I.

somewhere in your hopelessly planned lectures

we will learn what happens

to the surface area (are we ever going to stop wandering into

the chemistry hall

basement halls? their flowerstrangeness… the stageness they

seem to be losing all the time...)

of a number of dimensions of whatever is in between us

-number dimensional ball

and even if we don't

i still trust you.

i have only ever been able to do physics

problems when you're asleep

by the long french novels

in the vineyard

that freezes by buzzards bay. amor

vincit omnia. there will

always be more days than years though

you prefer years. more monstrous grapes in the ice shard

than vines. there will always

be a love that conquers it. it, meaning

our soullessness. tell me

something new for once, like:

how you've been dreaming

about passing out

in vital staircases.

about permuting the names of your cousins jakob and jacob (who did you

wrestle with that night in the bar-library? whose hip

did you shatter trying

to run out

with that copy of doctor zhivago?) and,

to get to the point, whose hip

did you suck on like a grapefruit. seville toronja. renaissance

treatises on the wasteland, dark

rosé. a triumph for jacob. a contentment

for jakob. a winter garden in

the south of spain growing

only mothers, stony photographs. tell me

where i went wrong. tell me anything

at all about wrongness,

your weather.

tell me how jakob feels when he loses the yu-gi-oh match

at states.

after playing the game

his whole life

and learning so much.

tell me how the letters of his name feel

rolling around in your hands (i wanted you to tell me all this like i didn't know it already

but now all i can imagine

is how

i knew it all and you worried so much… your life was so full of photos of grandma anna in

hungary…

you had all three god cards in play

and i couldn't do anything…)

in your dream on the fucking page. huge marbles that will always crush you.

angels you can never not know anymore.

i will always

walk through the wall. i will always grow flowers for you.

II.

beige drum set in flushing meadows park

having it all.

beige drum set in the first part of our lives

-number vibrational mode, unknot flowers and

gin flowers.

where does suffering come from. december was

the entire tempest condensed

into a pane of glass. glass, which

is a mode of shattering. each time, the winter tower

is transformed by winter. “invernadero,” beautiful. snow peas bursting

—hanging garden while we crosscheck each others'

proofs and finally,

finally,

drink coal-shattered herring-brine and dreamy clay stout.

when is december? when are we going to make

sense of the vilnius dream?

the susan dream? (when

are we going to have a staring contest with martin buber?) my children

will pull my beard. i will pull martin buber's beard.

(anything to win.)

something horrible is going to happen to the entire night sky

soon but we can't look up until i finish destroying your dreams, tigers' gazes.

until i knock the clay stout

onto your poem.

coeur de lion, when will we save susan? in every

sense of the word we. in the strangest

sense of save. when you pull me

out of the lake the rocks go dry and, finally,

you can see me in a more airy light, shivering, a more

amethyst light. beautiful, how flushing sounds

when you tell me about it. beautiful

the azulejo tiles on the floors

of your dreams, made

in fishing towns in portugal. beautiful how you never look down

in dreams, as if down were

not a way to be gone. loosely—even more loosely,

i want to sneak flerovium zinc fishing-

wire into the wrestling

match and, before i take you down, before m.b. gets a chance

to step through my stance with

your fullness, i will trefoil knot the both of us. (i want to

see abysmal

heaters in sage chapel one more time.) everything strange about my dreams

has been said before in my life. said about

me, to you, in hidden chapels inside sage chapel.

all the lights in my house went out. joyously. my eyes

were closed. i couldn’t see

what i gave you, covered in mud

and pollen. i couldn’t see your face recognize mine.

nothing we do is for joy, circa

2019 when we did it all for joy. m.b., i have mastered you. susan, i have mastered you.

i have mastered flowers, literally everything

for you, my question.

III.

ground getting

fragile and more ungraspable because we know precisely

where we are

which makes it

—arcs

between movement and the arcs of our steps,

new earths on which

we may have wildflowers, life, grandmothers—skinnier,

more certain,

farmer’s markets where you buy eggs

every monday and watch the rain tunnel

through your fingers into your heart. what

a village life, daisies

on the heater, for which

you are so imperfectly prepared. strato-

polymers. aviaries full of daisies

while its birds land,

the ground before ours. what might be incorrectly termed as strato-polymers

is the ground, vultures. comets, spacesuits full of snow,

liquid neon, life made of silicon instead of carbon.

you, opening the door

and the atmosphere floods out.

of course, (in a sudden slip of mastery)

whenever the spirit comes, i will catch it.

i will have it all to myself. i will

be all-pieces, all-apart. without jakob

i would be alexander, four hooked swords

divided into a circle on my back, a meditation. ride

or dawn. no one get back. no one

get home. flashes of color, in precisely

this order—dark blue dark blue dark blue dark blue

of my life of my life.

without jakob,

i would be at the kitchen table although my shoes and socks

would, of course, (in a sudden slip of spirit) be on.

although, jakob is with me

and nourished.

whatever life unleashes on you

i will unleash on life tenfold. no, onehundredfold, no, flocks of vultures and

charred pita, clay mud.

love, don’t look at me. i’m not here.

what life is is just a telescope burning down

to the last mirror. a current

of water inside a river going

the same direction. there is so much

water the kitchen

table won’t hold. i drilled

a hole in the cup. so it could contain more. it could

let the dill prairie drink

from it as well.

what life will inexorably be named

is the conversation between the last mirror and the rest of the observatory.

i drilled a hole in the focal plane so all the data could be fucked up.

