For eight miles across the narrow neck of the bay,
This spidery steel bridge serpentines gracefully
Over waters whose brigtnesses jubilantly toss
Silvers into silver, liquefy countless sky mirrors,
Slip mercurial messages from wave crown
To wave dip, and exhaust every effort that the eyes
Can expend to track their unceasing exuberance.
Even the machines, here, shrink to beetling insignificance,
And while traveling a mile a minute, seem to be moving
Slowly though an expanding envelope of blue space,
Which appears to desire a deviation from the what is
Of the city and its vast and intricate feats of engineering
To establish, if not for the defeated eyesight,
For the exalted vision, a what could be of the imagination.
We humans, subsumed in slippery silvers and mercurial
Swampings are now embraced by something more revolutionary
Than engineering, something that touches areas of living
Outside of the body, and scatters us sweetly through this blue.
If in this traversal, this bridge, these cars, the what is
Of the city take on certain entity-, perhaps even human-like
Characteristics, the steel smiling, as it snakes across
The happy bay, will the spirit, inhabiting this new
Amalgamation, move into the glow palace, where the chamber
Of sapphire awaits it? And having escaped finally
From the realm of mechanical separations, will it
Establish, at least for a moment, a movement for the body,
Which stretches miles and miles into hours and hours, as we dive and leap
From trough to crest, a hundred and a hundred thousand times?
Your treasured, people.”

After another restless night, at our preoccupied
Approach, suddenly, a score of songbirds scatters,
Like ascending, living confetti, returning to an apex
Of greens and blues, their flurries of twitterings
Chiming together, then splitting apart, each note
Carrying one of the many thorns whose sharpness
Galls us. For a moment, weightless, the ruins
Fall away in the rapidly receding distance,
As far below, the undulations of the surface
Reveal larger and larger vistas of earth and sea,
All the needling fragments reassembling into
Something cohesive and luminous,
Something indomitably living, who contains
In her being both flight and singing, plus
That indefinable quality of light that always
Effaces ruins. She is the angel who speaks
In the water’s voice, in the scattering clatter
Of hurried feathered pinions, in the sigh
Released from the hovel of the body,
To mate with the wind and dally with the leaves.
And how high she makes us feel, free in the depths
Of her soundings: how high, how whole, how strong!

We dream, in our mountainous accumulations
Of kindling, of a cauldron of ultimate fat,
Of a throne raised high with the skulls of our enemies,
Of a knowledge derived from sacrificial lambs,
Of a permanent bliss enclosed by a circle of stones.

These dreams weave scorching labyrinths of fire
With filaments of violence stretched as skin
Across an eye blind to the infinite. The stone
Is in the bag. The power is in the title.
The warmth of the hearth is in the death of another.
The dream is a nightmare of conflicted longings.

But there is a second, a brighter dream within us,
Not scattered through the hills as warring fires,
But centered, like a light within a jewel.
This is the I that calms us in its pool,
Ints infinite diamond cleansing every victim.

We slept in many bodies, but wake in one.

The face is a labyrinth of stone on stone,
Durable, but not infinitely so,
And in the end, its mask falls into ruins.
Then one of the fragments — each fragment is a mask —
Cracks into speech, breaks into realization:
“The Mask is a history of illnesses,
Mistaken paths to the center, which somehow hardened,
Gouging these twisted tunnels with agony.”

Mice run through the ruins twittering hungrily;
Snakes coil in the blues of the smoother stone alcoves;
Ants cart away the crumbled grains of sand;
Eventually, the center stands exposed.

The cure is strange, and not what we supposed.
A faceless vesicle of swarming lights
Swirls at the center of our twisted plight,
And each light burns to play a separate role.
Here is the clown, whose infinite delights
Unite us with the vortex of the soul.
Speak, and the mask is changed. Speak, and the pain unscrolls.

By mid morning, the absolutely pristine
Late-summer skies pour down such
Unrelenting quantities of light, that the trees,
Stirred only grimly by the breeze,
Seem almost to be supplicating, hanging,
A little limp, in dread anticipation of the heat,
And longing once more for night, and cold,
And wet. Last night’s big moon, just waning
From the full, her august demise,
Perhaps a premonition, is remembered only
Faintly as a chant of silver rest, fading
In the distance, her choirs haloing a lonely
Traveler, who moves into a swarming haze,
Which obliterates all dreams. What does this
Traveler know that prompts him to leave?
That the journey inward to the nourishing springs
Cannot occur in the blaze of optimism?
That hope is the product of a different, a purer
Emotion, one that stirs scents of ashes in the air?
The dry leaves rattle their dry stalks in our ears,
And the shaman, that wayfarer, that traveler,
Who has followed the departing day almost out
Of earshot, almost out of mind, chants a garbled
Talisman in a foreign tongue, his bare feet
Leading us down a stony path.

