Down to Earth is at once a road poem of the American mid-West, an epic of migration and ubiquitous borders, and a meteorological model of energy transfer. This book knows no limit to poetry’s ambition, dodging every border post, down every highway, like the ocelot running through its narrative.

Like SubstancesIn TempoInterventionPresent Company ExceptedStamp of OriginOversightNext to NothingNumber OneExcuse MeCollaborationCondensationThe Indiana TollBack of BeyondTravel PlazaStopoverRust BeltAll Those GatesThe ConfronterCrumple ZoneLike by David SmithHarlem Air ShaftLike FeelingRavenous At NoonHunter At DuskLying In LateDrifting OutThe Defeat of ArtemisBound SouthSouth UnboundAcknowledgements

Bound SouthIn light, in darkness, quarried equipment makes a standetched in light, etched in darkness, cooling after manufacturethen usage. Warmth became conciliatory, not soon enough,for previously the forced air’s change of settingcracked, crazed, dragged filigree damage. In keeping, sharp curtainsridge impassive, similarly clothing holds its creases, crumples,looking for all the world like that world’s definite hatching, dry point:the under-surface heat churns behind plaster, bedpostsworm-riddled, rims of fashionable fittings bubbling rust. As alwaysthe ingenious world settles, settles for its scurriers – it’s feasible to reconstruct as if conditions stayed constant,glassy spheres like castors turned, zero loss through friction,the slick interface prevails by fits & starts. In fact the whole economyneeds sharpened senses, so I lie encased & restless,hatched in mind whose pressed demands for electricity, tax for roads,cries rising off the flat table, headers stacked funerealinto the in-box, charges, these reductions pinch & shape – janitors ofskin-held intelligence, tattoo artists, Demiurge’s sidekicksscurry home into their nooks. So sensibly the scurriers settle downto score sleep, to float their cover stories with a controlled spinspheres waltz along to, just so long as a blabber lap-top won’t be discovered in the public bar, the harmless freeway potholesbulge & pock while SatNav rides the camber, O its dream cadences – anyone drives in his sleep! but this guy jolts under his covers,this jackass driver scatters, shatters, flocks of goatstussle by stone-blockedartesian wells for the merest trickle: I might be strapped in surgeryor strut like Giacometti manikins in ranks, grim figures like my shaving selfget serviced by hotglass, chalcedony or diamond, brilliantly accentuate, pitch upin a marble fountain’s depths: excellently bright, perfectly pitched:Great Artemis, you whose improved worst skips, blots, makes errors:Great Artemis, the pre-select who ceaselessly restructuresmatter’s elements, whose nuclei, electrons compose by your fault.Great Artemis. Pressure now accrues for change of state,heat increases concrete-capped within the chain perimeter, the memoriesof bedposts, chintzy linen forcing thought back into line,that murky self-regard secures the human mask, establishes its silhouette,the animal snarls & wastes intersticially. Great is Artemis.For turning in her purlieus & thrashing on her bed, this procrusteanlogic organises, here distressed the monad stretches& shudders, basalt stacks slot beneath the flibbertigibbet sun.Falling in their pattern, waves race, the day yawns, sunny despotismstaggers in on itself.