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A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim, And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim. The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould, Glint through their mildews like large cups of gold. Among the wild rice in the still lagoon, In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. The wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering, Where rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling. Late cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight, Sail up the silence with the nearing night. And like a spirit, swathed in some soft veil, Steals twilight and its shadows o’er the swale. Hushed lie the sedges, and the vapours creep, Thick, grey and humid, while the marshes sleep.

She came into my view as vivid as Somebody on a screen in a movie seen, Elegant in the focus of my eye. Birdboned. Quick and light. Not wearing pajamas. The little run resembling playfulness. Calling out something, screaming something or other As if her little mouth was fervently singing, As if you couldn’t hear what the words could be, Because of the singing. I had her in my sight. Other people were there, wearing pajamas, Streaming out of some hideyhole or other Into the way that that was how I saw them. The trees of the kind that grew there establish the place. We know that way the story of what it was.

He was cleaning leaves for one at a time was what he needed and a minute before the two brown poodles walked by he looked at the stripped-down trees from one more point of view and thought they were part of a system in which the dappled was foreign for he had arrived at his own conclusion and that was for him a relief even if he was separated, even if  his hands were frozen, even if the wind knocked him down, even if his cat went into her helpless mode inside the green and sheltering Japanese yew tree.

I'm preparing myself for an extended period of loneliness That will begin very soon I think I've illegally downloaded two new depressing songs I've placed a copy of Good Morning, Midnight under my pillow for easy reference I've printed out the tablature for every Morrissey song I know so I can sing them to myself Alone in my room Just a few things are needed really To make me calm While I figure out a simple, clean, and effective way to kill myself, With minimal stress for the person who has to find and dispose of my body But I'll probably never think of a way Because I'll probably never kill myself I'll just lie in my bed suffocating myself with my pillows While listening to the four songs you said were your favorite And maybe burn myself a little with the iron On special occasions And the next time I'm in a subway station, I'll stand a little further on the yellow line Or maybe the next I'm at your apartment I'll try a little harder

Jenny kiss’d me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in! Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have miss’d me, Say I’m growing old, but add, Jenny kiss’d me.

And I will bend down to smell his desire his tomb's flowers and marble his wilting joy his swapping temptation for content And I will keep him from the cold, visitors, oleander, and the sons of bitches and say: No one will resemble me like my father his white stumbling and the illusion that plucks words A shout that walks on two feeble legs eyes me with the summer of discontent and sprinkles me with water, turns me green before it shakes the bitter dirt off its fingers … that's my father he cried from a darkness in the grave And I will gather the house of your chucked absence as if we were alone on Earth … you die so I can fold the falcon's wings after its departure and believe the silence that remains

I The sky here is American like the blue of your eyes; the folds of your eyelids the Hindu Kush mountain. The rich vein of the Hindu Kush only a stony ridge cutting across the parched soil of Afghanistan on which the primal play of progress comes to pass. II Locked in, its people: nomadic, peasant or simply pleasant, green-eyed, blue-eyed, brown-eyed or simply wide-eyed. Its great teacher: Noor Mohammad Taraki, the proud translator of great works into Pashto, Dari, Turkic and Uzbek. Its cities: Herat, Kabul, Kandahar. III Assuredly, the pilgrims descend the emerald-strewn Panjsher valley. They have come to water and tend a young tree. Time is at hand, for the unhurried descent of the Western offering, whose yellow parachute will slow its fall. And this tree, which will grow underneath the cluster bomb, will hold up the pomegranate to the blue sky. IV The tick tock and whirr of metal and material in the hidden azure vault of the air has so far unleashed the American ahistoricality upon the two tall Bamiyan Buddhas. Ordained stone must give way to bared rock face. Grieve not. Rejoice, for the spirit triumphs here. V When Kabul was as beautiful as Leningrad, when our hearts hadn't grown weary, when Taraki could take a stroll down the streets of Kabul with a confident smile, when he could still be Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky, when our erstwhile bachelor could enjoy the company of dancing girls like a mogul emperor, when the way forward was the way forward. VI The uncertain exile is never to Rome— no picture postcards of the coliseum to send home— but to a mud hovel among other mud hovels by the edge of the city of Islamabad. For the uncertain exile has nothing to do with the divine or with any other kind of comedy, but with what has remained or with what reminds: with the trace of terror that persists. VII In this part of the world the children know and have desires to be a martyr, to enter paradise, to leave this life. Of the twenty-nine different names for the garden, they know all twenty-nine by heart. For this part of the world began with a garden and will end as an open ditch piled up with bodies. VIII Grant me Antigone's strength to forbear for the sun has come unstuck from a blue sky gone black, stolen for effect, and the veiled moon stands in, for the mourning women standing next to platters of rice, signifying the historically sound end of forgetfulness, returning our agency to mourn the collaborations of the merchant capitalist class with the unlistening, ahistorical God. IX If only Gandhi's spinning wheel had spun a million yards of cloth we would have covered all our war dead. And as for tents, we would have built cities upon cities of tents to keep the rain out for all our refugees. And then and only then would we have mourned our war dead, mourned our war dead.

