my brother Bill's birthday today. the roll-call:

Bill - Lincoln
me - JFK
Cara - Constitution Day
Grandma - 4 July 1900


from my own Cornell box (July):


5

With fog in rearview mirror end
of the span ahead lost in blast
of X-ray light (darkness visible? M.
Purrly's frwcks greenhorde lunge-dragn

tales?) Mississippian suppositories are
homing devices I will triangulate
some December with a Florentine
grandmother and a Negus-ancestral

mother of millenniums MOM grand
on the far side of blindness at the head
of the dinner table in the ancient
apartment off River Rd (or Niger?)

swirl of communal clay chert
deciphered only dimly and a little
child at the table with Lafayette
dancing in the painting in the country

of his father looking on after a late war
D.A.R. Florence Ainsworth 7.4.1900
cardinal pts of a maternal Negus
feeder reddening unraveling on

the other other side (these variable
sublimitations mean I need a M.A.P.
(relief if possible) or Nazca poem
(excellent, Ray!) visible over the Iowa barn)

raison d'état and Inca terraces (mirth-
impervious) in foiled embossments of
rain-porous Thursday's stunned pain's
cup of sorrow (vale JVL you're through)

and it's Marian Anderson Peru out of your
flaming dream from Indiana to the tall
Andes from musical tomahawk to capitol
steps up to the microphone and I am a poor. . .

1.21.2000