I guess I must address you
begin and progress somewhat peculiarly, wanting
not afraid to be anonymous, to love what’s at hand
I put out a hand, it’s sewn & pasted hingewise &
enclosed in cover. I’m 27 and booked, and my
grandfather

My grandfather, I begin with, played dominoes
called them “bones.” Bones is a doctor on Star Trek.
Black, intensive, rectangular solids starred
with white dots, and laid end to end. Mysterious
perfections, like flowers, but all, all as we can
know, give, take down address of, felt in the (bred
in the) bones. Loose cloak with half-mask
worn to conceal identity, esp. at masquerade, whence
dominoed
which I am
I saw it in a movie THE BLACK NIGHT, with Alan Ladd
and Patricia Medina
                                     the room of skulls of the
sacrificed at Stonehenge, wearing silky wigs blond
as Victoria’s our visitor’s hair. We intermingle.

That night I dreamed of my grandfather, playing
dominoes, and my mother my aunts—dreams are not
brightly lit—a brownish dream. Once, I dreamed
of the in perfect happiness, a motion not too fast
through space with one with whom I was completed.
Tetherball, skull and strung bones, my nightly fantasy
when an aunt died, blond and mad, I was six so I’d
something great to tell everyone. My father’s best
friend died, I was twelve and excited, my
aunt died. I saw her in dying wasted down to her
bones, the most pitiable animal I’d ever seen so I
cried without thinking, though didn’t grieve
I cried til there were unnaturally huge shadows
way down to my cheekbones and my cousins were
astounded and impressed. With them her death was for
us to hold close. I heard an elegy for Paul Blackburn

read by a friend today, and cried, for the beauty
of the work, his and his, don’t quite catch the
whole implacable rectangle. Those last two lines?
And for Ezra Pound: “In that palace they will
dwell forever/and guard the mystery of the world.”
So I mismanaged my first love affair, I botched it

humiliated, one sunset, eighteen, and I’m flooded with
the I have to die. It lasts a year. I take it
everywhere. I take it home. One whole night one
night I awake control every single breath I take
in case I might stop breathing. Victoria returns
from a walk with my baby
                                            The next morning I’m
different. A halo of will, my grandfather’s name.
He plays solitaire and whittles out how “when you
go you go” sky roofless. I never kissed him, once
had to my grandmother, didn’t want to, wrinkles
tasted dusty. She has cat’s eyes, hates doctors,
didn’t kiss Will before she married him

                                                                    she told me,
me too. I lay awake at night in the girls’ dormitory
and hug death to me it fills my body with will. I
can’t watch horror movies until suddenly last night.
I’ve watched my husband cry for the death of Jack
Kerouac, for his grandmother’s, for Allen Ginsberg’s
Elegies for Neal Cassady, and for the latter,
knowing neither, for the nobility of the poetry I
cry too. I cry last night at the end of Star Trek

the Captain rematerializes from the other, ghost
universe and Bones and the Vulcan are friends.
My husband’s mother doesn’t die as simultaneously
Paul Blackburn does. Thin wounded tough animal. Now,
she complains overweight and sends me love I’m
blank but can summon a rectangle for her a letter, is
that how I love? A few months later, in the same
heavily natured town where we heard the Cassady
Elegies So many colors flowers that sit and flowers
that fly and that girlishly dress and talk, I’m told
by letter my grandfather Will has died. I cry

comfortably, as comfortably as this year for Picasso
they were both in their nineties. I go to the museum
to pay homage to the Picassos (Chicago) and for the
first time, in a year of trying, I miraculously really
see EXCAVATION by de Kooning
bypass the Picassos, some angel’s around, is it Picasso?
Once I dreamed him exactly, corporeally, but young
(from photos) in a house of ghosts “What nonsense!”

Picasso and I said, in shrug language, to each other
meeting in the green hallway. Two days after my
grandfather letter, afternoon between waking and napping
I dreamed he came to me in air, like a baby in a
white nightgown, then flowed away. I just fed the
baby for the third time today, I must do these things
daily.
            Several months before I met my husband
I began to concentrate on ghosts, that they were there,
there here, and I, I might see one, if anyone why
not as with anything, I? I waited every night. I
went to bed and turned out the light, though no longer
lovingly hugged the dark, to see if it would appear,
the ghost. For three months. Nervously fell asleep.
I told my friend Mary she said Why not just see it?
I didn’t want to be one who saw ghosts. I waited
waited. Then I dreamed

                                          a woman a poet spoke to me
out of a drawing on my wall spoke what? Spoke.
The ghost would appear, and in a shower of gold, he
appeared and he was Rory Calhoun in his corniest
grin and loudest plaidest with shoulders sportscoat.
We embraced.

An enormous domino impenetrable of ghosts and also
evil perhaps. I wrestled with the ghostly, to emerge
real, and I wrestled I think with evil for it must
all be in me all of all in the world, kill, kill
yourself. A few weeks after Grandpa showed me himself
as a baby, my son was conceived.
                                                        10 minutes before
birth a shot of sodium pentathol: then I woke from
deepest black to where it was green, like my dream of the
room where everyone at all of each’s significant
ages for me, everyone I knew in one warm dark room
assembled in intimacy with me, a child. My child’s
my secret name, Libby.
                                        There’s the son you wanted
the nurse said. I cried and told her she was a skilled
and wonderful nurse. A person I don’t know

poet Ezra Pound part of my life dies he dies not that
part. I dream in order to participate in “the ceremony”
I must be decapitated, head placed on plate, with others,
at a white table. I awake and it’s I have to die,
all over again, not I but the baby will never die and
he, husband, and I will, not together. A wax-like
substance slow combustion ordinary temperatures luminous
in the dark, I fall dizzy to the floor

a week later, think I’m dying. Find I wouldn’t be
ready. But I don’t die death the unconceivable horror
so why not why not do the bad things the worst
things in life? Why am I not one who’s suicidal or
who’s evil? I wait as for the ghost but I’m haunted
by knives, and I work I write. I’m dizzy in the
museum but I grasp on to worship Cézanne, Picasso.
Weeks earlier I’d dreamed of poet Ed Dorn, in a lovely
greenish light, with a book a sequence of poems heavy
rectangles each they grant you comfort in the
territory where overlap life and death, not comfort
they grant you life in it. I dream I’m a blond

girl Samson in a pink prom dress, and I dream of
Ozymandias. Anonymous stone enormous stone head,
conveyed particle by particle from a place to a place,
but, says the Professor, useless to the conveyors
because not from their place. This is my place

In England we live in the country. A friend in
New York City has actually jumped into death from a
window, so palpable in my mind he might enter the room
and tell me again color preferences their meanings.
Blond . . . fair, person with such hair & skin; silk
lace of 2 threads in (hexagonal) meshes (orig. of
raw-silk color). Colors their flowering I wait
for my evil the monolith is implacable, with evil,
but the monolith is me inescapable, that I am not
evil, thread life and death. I waited six months
and wrote and wrote “I’m well and whole” to be so.
England’s so old that layers of death

pervade beautifully the beautiful countryside.
Last Sunday I walked barefoot through the cemetery,
came home and wrote “. . . And the dead the golden
warm & shady earth / I’m comfortable with / . . . Sights
& insights endless as the dead . . .” Intimacy with
all, spreading, Your Dailiness.