The fullest culmination to date of an original voice and "a central poet of his generation" (Harold Bloom) Time was plunging forward, like dolphins scissoring open water or like me, following Jenny's flippers down to see the coral reef, where the color of sand, sea and sky merged, and it was as if that was all God wanted: not a wife, a house or a position, but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein. from "Olympia" In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole's melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man's creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of "a man alone," trying "to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence."Middle Earthis a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are "marvelsunbuttoned, riveting, dramaticburned into being" (Tina Barr,Boston Review).

SELF-PORTRAIT

IN A GOLD KIMONO

Born, I was born. Tears represent how much my mother loves me, shivering and steaming like a horse in rain. My heart as innocent as Buddha's, my name a Parisian bandleader's, I am trying to stand. Father is holding me and blowing in my ear, like a glassblower on a flame. Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling of formal precision and stoicism. Growing, I am growing now, as straight as red pines in the low mountains. Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl. I become distressed watching the President's caisson. We, we together move to the big house. Shining, the sun is shining on my time line. Tears, copper-hot tears, spatter the house when Father is drunk, irate and boisterous. The essence of self emerges shuttling between parents.

Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel's tongue draws me out of the pit. I drop acid with Rita. Chez Woo eros is released. I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man's tongue. The draft-card torn up; the war lost. I cling like a cicada to the latticework of memory. Mother: "I have memories, too. Don't let me forget them." Father: "I'm glad the journey is set. I'm glad I'm going." Crows, the voices of crows leaving their nests at dawn, circle around, as I sit in a gold kimono, feeling the subterranean magma flows, the sultry air, the hand holding a pen, bending to write, Thank you, Mother and Father, for creating me.

ICARUS BREATHING

Indestructible seabirds, black and white, leading and following; semivisible mist, undulating, worming about the head; rain starring the sea, tearing all over me; our little boat, as in a Hokusai print, nudging closer to Icarus (a humpback whale, not a foolish dead boy) heaving against rough water; a voluminous inward grinding- like a self breathing, but not a self-revivifying, oxygenating the blood, making the blowhole move, like a mouth silent against the decrees of fate: joy, grief, desperation, triumph. Only God can obstruct them. A big wave makes my feet slither. I feel like a baby, bodiless and strange: a man is nothing if he is not changing. Father, is that you breathing? Forgiveness is anathema to me. I apologize. Knock me to the floor. Take me with you.

THE HARE

The hare does not belong to the rodents; he is a species apart. Holding him firmly against my chest, kissing his long white ears, tasting earth on his fur and breath, I am plunged into that white sustenance again, where a long, fathomless calm emerges- like a love that is futureless but binding for a body on a gurney submerged in bright light, as an orchard is submerged in lava- while the hand of my brother, my companion in nothingness, strokes our father, but no power in the air touches us, as one touches those one loves, as I stroke a hare trembling in a box of straw.

POWDERED MILK

Come to the garden, you said, and I went, hearing my voice inside your throat. It was a way of self-forgetting. Or it was a way of facing self, I did not know. You drank scotch whiskey and mixed me powdered milk, as if I were still your boy. Dogs tussled on the lawn around Michelangelo's David , kept like a shrine; big ordinary goldfish chewed through the pond; and the speech of bees encircled us, filling a void.

A hundred blooming reminded me to be and not to seem. When a squalid sky pulled down the sun, we grew accustomed to it. Darkness was no nemesis. Come play checkers on the terrace, you sighed. Like me, you felt neglected, you were in a mood of mental acuteness. Like you, I was a with a taciturn spirit, I was a man who would never belong to anything. Solitude had made us her illegitimate sons.

KAYAKS

Beyond the soggy garden, two kayaks float across mild clear water. A red sun stains the lake like colored glass. Day is stopping. Everything I am feels distant or blank as the opulent rays pass through me, distant as action is from thought, or language is from all things desirable in the world, when it does not deliver what it promises and pathos comes instead- the same pathos I feel when I tell myself, within or without valid structures of love: I have been deceived, he is not what he seemed- though the failure is not in the other, but in me because I am tired, hurt or bitter.