For ten days now, two luna moths remain silk-winged and lavish as a double broach pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin. Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green of copper weather vanes nosing the wind, the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen's green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore, the plush green peat that carpets the island, that hushes, sinks then holds a boot print for days, and the sapling-green of new pines sprouting through it. The miraculous green origami of their wings - false eyed, doomed and sensual as the mermaid's long green fins: a green siren calling from the moonlight. A green siren calling from the moonlight, from the sweet gum leaves and paper birches that shed, like tiny white decrees, scrolled bark. They emerge from cocoons like greased hinges, all pheromone and wing, instinct and flutter. They rise, hardwired, driven, through the creaking pine branches tufted with beard moss and fog. Two luna moths flitting like exotic birds towards only each other and light, in these their final few days, they mate, then starving they wait, inches apart, on my cabin wall to die, to share fully each pure and burning moment. They are, like desire itself, born without mouths. What, if not this, is love?

We never saw the ghost, though he was there— we knew from the raindrops tapping on the eaves. We never saw him, and we didn’t care. Each day, new sunshine tumbled through the air; evenings, the moonlight rustled in dark leaves. We never saw the ghost, though: he was there, if ever, when the wind tousled our hair and prickled goosebumps up and down thin sleeves; we never saw him.   And we didn’t care to step outside our room at night, or dare click off the nightlight: call it fear of thieves. We never saw the ghost, though he was there in sunlit dustmotes drifting anywhere, in light-and-shadow, such as the moon weaves. We never saw him, though, and didn’t care, until at last we saw him everywhere. We told nobody.   Everyone believes we never saw the ghost (if he was there), we never saw him and we didn’t care.

The woman across from me looks so familiar, but when I turn, her look glances off. At the last subway stop we rise. I know her, she gives manicures at Vogue Nails. She has held my hands between hers several times. She bows and smiles. There the women wear white smocks like technicians, and plastic tags with their Christian names. Susan. No, not Susan, whose hair is cropped short, who is short and stocky. This older lady does my hands while classical music, often Mozart, plays. People passing by outside are doubled in the wall mirror. Two of everyone walk forward, backward, vanish at the edge of the shop. Susan does pedicures, pumice on my heels as I sit on the stainless-steel throne. She bends over, she kneads my feet in the water like laundry. She pounds my calves with her fists and her cupped palms slap a working beat, p’ansori style. She talks to the others without turning her head, a call in a language shouted hoarse across fields where a swallow flew and flew across the ocean, and then fetched back to Korea a magic gourd seed, back to the farmer’s empty house where the seed flew from its beak to sprout a green vine. When the farmer’s wife cut open the ripe fruit, out spilled seeds of gold. Choi Don Mee writes that some girls in that country crush petals on their nails, at each tip red flowers unfold. Yi Yon-ju writes that some women there, as here, dream of blades, knives, a bowl of blood.