And, to my ear, the most beautiful, heartbreaking image of all:

There were owls so asleep
one could die of old age in their dreams.
(p.20)

Totem’s idiom is vital, erotic. It is born of infinity and being. Language itself

emerged: in the Flesh of the Fruit.
I spoke tongues against your breathlessness…

To be alive I had to praise, to praise I had to
learn to speak.
(p.15)

“Nothing gets right in Love because / Of Time, and Motion; poetry touches that” (p.73). Love is key to Totem, infusing and inseparable from the poem’s other core themes. The couple who witness the Creation’s fireworks display are real, physical bodies. Their love is the realest thing there is, diaphanous yet solid — “Her nakedness is all” (`(Naked),’ p.43) — from the atoms spraying out of their emotions to the galactic disruptions causing their thinking:

sound waves fought their way
through air. But light was the medium itself.
Thousands of birds, the tiniest birds, adorned your hair.

… I drew my love from
geometry.
(pp.17-8)

With its disarming turns of phrase — “I am very tired and I am rather in love,” p.19 — I came to my senses. “She said I came, I came to my senses really fast / and you liked it.”

at the poetry reading

I read `The PM on Mental Illness,’ then `Abu Hamza al-Masri Preaches God’s Love’:

No drop of liquid
is loved by Allah more than
the liquid of blood.

Within two days, his predecessor would be killed, and Abu Hamza would become the leader of al Quaida in Iraq.

After `Please Send Some More Work’ and `Theology and `The Said’’ (“Fucking French”), I read `The PM Deploys More Troops’ (“A sort of haiku villanelle.”).

I crave to see just a moment into the future. (I say “Five seconds,” and the TV replies, “Five seconds.”)

A Twirl is an evaginate Flake.

COSTELLO JUSTIFIES HIS LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

My parents told me,
“If you have done nothing wrong
you’ve got nothing to fear.”