sock, fat and gray. White bearded affable therapist next door was an RCP militant in the sixties. Static growl of a modem.

Uncorrected proof. Riding the train backwards. To which, for your entire library, now add the costs of hauling and shipping. Moon follows, long walk at dusk. A two-boy basket.

I step into the humid air. What did you know and when did you know it? Moon yellow foretelling rain. The squirrel growls. First sun smeared across the morning sky.

Chooses "Alfred" when he comes to the US to attend college, that the Anglos won't struggle with a Korean name. Old Giants media guide, filled with bios of prospects who never made a dent. Smell of over-ripe bananas the minute you enter the room.

Beyond the great mansion, five outdoor swimming pools overlooking tennis courts and soccer fields rimmed by running tracks. Each strip mall proposed as a theory of how to live. Small boys playing soccer with a volley ball. Vast lawn aglitter with lightning bugs. We stalk them.

Our love of the word poop. In the glass, ice melts, leaving beads of water around its outer surface. A train in the forest (how did it get there?). Moth's imprint on the window screen.

The air hot and thick as syrup, blue jays listless in the trees. First sun reflected off the top branches before you see the sun itself. Achilles tendon taut, almost brittle, each step as you rise the stairs. A house of deep-colored walls, burgundy and pink, through which to reach the large yard. Turning the corner in the corridor we almost bump and step back, excuse ourselves and walk on, small dance of the break-up of intimate space.

Lightning rolling, popping, snapping all across the sky (the whole forest in silhouette, down to the most infinite twig), then rain, although not as much as I would have expected, after which the hot spell is broken, no electricity anywhere for miles, people emerging slowly form their houses once the sun rises, the beauty of a gray dawn.

Behind this bale of hay, the tiniest full grown horse in the world, so small that a cup of water and a handful of hay is a mighty big meal for Tiny Tim. Merry-go-round balanced precariously over the fairground mud. Tattoo on the back of her neck forms a pyramid of letters, all san serif and upper case, but she won't hold still so I can read them. Font catalog.

First the lightning, then the rain. Last demo filing cabinet missing handles, one drawer locked with no key in sight. I walk out of the building and my glasses steam instantly at the difference in heat and humidity.

The cup is a funnel inverted over a base of blue clay, the handle added later, rather large, like an ear out of proportion to its head. Ice melts quickly, leaving only a smear of bubbles on the surface of its watery residue. I'm calling in my role as the difficult client. In the bank, a bowl of lollipops by each teller's window (there is only one teller). First silhouette of the trees, predawn sky to the east. Lettuce falls from the corned beef sandwich.

The voice that was late within us. In such weather, one can watch bananas ripen in real time. Day lilies unfurl, the sky brightens before the sun arrives, almost pink through the tall poplars. Black dog wanders in the large yard in the far end of which a crow has just settled.

In the forest, a small wood-frame house, burnt to the ground, no sign of people anywhere. He opens the palm of his hand to reveal a lightning bug, which rises slowly in the night air before it shines. Fire truck rides for a buck, Ferris wheel lights the sky, giant mechanical swing in the form of an Egyptian boat.

In the forest, voices, laughing. Just how leathery the flesh of my own neck has become. As that man strides purposefully towards him, I saw this fellow reach for something under his jacket tucked right into his pants at the small of his back and think gun. My pager set to vibrate. Soft first light of sun.

The aggression of toddlers or of squirrels. Theory of naming evident when we call a black-capped chickadee a bird that more accurately appears to wear a white mask. I carry a sleeping boy up the stairs and to his bed.

The word on the net is that you are in France. A large one-story pomo building on an even larger lot turns out to be a hair salon (land use away from the city). How each McDonalds is most apt to differ from one another lies in whatever special accommodation is made for the play of toddlers. Aware of the dewpoint nearing eighty degrees.

Irked at Adam's meddling, Hayley set a wedding date with Abe, then later went to the beach with Mateo. After defending Kirk to Scott, Sam stunned Kirk by insisting that they start their honeymoon right away. Meanwhile, Nikkie tried to get Amy to show interest in Nick, and then tried to get Nick to show interest in Susan. Luke explained AIDS to Lucky.

On the couch, starting to watch a video (Gerard Depardieu as Cyrano leaps and rants about the stage), I virtually swoon into a deep sleep, to dream of a great wall of candy, sugar-coated drops of licorice, white, pink, black. Simple male transfer protocol. Three kinds of woodpeckers about these trees. Atmosphere is a broth.

Old town graveyard after dark, the grass too high, lit only by lights from the nearby church parking lot. A bowl of blueberry frozen yogurt. Large sore on the roof of my mouth. The sweltering sky.

Hourglass frozen against the screen. First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar. T3 trunk line upgrade rollout – scan that! Differentiate in a boy's mind gravity from magnetism from simple suction. Small girl skating down the steepest of hills.

An icon for poetry (winged hearse). Woodpecker walks up the trunk of tree. Light mottled on the large leaf. Squirrel growls.

To look up at the impossible brightness would be fatal, tall cloud full of human ash, the city itself missing, to be defined forever by this absence, instance. Undelete function enabled. Nineteen years later, a boy arrives at a demonstration. Don't Laos me up.

Hilltop forest stripped, winding private road arrives at an 'S' shaped development of new construction (three models: Adelaide, Bristol, Chaucer), through the mud into a shell of board and sheet rock, cedar shake shingles, 65 surface choices for cabinets (I look up in the closet right through the attic to the sky). Red tail hawk threads the air.

This is what makes a rabbit hop. I shut my eyes and the dream (cartoon samurai) continues. Tea too hot to sip. An elephant king and a mouse, both made of cloth, equal in size. Tractor fed, the old dot matrix looks robust and healthy.

Embodied poetics would be a more intriguing proposition. This paragraph is called the Sicilian Defense. In the dream the reading is a pretext for a party, the party a pretext for a seduction.

Radar reveals T-storms in green. Suitcase hangs by a strap from a doorway, an effigy. Constant growl of the crickets. Instant in which the engine turns over. When, in the corridor, he says to her, "You model, don't you?" her reactions change totally, vague flirtatiousness replace by tone composed in equal parts of fear and anger, "Who told you? How do you know?"

Chem lit vs. fem lit. Channel surf the AM dial west of Dallas. Poetics of the open mike: categories for people who write but don't read. The curtains blow tho the window's shut. Give you the world every 30 minutes. Later, this will all be handwriting, then print. A flicker, in what should be an empty glade. Roadkill here is different.

Held by its feet upside down, the turkey will twist its neck to keep its head upright. Roadside stands sell old gas station signage, decommissioned pumps perfect to decorate a tavern or gift shop. Lone drivers heading south, route I-35, Fort Worth just a blur in the rear view mirror. Bird feeder hangs from the tree.

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from You, 1995, work in progress. "XVII," published by Black Ice, an e-zine edited by Mark Amerika (www.altx.com)