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For example, with someone who no longer is, who exists only in yellowed letters. Or long walks beside a stream, whose depths hold hidden porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy with a timid student or the postman. A passerby with proud eyes whom you'll never know. Friendship with this world, ever more perfect (if not for the salty smell of blood). The old man sipping coffee in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone. Faces flashing by in local trains— the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps for a splendid ball, or a beheading. And friendship with yourself —since after all you don't know who you are.

How much delight before we collapse How much earth in the lungs How much wine When we want more When the weeds sprawl It is not what you think Think how fast some landscapes change the lover, the gardener's grand idea, the failing Maple the boat about to capsize the correction the hand's reflection the impossible replication of weight versus time how it will never mean what you want

To Robert Hass and in Memory of Elliot Gilbert Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn, Bashō and his friends go out to view the moon; In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter, The secret courtesy that courses like ichor Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke, Impossible to tell in writing. “Bashō” He named himself, “Banana Tree”: banana After the plant some grateful students gave him, Maybe in appreciation of his guidance Threading a long night through the rules and channels Of their collaborative linking-poem Scored in their teacher’s heart: live, rigid, fluid Like passages etched in a microscopic circuit. Elliot had in his memory so many jokes They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture Inside his brain, one so much making another It was impossible to tell them all: In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana. Imagine a court of one: the queen a young mother, Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child And her new baby in a squalid apartment Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors. She tells the child she’s going to kill herself. She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her, The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations Of different people in the building, he jokes, He feels if he keeps her alive until the father Gets home from work, they’ll be okay till morning. It’s laughter versus the bedroom and the pills. What is he in his efforts but a courtier? Impossible to tell his whole delusion. In the first months when I had moved back East From California and had to leave a message On Bob’s machine, I used to make a habit Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through, I would pretend that I forgot the punchline, Or make believe that I was interrupted— As though he’d be so eager to hear the end He‘d have to call me back. The joke was Elliot’s, More often than not. The doctors made the blunder That killed him some time later that same year. One day when I got home I found a message On my machine from Bob. He had a story About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short, One day while walking along the street together They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them, And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest. Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy, Impossible to tell—a dead-end challenge. But here it is, as Elliot told it to me: The dead man’s widow came to the rabbis weeping, Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him. Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not. But the short rabbi told her to bring the body Into the study house, and ordered the shutters Closed so the room was night-dark. Then he prayed Over the body, chanting a secret blessing Out of Kabala. “Arise and breathe,” he shouted; But nothing happened. The body lay still. So then The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles And danced around the body, chanting and praying In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic. He prayed In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes Seemed not to touch the floor. With one last prayer Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man’s face. Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture And said, “Arise and breathe!” And still the body Lay as before. Impossible to tell In words how Elliot’s eyebrows flailed and snorted Like shaggy mammoths as—the Chinese widow Granting permission—the little rabbi sang The blessing for performing a circumcision And removed the dead man’s foreskin, chanting blessings In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse From head to foot, and with a final prayer In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion, He seized the dead man’s head and kissed the lips And dropped it again and leaping back commanded, “Arise and breathe!” The corpse lay still as ever. At this, as when Bashō’s disciples wind Along the curving spine that links the renga Across the different voices, each one adding A transformation according to the rules Of stasis and repetition, all in order And yet impossible to tell beforehand, Elliot changes for the punchline: the wee Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer, Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching, A kind of Mel Brooks gesture: “Hoo boy!” he says, “Now that’s what I call really dead.” O mortal Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal Lords of the underground and afterlife, Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto, What has a brilliant, living soul to do with Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers, Our languages don’t touch you, you’re like that mother Whose small child entertained her to beg her life. Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi, The one who washed his hands of all those capers Right at the outset. Or maybe he became The author of these lines, a one-man renga The one for whom it seems to be impossible To tell a story straight. It was a routine Procedure. When it was finished the physicians Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded, But Elliot wouldn’t wake up for maybe an hour, They should go eat. The two of them loved to bicker In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish, On Sandra’s to some Sicilian dialect. He used to scold her endlessly for smoking. When she got back from dinner with their children The doctors had to tell them about the mistake. Oh swirling petals, falling leaves! The movement Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book. Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent, Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer. But the Universal is the goal of jokes, Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There’s one A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero Of the South African freedom movement was speaking To elderly Jews. The speaker’s own right arm Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers. He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots For the ANC—a group the old Jews feared As “in with the Arabs.” But they started weeping As the old one-armed fighter told them their country Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote Could make a country their children could return to From London and Chicago. The moved old people Applauded wildly, and the speaker’s friend Whispered to the journalist, “It’s the Belgian Army Joke come to life.” I wish that I could tell it To Elliot. In the Belgian Army, the feud Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious, So out of hand the army could barely function. Finally one commander assembled his men In one great room, to deal with things directly. They stood before him at attention. “All Flemings,” He ordered, “to the left wall.” Half the men Clustered to the left. “Now all Walloons,” he ordered, “Move to the right.” An equal number crowded Against the right wall. Only one man remained At attention in the middle: “What are you, soldier?” Saluting, the man said, “Sir, I am a Belgian.” “Why, that’s astonishing, Corporal—what’s your name?” Saluting again, “Rabinowitz,” he answered: A joke that seems at first to be a story About the Jews. But as the renga describes Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl, So in the joke, just under the raucous music Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow, Over the banana tree the moon in autumn— Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.