As if it were a ghost that had fallen from a luminous
Height and had passed through some glittering,
Translucent material as it fell, the earth,
With its whole collection of winged trees,
And serpentine waters, greets us this evening
With one of its final summer proclamations:
“Brazen.” Whoever says the word, says it in colors,
Not sounds, colors that have moved nimbly,
Silently from an interior landscape, where they
Have saturated themselves with emotion.
Now they slide swiftly through the trees,
And across the choppy bay, and then bleach out
In the sky, not paled by the intensities
Of their travels, but fevered down to a blue
Essence adorned with bridal clouds. “Brazen.”
That’s its romance, its final simplicity,
That is can remain perfectly what it is,
Derisive of every disenchantment,
Deadly to all parodies of pastorals. That is can
Compel us to actually see the imperceptible,
The inner one who is as potent as she is alive,
Adapting her blissful body to millions of forms.

At this time of evening, the shadows play
Such a decided role in our contemplation
Of nostalgia, that we cannot orient ourselves
To their lengthening, without some small
Acceleration in the depletion of our vital forces.
Distance is everywhere — in the masses of trees,
In the glass panes burning in the buildings
On the hill, in the soft brush that becomes
A claw and obliterates distinction. Everything blurs,
Except that singe monument: the hospital where
She died. Da, Inessa, the psychic, the clairvoyant,
The ved’ma from a vanished world of isolated
Villages and superstitious moujiks, is dead. The fact
Is so incredible — although she was unfathomably
Old, blind in one eye, and hobbled through
Her humble trailer, parked amid towers
Of affluence, on swollen ankles, her one tooth
Forever hungry, her aching head always bandaged
Against our too physical American reality
By a damp babushka — it is worth repeating.
Inessa, the ved’ma, is dead. She ate no children,
Tricked no bridegrooms, turned no humans
Into wild animals. On the contrary, Inessa
Was a saint, who took twisted root in California
Soil out of the old wickedness and magic
Of primordial Russia. Here, she, with deliberation,
Cast aside the trifling pursuits of money
And motherhood, to close her eyes, and talk to God,
For others. Let’s say it again,
So that we may return for one last time
To the nostalgia studio, which is now going
Black and emptying quickly of supplicants.
Inessa, the friend of friends, the friend of
The Friend, the friend, our friend, is dead.
Da, true, the Dark man grinned. What else
Could he do, his curses of white swellings
And bloating hydremia having only filled
Her body with sanctified oils and made it
A refuge for Christ’s forgotten ones.
She is free, and he must collapse in ashes.
Because she knew, she knows, that if life
Is a martyrdom, then death itself must die.
Because at this time of evening, it must
Be like this. Da. Da. A lengthening
Of shadows, a hurricane of gold,
All the statues of her afflictions and recitations
Quiet now, in that distance, which can only
Bring more comfort as it grows.
Quiet now, running now, like a flurry
Of blue and copper ghosts along day’s last
Crumbling battlements, approaching truth
By way of eccentric passion,
In that big chair, with her fat bare feet aloft,
Her head thrown back among the laughing stars.

This morning, a fog has pressed down, almost
To the treetops, erasing the great bulk of the mountains
And the oppressions of distance, and enabling
The imagination to push skyward into a salient
Of being hitherto made incorporeal by the too
Rigorous commands of the physical senses.
This strange amalgamation of vaporous,
Almost watery fire, is probed by a separate
Sense, the internal tides and combustions
Which manufacture dreams. Now we can see
The many faces of entities, standing placidly,
Or wildly dancing, all moving about these celestial
Hinterlands, and entirely sustained in their
Quixotic powers by families of worshipers on earth,
Who fashion simulacra of them, then lavish
The effigies with devotion. So potent,
And so inward have some of these devotees
Become, that miracles — that is to say,
The incorporeal causations of love —
Sometimes erupt. This one, with pupilless eyes,
Seeing women, at the grey horizons, dance
In silken finery. This one, with twisted legs,
Exquisitely dancing. The usual beggars drowned
In torrents of money. And in the midst of these
Enormous gyrations, as if composed of that same
Watery fire, we find a small, frail woman,
Her weak eyes closed, her yellow cane, set aside,
Her mind turned inward — a collection of sinewy sticks
In a saffron sari, upholding the heavens themselves
With her fierce song.