untitled, uncertain date

B.

Looking at an atlas of a state the pages of which
are broken into alphanumerically ordered squares,
I cannot find my way among them, or get outside
the one with my address on it. Discolored carpet
with billowy edges of brown suggest formations
Of lava or fjords rimmed in by high mountains,
steep slopes that would erode to water did the moss
and boulders not hold the soil back, and behind them,
tundra with the sparsest vegetation on earth, and deer
with huge antlers padded with regal velvet,
And after them, nothing for an incalculable distance
except gray carpet, which since the landlord
is going to rip it out of the hallways, proves
there are limits to this landscape,
And that my powers of invention or merely dictation
can easily flag, leaving yours truly empty-handed:
the wealth that in my dreams I had acquired
Is not in my waking life. I enrich myself
in dreams and wake to find that in the transference
I have lost my shirt along with the power
to fly in a kind of buoyant liquified maternum humanum
by which I can sustain myself above the ground
for whatever length of time the dream takes place,
Whether in the blink of an eye or in an hour
or in these sporadic periods between sleep and wakefulness.
Gears from tanker trucks grind, full of milk,
which more than a few pampered empresses
have bathed in to emerge in blood-red ballroom gowns
and a tiara, the emperor dressed in the epaulets
and shoulder-braids of a Bonaparte:
milk is a kind of element through which the exalted and elect
enter and emerge—in this way it’s the body politic,
the dugs of state, the king nurtured to keep his state in order.

A.

There is no website for the event that I am attending,
There are no maps. There is a map to North Station
Or North Causeway Street—that much I know.
There are as many maps for the south as for the north,
And some are color-coded, as if for different systems
Of fluid under the coarser, built-up, outer layer of tissue
of lymph, blood, mucus. There are no maps for water-mains
With crosses for valves and locks. It should be possible
To walk into the ground blind and dumb and arrive
At the other end of sunlight, which dries and simplifies
All kinks, as an iron or the sweep of a hand across landscape.
Abstractions melt before the eye like spiderwebs,
Or dry against the safety glass. The maker’s initials
Are white frost, an acronym that can’t be spelled
Because the companies have split into subsidiaries.
Their legal disputes will carry through the afternoon.
But the glass won’t necessarily break. Being safety glass,
It breaks into impermeable pebbles of equal weight,
Each segment discretely weighed and measured beforehand.