PRESEPIO

This is the world God didn't create, but an artist copyingthe original, or some nostalgic idea of the original, with Mary and Joseph, or statues of Mary and Joseph, bowing their lamp-lit faces to the baby Jesus. Language is not the human medium here, where every eight minutes the seasons repeat themselves, a rainbow appears, bleeding like an iris, and the illusion of unity is achieved, before blowing snow buries everything again. Looked at from above, the farmer's sheep are as big as conifers. Something is wrong with his sons, whose pale bony necks make them look feral. And the rooster cries more like a miserable donkey. A light goes off. Another comes on. In a little window, with a lamp to be read by, nobody is reading. If God is around, he seems ineffectual. In the alps, a little trolley grinds its gears, floating into the valley, where heavy droplets fall, as the farmer's wife hurries-like a moving target or a mind thinking-to unpin her laundry from the wet white clothesline, and the farmer, in the granary, stifles the little cries of the neighbor girl parting her lips. If the meaning of life is love, no one seems to be aware, not even Mary and Joseph, exhausted with puffy eyes, fleeing their dim golden crib.

CASABLANCA LILY

It has the odor of Mother leaving when I was a boy. I watch the back of her neck, wanting to cry, Come back. Come back! So it is the smell of not saying what I feel, of irrationality intruding upon the orderly, of experience seeking me out, though I do not want it to.

Unnaturally white with auburn anthers, climbing the invisible ladder from birth to death, it reveals the whole poignant superstructure of itself without piety, like Mother pushing a basket down the grocery aisle, her pungent vital body caught in the stranglehold of her mind.

MIDDLE EARTH

The soup boils over. The doorbell rings. The gas man demands payment for the last bill. Can you find my yellow pills? Mother interrupts meekly. Fruit flies follow me, circling my head. I drink wine to forget things. I ride the train backwards. I go to the zoo. I eat tiny marzipan men at the bakery; desire and disgust get mixed up. I read Kant: stability is the fruit of both war and human insight. True or false: more humans die as a result of prophets than statesmen? I scramble onto the ferry with Mother. Iridescent ducks swim away like phrases. Let me in, let me in! I shout when I discern her child's face peering through the dirty portal window. Look in my face, I say like Frankenstein to his bride, look in my face. I repeat things in order to feel them, craving what is no longer there. The past dims like a great, tiered chandelier. The present grows fragmentary and rough: some days the visual field is abstract or empty- in a windy sky, birds appear young and unwise; others it's eerily concrete- expressive figures move around with an endless capacity for tumult and uncertainty, taking us farther from ourselves, into the aura at the deepest point of the river, where grit blows in my face and my numb hands grip onto Mother's, like love and hate in the shuttered mansion on the hill, as red mist burns off the surface of the river. VEIL

We were in your kitchen eating sherbet to calm the fever of a summer day. A bee scribbled its essence between us, like a minimalist. A boy hoed manure in the distance. The surgical cold of ice made my head ache, then a veil was lifted. Midday sprayed the little room with gold, and I thought, Now I am awake. Now freedom is lifting me out of the abyss of coming and going in life without thinking, which is the absence of freedom. Now I see the still, black eyes saying, Someone wants you, not me . Now nothing is hidden. Now, water and soil are striving to be flesh.

SWANS

From above we must have looked like ordinary tourists feeding winter swans, though it was the grit of our father we flung hard into the green water slapping against the pier, where we stood soberly watching the ash float or acquiesce and the swans, mooring themselves against the little scrolls churned up out of the grave by a motorboat throbbing in the distance. What we had in common had been severed from us. Like an umbrella in sand, I stood rigidly apart-the wind flashing its needles in air, the surf heavy, nebulous-remembering a sunburned boy napping between hairy legs, yellow jackets hovering over an empty basket.

RADIANT IVORY

After the death of my father, I locked myself in my room, bored and animal-like. The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle, the parrot tulips-everything possessed his face, chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured out of me except sensibility, dilated. It was as if I were sub -born-preverbal, truculent, pure-with hard ivory arms reaching out into a dark and crowded space, illuminated like a perforated silver box or a little room in which glowing cigarettes came and went, like souls losing magnitude, but none with the battered hand I knew.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Middle Earth by HENRI COLE Copyright © 2003 by Henri Cole
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.