Life’s pressures can lead to creativity. In “Elegy by Frank Gehry” (pp. 35-36), the narrator tries to make an offering to the artist who had been an abused boy “broken hard on his father’s knee,” and thus “I looked for a crack where all / the used light leaks in, where you made / your art.” The “used light” of the artist cracked by experience, the transformed light, can lift him or her above humanity, into the “emptiness above, / as once, in the cathedrals of Europe, space / was left for the angels, who never rest.” Those touched by the shadowy wing of death can become sublime — until the fall.

Section Two signals the fall. The single poem in fifteen parts, “After West” (pp. 39-48) is an elegy mourning a former state and bearing witness to a catastrophe. After west, “there wasn’t any west”: “every bit of it / was used and torn… every / mind changed” with no prospect for growth, no “way / to grow the new idea,” just disillusionment, with only the clouds over the sunset and inhospitable “boiling ocean,” finding a way out through their “transubstantiation” from water to vapour to “light.” They had “changed already into light and light / enough to float free,” with “light and light” at the end of the line evocative of an intense luminosity.

The earthbound soon faced darkness and discomfort, with “ash filling / the open eyes,” so they walked blind, “closing every eye.” After west was the prosperity of the baby boomers after 1968, turning the west into “gold”: the rise of the war children personified in the “pissed-off baby boy” who “slugs the midwife on his way to his mother’s breast.” The changes bring anger, and more misery, with the reappearance of the figure of the suffering boy, who “like bits of laughter, torn laughter” drops off the end of a pier into the waves. The anger has not saved him — it has led to self-destruction —, and Walt, at night, lies “awake after west.”

After west, words become cumbersome, “like plates of earth” that can unleash techtonic forces. The poet “inadvertently” borrows half a dozen lines from Blaise Cendrars in a description of an underwater world that is “clear and calm” though “volcanic.” The boy is now a “robot boy,” with “arms in pieces on the factory / floor” and “no way to hold the nothing left to hold.” He “would dream of singing,” but he is too “filled with circuitry / and grief” to do so. The dreamless almost come to life each morning by “reinvent[ing]” themselves and taking what they need “in their arms,” but they are unable: “those without hope… / … are forced to dream.”

The notion of scalping reappears, as pies in the “dark diner” “glow like useless brains awaiting dissection.” Further to this split, clouds need to “crack” to allow beauty to come to life, “to release a flock of gulls, a slant / of sunlight, a little air.” Ugliness and beauty are torn from people and nature before metaphor makes way for the literal source of pain:

The poet’s young children, Walt and Phoebe, are “delivered by wings after midnight” to “a lost land beneath the tide.” The west and its history are “lost;” there is no orientation, as “[w]e lost our maps, we lost our legends, / we lost the compass point spinning west.” The separation gives rise to a feeling of castration, the narrator having “lost the saddles strapped to the lost gelding”: a separation that leads to imagining that perhaps at loves’s end, the universe would end, but in our pathos we have no effect on nature; on the contrary, “the sun / went right on shining” (James Schuyler, cited by Harms).