When Venetia Burney first whispered that name
into her grandfather’s ear, you ceased to be
a faint albedo on photographic plates
on the furthest shoulder of our galaxy.
You were thenceforth Star of the King of the Dead,
Lord of Tartarus and its portentous rivers,
the ninth planet—destined to be neglected
by Gustav Holst and silver-winged voyagers.
More cryptic than Ganymede or Callisto,
you beguiled us with your scale and your distance,
master of the Eighth House and of Scorpio
(till The Epsom Comet cleared Venetia’s fence
and left your name swirling in her morning tea,
dissolved by earthly gavel and committee).

They drank like gods—by which I mean they fell.
My lord would chart the stars with drunken proof,
then chart again the table’s edge, the bench, the wall,
declare them wrong, and call the stumble truth.
He swore the sky was his, or so he fought,
measuring heavens cup by cup, until sundown,
till even Saturn reeled. Young Kepler watched—
smiled thin as ink—and wrote the good parts down.
Good Lynx, you rose with all a noble air—
antlers in the candlelight, your crown awry.
You lapped the cup, turned and climbed the stairs,
then fell like Icarus, much too drunk to fly.
All the while, two fools disputing stars—
your constellation burns beyond their charts.

I. Solitary Refinement

At the hour of second sight, he scrawls
two marks—one holy, one erratic—
an incantation on his office wall,
like the sympathetic magic
of his primordial kin—whose curves
of ochre bison, hunters, horses,
the French so lovingly preserved.
He’ll be half-blind like them, forced
to squint while scribbling in the faintest light
where shadows move like feral beasts—
he’ll press his fingers to his eyes
to prove he actually exists, to cleave
the borders of his prison cell
in every hollow of his skull.

II. Horror Vacui

The noble savage is a mythic lark,
yet proves no less compelling.
How then does man outwit the dark
without putting out his eyes, or sailing
heedlessly toward the burning sun?
Must he lash himself—and his brother—
to a rattling chariot, and run
to death beside him for their mother’s
madness? His choices are more limited
than tracing filament through a maze.
Perhaps the ‘enlightened’ primitive
will cry into that boundless cave,
only to hear voices beyond the room,
echoing deeper into the vacuum.

III. The Persistence of Division

But then the office space grows dim,
the only light, his thoughts—refracted through
his bourbon, ice, and the tumbler’s rim—
a film unspooling out of view:
his final moments drawing near;
a flicker caught between this world and that;
a blurred frame for each passing year—
now ending on this faded photograph:
He’d always thought his wife had smiled
a bit obliquely for a bourgeois girl,
sunning on that imperial virgin isle
by a native decked in costume pearls
strung from his belly to his nose.
He gave her horns—the native, a halo.

Gushing Spring

I begin where the body meets the floor,
the sole unseals its mouth against the skin.
This ache admits the point where healing pours,
the way dry ground admits the rain within.

Great Surge

Between the bones, I work the knot to light,
and feel it climb, reduced to simple need.
What holds in muscle moves itself at night,
a pressure worked through fiber into heat.

Three Mile Point

Below the knee, the muscle learns the number:
one bowl of rice, then work until compelled.
The body holds the rise of hunger,
how far the fields extend when breathing fails.

Joining Valley

The hand goes slack. The trade is learned by feel:
to hold, release—remain upright and still.

Inner Gate

At the wrist, the passage seals the chest.
The heart kicks hard against a closing wall.
Air comes too late, the mouth compressed.
I do not move. That stillness is the rule.

Great Sun

The temple bears descending fire
a brightness set in force, a binding law.
What heat selects, it lifts onto the pyre;
what heat rejects is left exposed and raw.

Hall of Impression

Between the brows, the pressure slips—I grasp
not faces, but the burn that faces leave:
a sky that falls, a field erased to ash,
the look that means the future has been seized.

Bright Eyes

Beside the eye, the signal tempers sight.
The nerve is charged, obedient to light.

Of gamelans and pictograms I sing,
of satellites with gossamer fins
arrayed with Apollo’s flaxen rings!
With ancient hearts and minds, contained herein:
may you accept this interstellar ark
which cut the vacuum with its ivory nose
and bore its noble calyx to the dark,
a billion nights of spinning in repose
until it fell upon your alien shore.
Of the Brandenburg and glorious Fifth
I sing, Queen of the Night and Morning Star!
Like dew, you must shake the stardust from our lips—
O Melancholy Blues, O Devil Bird!
We’re resurrected with each passing word.

