Sequence

1. HELL

You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down,

the infernal hatreds.

Shoot them. Shoot them where they live

and then skip town.

Or stay and re-engineer

the decrepit social contraption

to distill the 200-proof

elixir of fear

and torture the...the what

from the what? And didn’t I promise,

under threat of self-intubation,

not to envision this

corridor, coal-tar black,

that narrows down and in

to a shattering claustrophobia attack

before opening out

to the lake of frozen shit

where the gruesome figure is discerned?

Turn around, go home.

Just to look at it is to become it.

2. PURGATORY, THE FILM

He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know.

She was the second born of a set

of estranged identical twins. They met,

hooked up, and moved in with her mother,

who managed a motel on Skyline Drive.

But always it was the other,

the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway,

he imagined in the shadow

of the “Vacancy” sign

or watching through the window

below the dripping eaves

while they made love or slept.

The body is relaxed and at rest,

the mind is relaxed in its nest,

so the self that is and is not

itself rises and leaves

to peek over the horizon, where it sees

all its psychokinetic possibilities

resolving into shapely fictions.

She was brave, nurturing, kind.

She was evil. She was out of her mind.

She was a junkie trading sex for a fix,

a chief executive, an aviatrix.

She was an angel

to the blinded and the lamed,

the less-than-upright, the infra dig.

And she was even a failure.

She went to L.A. to make it big

and crept back home injured and ashamed.

3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUEL

They put him in jail, why we don’t know.

They stamped him “Postponed.”

But he didn’t mind.

The screws were almost kind.

He had leisure to get his muscles toned,

mental space to regret his crimes,

and when he wasn’t fabricating license plates

he was free

to remember the beauty

that not once but a thousand times

escaped him forever, and escapes me, too:

ghosts of a mist drifting

across the face of the stars,

Jupiter triangulating

with the crescent moon and Mars,

prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew...

4. HEAVEN

There’s drought on the mountain.

Wildfires scour the hills.

So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills

searching for the fountain,

which it finds, believe it or not,

or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver

rises from an underground river

and makes a few of the hot

rocks steam and the pebbles hiss.

Soon the mammal will drink,

but it has first

to stop and think

its reflexive, impeccable thought:

that thinking comes down to this—

mystery, longing, thirst.