(everything will appear as the inverse of

how it is on that plane. the hole, an expanse. giant plains, whorls of tiny pickerel.

my fingerprints, wandering elliptical ghosts… just

visible in your analysis…)

benjamin i’m bringing you back, dragging you

out of the text with a string. look—lightning

over ibiza, lightning snaking

through your friend’s house so the analysis

has a space to work through. that’s it. now

you can go back.

letter from dora: you don't know benjamin

at all. the text is so obscure and we will be miserable.

(i was floored when i read your letter.)

letter going back: i read your dissertation. everything there was obvious, basically woolen,

comatose, beautiful.

(when will you publish it, reopen the problem…? i can only catch you

every day while the physics is still worked out.)

it is so dark. it is already morning. my eyes are open and i don’t see.

IIV.

one-way intersections

and daisy chains, rumor chains, rules of being.

destroying tapes of hannah arendt lectures

to make room for the clash cds, shredded halvah.

does this mean we're alive.

no.

how long. how long. how long. how long.

how long will we live. how long will we live.

i was at patmos, my parents’ kitchen.

i ran away to sunbathe on the rocks

with you, the bad son—blue circle on a green grid, dark wings

in a blue sky. does the geometry work out.

possibly.

it works out if i love life without end.

it works out when i realize i'm inside history

and i must live.

does the single-daisy chain work. yes immediately. you can't deny that.

(you can't interview

hannah arendt anymore.)

but hannah, i want to be closer to life.

close enough to notice immediately, when i wake up, that yes.

life without end—grape jelly spread

on the table itself. eat the table. sit

on my back. life without end—how long.

long how will it last. melted gold on black

porcelain. i don’t understand wind when it

turnsback. when it shuts the stained understanding you keep gone.

IV.

every angel is a bed, dogwood candies

in my dad’s dad, you

wouldn’t understand—windows

in strings of the sweetest

glass. rags and alte sachen!, pike heads, clementines. (sphere-packing problems in

abgrundsymal i will bring you forth

-number of dimensions.)

am i here for you? do i concern you,

grandma anna, shafts

of light in the staircase when

the camera lets the photograph in,

when you concern me?

when you come to me in your dreams of mine.

how sweet will the glass be when, its bitterness transformed,

we throw birch tree branches into it, mastica

and onycha,

stir it? a

century-magnet, strange

attractor—that’s when you pull

me in, that’s long dark roads in hungary

covered with oysters and chives

after the rainstorm. that’s

where i matter. that’s

the maneuver that needs four hands to pull off.

in the entire city, in the dense, sweet and choking chicken's blood,

i will be your shore.

at the beginning of your life

i will be your life's shore.

without yet being mine, without yet measurement, swathes

of baby clothes and luxor—the pharaoh’s

haughtiness. don’t

undo me i’m undone, ahistorical, unglamorous,

x-rayed.

do you remember when we would grade e&m problem sets

on saturday nights, emptying bags of sour gummy worms and cashews?

i would always be so brutal,

quick and tyrannical, and you would go through everything again,

giving back

half the points i took off.

and every time

my heart would just harden, fill up with clean electrical air and pharaonic pridefulness. no.

of course i don’t remember.

do you remember when we made risotto when both

your roommates were gone and you drank

the whole bottle of wine—are we

finally destroying the poem? tanks and tanks

of mint and jellyfish

in my bedroom I drink from. that

and nothing else. the only thing

I drink. the only thing I know you’re scared of. here, cape cod daikon

and iron defense, gigantic warfare of…

and in… the self. which bloods, selfhoods, fucks me over. really

just fucks me over the balcony-smile

in your room.

i… don't remember any of that either.

not studying archaeology

but blowing up the beach

with pearl and wildflowers.

not drinking the destruction wine

but being anointed in it.

i would literally give you anything i have

for you to come live with me, with my life.

for a red rose,

steel-clad, its inner-space

where nothing could live

without a great sacrifice,

a huge change,

its gravity kneading

the entire black sky.

if i knew better how to love

the space you’re in.

if i knew better where to light

the house on fire so all of it burns while

we’re inside.

interiority. listening to a stranger shower

in the other room. listening

to the tragedy of it all—bright walls

in a dark room. i

i i i i i i i i i i i i

will live with you though i don’t know why.