The rough beast does not slouch, he walks erect
while speaking at rotary club luncheons,
charity balls, and a late-night public
access channel, building his dominion.
He is pudgy, hardly a feral child
brimming with preternatural powers
(an unassuming grass-roots antichrist),
yet he has been cultivating his charm
since the advent of sin. The world won’t end
with a whimper, but with a mobile phone
ringing out the Requiem Aeternam
beneath the seat of an El Camino:
then at rest stop near Idaho Falls
he’ll catch the endgame from a bathroom stall.

Nothing registered as wrong or right.
The room kept customs: cup and spoon,
a table scarred where mornings set their weight.
She knew at once. I looked away—too soon.
No gauge for harm, no light to score the dark,
no server queued to audit what was done.
The moment sealed itself, a postal mark
pressed into fact and sent into the sun.
From nothing came the laws I learned to keep:
first matter, then the habit of the nerve—
this heat, her lipstick on the coffee cup,
a stain the morning carried, then observed.
The clock advanced. My pulse obliged its turn.
I called it cause, not choice—and let it burn.

Your breath, a white net, a gossamer veil
falling into the dark waters beside
your hand. Your hand, a coral branch, a gray
comb, now parting the curtains from your eyes.
Your eyes, two halos, fire-ringed coronas
beaming bright as moons against the blue skin
of your face. Your face, a cobalt opal,
a smooth luminescent stone balancing
upon your shoulders. Your shoulders, a wood
frame, a cross buried in the sand, pressing
into your spine. Your spine, a marble road,
a long porcelain serpent constricting
around your womb. Your womb, a burning house,
a violet light pluming into your mouth.

You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
I’m not deceived by your far-off gaze
or the canted edges of your smile.

The gods confer—perhaps they are beguiled
enough to send the animals your way.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

The geese and rabbits shadow you awhile
as we converse or kiss—they can’t but stray
to the canted edges of your smile.

With this, you resurrect the god of wine,
the moribund branch, the shriveled grape.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

In Eros / Thanatos, you grant new life—
Prometheus flickers in your gaze
and the canted edges of your smile.

I can’t resist the revels—half a child,
half a beast—who needs the right to say:
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild
with the canted edges of your smile.

I. American Jeremiad

“I love a martini, two at the most. Three – I’m under the table; four, I’m under the host.”
– Dorothy Parker
(The Algonquin Hotel, 1929)

Shakespeare is dutifully remembered
for his plaintive sonnets and perfect plays.
We are ruined by his genius, forever
at a loss to be adequately pained.
Today, we are on the opposite side
of Elizabethan diction; we brood
in prosaic tones and truncated lines,
we cheer blandness and raise brandy balloons
to Sandburg, Hemingway, Williams, and Frost,
those cryptic purveyors of emptiness
who’ve dulled the edges of our lips and thoughts.
Should we remix their drinks, I would request
this recipe: a splash of Whitman’s Dick,
& a dash of Emily Dickinson’s Wit.

II. Pre Profundis: The Ballad of Hyacinthus and Marsyas

“Those whom the gods love grow young.”
– Oscar Wilde
(Cadogan Hotel, April 5, 1895)

How I hate that unfathomable boy,
who pretended to love me in the guise
of a man! He has robbed me of all joy,
my good name, and my fortune with his lies.
And yet, he was a celestial body
devouring light, bending me to his will:
I was wittingly drawn to the dark rings
of that moon, the circumference of my hell.
Now gilded snakes pervade my dreams; they slip
with cool abandon down my bed to sleep
and brush the trembling reaches of my lips.
Nysaeans—why have you forsaken me?
For Apollo kissed that indolent youth,
then flayed my skin for blowing on a flute.

