I came to Alabama for the dreams

   of Sun Ra, who said he was born on another

impossible, uninhabitable bottom land and unreconstructed

at Delphi. Some judgment! Now I've got osteonecrosis,

talk about the dead speaking through us.
The fountainhead cut off the flow to the corpus,

The addition of solitude untrammeled,
one and more and more but always
the inner life astray,

3 days, 6 meals, 8 coffees have I driven
just to see the island.
I have turned off the radio 90 times

Its blue cathedral is trembling into the marrow
of my mouth. Its sharp houses split open

every string, then still into the trotting

You have been evoked so often
like some relative in office
whom we have heard of by name

The Middle Ages had ended
even in the provinces,
but at first no one noticed

I suppose I ought to consider the question rhetorical,
or know it simply means, I'd like to know what you've seen.

As a matter of fact, I've been the spider crawling beneath
your sheets, the worm searching your warmth as you sleep,

Out of lapis blue the face
         rises
round and smiling like a bell.

Snow fell all night and suddenly there was morning:
a startling vision from a familiar window,
   while yet an ordinary sight: a
         neighboring hill had become itself more