Frankly it amazes me
--how urgently he talked about death,
this sweet blank flan of a boy

as yet untouched by it
in any way, except for the general knowledge
that lurks in everybody’s neural complexitypaths
from birth. How urgently; and sometimes

even, convincingly. The body with the single
professional gang-commissioned death-hole
where the vein snakes up a temple…
or the larger and bloodier butcherwork
the surgeons will make in twenty more years
of his mother’s gut…he has no knowledge

of these, his world is simple and clement,
and yet his small vocabulary is fuel,
it seems, for death, and almost anything

can spark it to combustion… I think
of cartoon animation people running off a cliff:
they’ll fall, of course, but first

their innocence and energy will keep them
successfully aerial. The same when he faces
spiritual longing…his words are meat

on the alter, his words are knees on the hard-ridged shells
of the oracle floor…this boy,
untested by anything more
than a standardly difficult day at school
or a family spat…his words, his breaths, like any aspirant’s

ascend in search of the numinous…
and I think of the initial zipping trail
of the skipped stone: it will sink,

but not before its moments of magic.
And love!--his assault upon love.
And sex!--yes, somehow, Ess-Ee-Ex,

its etiquettes and its violences
and its stinkflower gravitational pull
and its ice-grip and its swamp of no return
and its beckoning wetlands and its explosions
of small god-pleasures and its nightly tombs
and moon-gates and unwashable chemical force,
its hokey-pokey in the honkeytonk,
its musk, its mask, let’s face it:

only great ignorance
is up to that task.

When I tell you that cultural ritual is an artifice
composed of simultaneous chrono-vectors,
I’m thinking of sex. I mean it.
We all are. It isn’t just me. Or when I say
the war, or the god, or the list with the juice and the cereal…
sex. What is it the psycho-experts are claiming?--every ten seconds?
When I tell you that I’m thinking of sex,

I’m thinking of death. Its worm is always
in my eye, its sour and dirt-blown web is always
a catch in my throat. It was always a wen
releasing a small electrical jolt to the brain
of Napoleon, Alexander, Attila. It was funereally
in the black, black ink of the Brontes;
why should I be any different? Why can’t we

be honest?--every poem is “Sex.” (Or “Death.”)
If we were honest, half of our poems would be about
the making of poems, the conference on the making of poems,
the resume of poems successfully made…you know, the way
that half of our time is actually spent. And did
ten seconds pass just now? If so, then
sex. (If so, then death.) Not too long after

the Dolphin first made port in Tahiti, it was discovered
the crew were trading its nails
for dalliances with the pliant and welcoming
women of that island--“to such a great extent, the ship
was in danger of being pulled apart.”
Inside the cradling waves of moonlight
on those waters…smiling…consummating…human

nails into smooth, bamboo-brown human grain…
how did they know, how could they foresee, that
my mother would die from her own lungs
shaping hundreds of obstinate fists in her chest,
my father would die with his own blood turning
into a useless negative of itself?
And yet they must have known, they must have seen the lesson,

they were trying to deny it with the drive of such
combustive, zealous engines! This is my topic
tonight, and how the craft of poetry and the role
of the postmodern yes a bare knee like a beacon,
like a skull beneath the face-skin, and a question
from the audience is yes in my mind, yes in yours, yes
sex and death--the one thing.

Maybe the gods do walk among us, swaggering,
consoling, pitying, lusting for our warmth and inexperience
that must be a kind of sexual veal to them
-- whatever, maybe they are here, always, invisibly.
Maybe we do exist in fields of psychic interconnection,
and the way electromagnetism or gravity is a grain
that patterns space-time, so are waves
-- although we'll never be aware of them -- of hunch
and luck or telepathy. As for neutrinos:
it isn't maybe. They're showering through this page
and your hand and your heart right now. The moth
beats in a frenzy around the candle flame, as if trying
to whip the light itself into a cream. It can't refuse
the bulb in the bedside lamp, the headlight in the car.
And yet it doesn't even seem to see the sun
-- the sun is too here for that.

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
                   and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
                   and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.