III. The Idea of Disorder at Key West

“By God, I wish I had that Hemingway here right now!
I’d knock him out with a single punch!”
– Wallace Stevens
(Casa Marina, 1935)

Oh! Blessed rage for order—pale Ramón!
Papa is a friend of Dionysus,
as are we—let us tip our hats to him,
as well our cups: to the Bull of Minos
on this isle of bones, who sloshes about
its shallow reefs! I give this humble toast
to dull his roar beyond our pink redoubt
which mists the trawlers idling on the coast
and drapes their empty decks with silver foam.
Let us conspire to lure him with a string
of hyacinths beside his water hole,
that stretch from our veranda to the sea.
I’ll don my mask, you tune your pithy lyre:
the Maenads fan their cocktails by the fire.

IV. Delirium Tremens

“A straw hat on, my eyes flushed, might I resemble the former
preacher who painted a pool table and then maimed himself?”
– Rush Rankin
(Descanso Beach Club)

The seaweed bends with the ocean, a field of women
kneeling, then standing row upon row, as if to offer
a benediction to the shore. Already I forget I am
floating in this frigid Catalina water,
not some ghost surveying southern France—
nor an ominous crow or a half-mad painter
scanning a landscape after a pint of absinthe—
A boat circles above me, the black chain from its anchor
stretches like an umbilical cord to the blanched florets
of coral below. The motor hums. A large woman peers
over the side as I ascend, her distorted contours
growing in and out of focus—and I am free,
more so than Van Gogh waking in Saint Rémy,
a dark habit caressing his cheek.

V. Dionysus Spikes the Ball

“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones, run in packs
like the primal horde.”
– Camille Paglia
(Caribbean coast of Mexico)

The mermaids swing their bodies beach
to beach—like skipping stones that never sink;
they don’t suspect how far the rip tides reach
or how the sea is seething as they drink.
The Marquis purrs when hipbones slap the waves—
a gasp, a jolt, a laugh that could seduce;
Camus would note a stranger learns to crave
the shine of sweat that justifies abuse.
The boys—like oiled gods in mirrored shades—
strike statues in the surf, each sweaty boast:
a promise made of flesh the sun remakes;
Dionysus leaps and hammers down the post.
Those hips, that heat, that final feral act:
a scholar licks the salt off every fact.

VI. Do Not Go Quiet

“I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”
– Dylan Thomas, on the eve of his passing
(White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, 1953)

I will not sip the dark. I drink it neat—
Four Roses, please, poured quick—no word to waste.
Your bar keeps tilting, free of gravity
or is it me, untethered to this time and space?
The mind draws tight, a star to single grain,
then breaks—rose-bright, galactic, drunk with sound;
Not truth, but song flung hard against the pain
of knowing breath must spend itself, unbound.
I will not sip the dark. I drink it down.
The night still answers when I strike the bar.
My breath comes bright; my blood refuses crown
or calm—this pulse outshouts the dying star.
What’s that—my breath is neither galaxy nor rose?
A pox on both—pour on. I’ll drink until you close.

VII. Shiduri’s by the Sea

“Beside the sea she lives, the woman of the vine, the maker of wine.”
– Shin-eqi-unninni

My tavern is exclusive and discreet,
the customers irregular at times;
some drink from flasks of lapis lazuli
while others tip bejeweled carafes of wine.
Above the bar I dedicate a frame
to every famous patron I have served—
that’s Ea on the left, a tortured mage,
who drowned his sorrows when he drowned the Earth.
The Stone Men used to come on Saturday
to numb their week of service on the ship—
they were a stoic lot, but always paid
until one client smashed them all to bits.
He said his name was Gilgamesh, I think—
he crushed the pink umbrella in his drink.

VIII. Taken, With a Twist

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say No in any of them.”
— Alexander Woollcott, on Dorothy Parker
(The Algonquin Hotel, Oak Bar, 1920)

“Pour me a gin that’s educated in sin.”
—How earnest. I prefer mine taught to ply.
I drink what makes a decent woman grin.
—I drink what leaves the decent woman dry.
Then let’s proceed. I favor discipline.
—Only if learned. You must go slow.
I never rush. I like my damage driven in.
—Good. I collect what lingers after “no.”
And when it burns, do you deny the fire?
—I file it, darling. Names are tools.
I name what breaks me just to watch it tire.
—Then order well. The glass remembers fools.
“God’s Promise?” Or “The Devil’s Repast.” A spark
flared up when she leaned in: “I never experiment in the dark.”