“Café-Concert at Les Ambassadeurs,” 1876–77 by Edgar Degas i have a red dress and no eyes. i have a dress that is blood red and i have eyes that don’t blink when the balcony sucks in. my dress is a beet swollen with thought, and hangs like a body on my body. i have eyes that don’t blink at being seen. i was halfway finished before i saw i’d begun. my dress drips down the center. my eyes are needle holes and my dress is an over-red thread. i hang my words in the air by their feet, limp and damp, and my dress is my only laugh that is actually red. my eyes are the backs of moons and afterwards men jest us like children, and smoke, and women who have been my dress circle their stomachs with their hands. i’m an actress. this is not my mother tongue. i have a dress that is yellow. my lines are written by a parisian man. we met in london. i came dancing out like god upon a crimson wave. my dress hung like a question or a suddenness. he wrote me coming out this way, he says, to make me like a lioness. the constellations are full of dead women, he says. he says my dress is the coat of a great lion. i turn like the blood inside a rose. the crowd is a great gasp. i can feel myself become a pear. it’s as if you haven’t taken pills, he says. i still have that dress. it’s not too blonde or red. you can grasp it with your eyes, he said, the way you wear it.

First there was Jim, clamping to my long black hair that nine-pound Cleopatra wig with nylon bands and bobbie pins. Meanwhile I was on fire for Chad, who coached me a bit impatiently Tuesday nights on my Joan-of-Arc inflection. Then Terence said I’d be perfect for the lounge-singer- turned-whore, and as it turned out that was a fairly easy gig. Max signed me on soon after, claiming I was a natural for Eternally Aggrieved Girl, which in hindsight hurts me deeply. So by the time you followed me back to the green room to wait in the hallway—whistling!— for my scrubbed face to emerge, naturally I was wary, waiting for the script you never bothered to come up with. It was damned awkward sitting there, nothing but milkshakes between us. Maybe, I thought, you’d assumed I was the one with a script. Finally I decided to give Terence a call. I didn’t like the way you looked at me so steadily with your chin resting on one fist, as if the table were a table, the boards A floor. Listening there as if you meant it, as if something I could say were true, and every moment from now on would be my cue.

To Lady Winchelsea, Occasioned by four Satirical Verses on Women Wits, In The Rape of the Lock In vain you boast poetic names of yore, And cite those Sapphos we admire no more: Fate doomed the fall of every female wit; But doomed it then, when first Ardelia writ. Of all examples by the world confessed, I knew Ardelia could not quote the best; Who, like her mistress on Britannia’s throne, Fights and subdues in quarrels not her own. To write their praise you but in vain essay; Even while you write, you take that praise away. Light to the stars the sun does thus restore, But shines himself till they are seen no more.

I think she wanted to explain the silence hidden within her voice— blue egg in the nettles. She wrote something on a rock, used the rock to bash in the skull of an injured deer. Bloodied swan-neck arms. She slinks into her own viscera, a baby fox backing into its trunkhole. The wordbone's connected to the gutbone. Meanwhile, her desire for nobody now bucks like a rabbit under her ground.

When we first heard from blocks away the fog truck’s blustery roar, we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals, and scrambled out the door into an evening briefly fuzzy. We yearned to be transformed— translated past confining flesh to disembodied spirit. We swarmed in thick smoke, taking human form before we blurred again, turned vague and then invisible, in temporary heaven. Freed of bodies by the fog, we laughed, we sang, we shouted. We were our voices, nothing else. Voice was all we wanted. The white clouds tumbled down our streets pursued by spellbound children who chased the most distorting clouds, ecstatic in the poison.

I A whim of Time, the general arbiter, Proclaims the love, instead of death, of friends. Under the domed sky and athletic sun Three stand naked: the new, bronzed German The communist clerk, and myself, being English. Yet to unwind the travelled sphere twelve years Then two take arms, spring to a soldier's posture: Or else roll on the thing a further ten, The third - this clerk with world-offended eyes— Builds with red hands his heaven: makes our bones The necessary scaffolding to peace. II Now, I suppose, the once-envious dead Have learned a strict philosophy of clay After long centuries, to haunt us no longer In the churchyard or at the end of the lane Or howling at the edge of the city Beyond the last bean rows, near the new factory. Our fathers killed. And yet there lives no feud Like Hamlet's, prompted on the castle stair: There falls no shadow on our blank of peace, We three together, struck across our path, No warning finger threatening each alone. III Our fathers' misery, their spirits' mystery, The cynic's cruelty, weave this philosophy: That the history of man, traced purely from dust, Is lipping skulls on the revolving rim Or war, us three each other's murderers - Lives, risen a moment, joined or separate, Fall heavily, then are ever separate, Sod lifted, turned, slapped back again with spade.

A good way to fall in love is to turn off the headlights and drive very fast down dark roads. Another way to fall in love is to say they are only mints and swallow them with a strong drink. Then it is autumn in the body. Your hands are cold. Then it is winter and we are still at war. The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear about how we live in a beautiful country. Snow sifts from the clouds into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war. A good way to fall in love is to close up the garage and turn the engine on, then down you’ll fall through lovely mists as a body might fall early one morning from a high window into love. Love, the broken glass. Love, the scissors and the water basin. A good way to fall is with a rope to catch you. A good way is with something to drink to help you march forward. The gold-haired girl says,