An even greater spaciousness and the role of the self in it becomes the drama of the “mystic Moment.” The narrator begins his meditation “from the window of a Pullman car” not with a linear analysis or description, but with a haunting set of images that produce an overplus of associations suggesting a lush world and imagination: “a plush and velvet world / with plugs of tobacco / outside a jelly factory.” Yet this world is also one of intense deprivation, a desert where “mountains had long ago crumbled away, / erased by some soft artillery on the radio.” (It is worth noting that Tate’s images usually have a very realistic base: in a way, radio waves do “flatten” mountains just as they “narrow” distances.) The complex of opposites in texture here helps support the sense that the self is confused between two worlds, one passing by the window, the other above in a “swarm of burnt out stars,” the invisible ghosts of lost worlds. The sense of loss is climaxed in the poem when the narrator confronts a reflected other:

And yet, in spite of such violence against the self, the self persists, in the tracings of the language. Note the way the second line in the passage above, as a single unit, underscores the identification of the “I” and the “he — the “I” both reaches and is outside, “drowning.” In this way the self always also occupies another place, becoming, by its very amorphousness, what Tate calls “a nameless representative of humanity.”

It is the unseen, then, that holds the fragments together — like the cipher — that needs to be unraveled in language, that necessitates the mythic vision, that suggests the undercutting of simple visual images, simple presences and moments.

The speaker becomes, as Tate says in “Blue Spill,” “the fatherless son and the sonless / father,” in a place and time always elsewhere “where his new life / begins quietly in the eyes of a wakened animal.” In “If It Would All Please Hurry,” the speaker also begins the narrative by going inside to go to sleep, to be alone: “I do not wish / to share the cliffs with anyone.” He feels a loneliness, then imagines an other: “I feel you are in it [the bed] too.” The poem is an attempt “to get into the habit of realizing you are real” and ends with a prayer — as if reality and realization could be made coincident: “Hold tight, squeeze.” This sort of process — making the self by expanding the realm of the moment, goes on endlessly; the end is forever deferred, the poems deny simple closure.

“Look back, what life has become: the sky / is clearly alien, amazement, / star of my night blasts the subtle shifts / of mood,” the speaker exclaims in “Heatstroke.” What the poet as stylist does within the predicament I have been describing is to become a mythologizer of the imagination. The woman described in “Heatstroke,” for instance, becomes a “myth squeezing itself,” the product of “need.” Any dismantling, as we saw earlier, is also a process of reconstruction, of myth-making: “tear them down / and build them up — it’s one motion.” It is from this impulse that poems like the mock romance “Three/Missionwork” emerges. This prose poem in ten parts concerns Klingbat, a captain and several others in a parody of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” a parody that leaves the central and disturbing issues intact. And this mythic impulse is the source of a poem like “Riven Doggeries” which dramatizes loss comically and grotesquely (a dog has leapt, no been abducted by police helicopter from a 7th-storey window), and just as tongue-in-cheek reconstitutes a mythic creature — “the ideal pet, however, / is unrecognizable when it arrives/ in the river awash with the land afar.” Riven — river — revive; doggeries — doggerel — dog; the poem’s myth originates in the play of language itself, a language of loss and diminishment, not an outside source. The poems become as Tate suggests in “Spring Was Beginning To Be Born” “disguises,” “murmurs,” “splutterings,” bits of language coming together:

In “To Fuzzy,” a sort-of seduction poem set against a backdrop of Pharaohs, thaumaturgy, the Nile, and other exotic contexts, the speaker reveals a dream that admits his own predicament as writer:

It is the unseen, then, that holds the fragments together — like the cipher — that needs to be unraveled in language, that necessitates the mythic vision, that suggests the undercutting of simple visual images, simple presences and moments.