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In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”

Things weren’t very specific when I was in labor, yet everything was there, suddenly: all that my body had known, even things I’d only been reminded of occasionally, as when a stranger’s scent had reminded me of someone I’d known in the distant past. The few men I’d loved but didn’t marry. The time, living alone in Albuquerque, when I fainted in the kitchen one morning before work and woke up on the floor, covered in coffee. Finally. it was coming. It was all moving forward. Finally, it was all going to pass through me. It was beginning to happen and it was all going to happen in one single night. No more lingering in the adolescent pools of memory, no more giving it a little more time to see if things would get better or worse. No more moving from one place to the next. Finally, my body was all that had ever been given to me, it was all I had, and I sweated through it in layers, so that when, in the end, I was finally standing outside myself and watching, I could see that what brought me into the world was pulling you into the world, and I could see that my body was giving you up and giving you to me, and where in my body there were talents, there were talents, and where there were no talents, there would be scars.

He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make: But Charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake. —Ovid, Metamorphoses (Tr. by Arthur Golding) Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton-crash that dumped us in that sea-fed swamp, the Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without opposite—attend instead the transcendent, the flying, for god’s sake, what we saw the moment before we thwocked overboard: a heron stutter-flapped and lifted off, clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first, but couth beyond sublime once clear of cattail punks and saltgrass tips, the overturned rowboat’s rusted hull. Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped, rose flipping fish from beak to tongue and down its neck, water beading on its head. But the crown that really pleased the crowd my maiden voyage was iridescent green, brilliantined, a merganser’s spiky coxcomb. He swam right by, chasing red herrings and cackling so happily I had to pull a feather from his cap. And so I surfaced solo. I tell myself, I only launch the bark, I never book the seats. I didn’t stop to spin the prop or wipe the rail, just tipped the motor up and paddle-poled, bottom- stirred. Rousted horseshoe crabs, sleeping ducks, cranky grebes, slapped along the little waves, the seeping tide, lonelier, sure, indignant, too—what better lover has plucked and boasted, over what better lyre? An open boat: it’s company, not coin, I want. I’ll tune the wake to silence, court grace, make change— still trading on the laughs I’ve jerry-rigged.

I had never seen a cornfield in my life, I had never been to Oklahoma, But I was singing as loud as anyone, “Oh what a beautiful morning. . . . The corn Is as high as an elephant’s eye,” Though I knew something about elephants, I thought, Coming from the same continent as they did, And they being more like camels than anything else. And when we sang from Meet Me in St. Louis, “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,” I remembered the ride from Ramleh Station In the heart of Alexandria All the way to Roushdy where my grandmother lived, The autos on the roadways vying With mule carts and bicycles, The Mediterranean half a mile off on the left, The air smelling sharply of diesel and salt. It was a problem which had dogged me For a few years, this confusion of places. And when in 5th grade geography I had pronounced “Des Moines” as though it were a village in France, Mr. Kephart led me to the map on the front wall, And so I’d know where I was, Pressed my forehead squarely against Iowa. Des Moines, he’d said. Rhymes with coins. Now we were singing “zippidy-doo-dah, zippidy-ay,” And every song we’d sung had in it Either sun or bluebirds, fair weather Or fancy fringe, O beautiful America! And one tier below me, There was Linda Deemer with her amber waves And lovely fruited plains, And she was part of America too Along with sun and spacious sky Though untouchable, and as distant As purple mountains of majesty. “This is my country,” we sang, And a few years ago there would have been A scent of figs in the air, mangoes, And someone playing the oud along a clear stream. But now it was “My country 'tis of thee” And I sang it out with all my heart And now with Linda Deemer in mind. “Land where my fathers died,” I bellowed, And it was not too hard to imagine A host of my great-uncles and -grandfathers Stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior And finding themselves suddenly On a rock among maize and poultry And Squanto shaking their hands. How could anyone not think America Was exotic when it had Massachusetts And the long tables of thanksgiving? And how could it not be home If it were the place where love first struck? We had finished singing. The sun was shining through large windows On the beatified faces of all Who had sung well and with feeling. We were ready to file out and march back To our room where Mr. Kephart was waiting. Already Linda Deemer had disappeared Into the high society of the hallway. One day I was going to tell her something. Des Moines, I was saying to myself, Baton Rouge. Terre Haute. Boise.

—St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.

I am saying primroses lined the pathway of toothless hedges. I am saying the ocean shimmered like corrugated steel in the morning sun. The context of my story changes when you enter. Then I am dung on the wall of the nomad’s field. Then the everyday waking person. I am nodding in your direction like fissures between dandelion fur. Seeing in your manner. I am speaking your pace. Slippage of silk slippers. I say you are losing sight. I say your breasts are dry shells. I am afraid of what I am capable of doing. This is all a manner of stating how I prepare myself to be loved.

I stared into the valley: it was gone— wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained, gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one. And here and there I noticed, when I strained, the alien clamoring of small, wild voices: birds that had lost their way in that vain land. And high above, the skeletons of beeches, as if suspended, and the reveries of ruins and of the hermit’s hidden reaches. And a dog yelped and yelped, as if in fear, I knew not where nor why. Perhaps he heard strange footsteps, neither far away nor near— echoing footsteps, neither slow nor quick, alternating, eternal. Down I stared, but I saw nothing, no one, looking back. The reveries of ruins asked: “Will no one come?” The skeletons of trees inquired: “And who are you, forever on the go?” I may have seen a shadow then, an errant shadow, bearing a bundle on its head. I saw—and no more saw, in the same instant. All I could hear were the uneasy screeches of the lost birds, the yelping of the stray, and, on that sea that lacked both waves and beaches, the footsteps, neither near nor far away.

In their excess, their blowsy dreaming and King Solomon-like tempers, the clouds possess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils, when a painter earned his profession as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps, treated that blank pasture of the “heavens” like something that had lived. Their crawly undoings remind us of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls of cotton—the morning phosphorescent or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt. The nights there were scumbled with light. How could we ever have taken them for the abstinence of art?

in the general conservative cast, overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies, in the worried beyond reason shaking dense under-growth invasion of deliberately callous vertebrates, hotheaded newagers paint possible minds dirtier than can be produced in a real whereabouts nonlocation location, crumbling in darkness. a breath away from my next instant self, knowing lies will flow from my lips as well as the rest; a creative fallacy to create that which we think we know, with a thousand pens ready to suggest what one should do. reminding myself, all ends with what effects it will have. reminding myself, all ends with what can be named and financed, so why not let my bones be picked by the ants. reminding myself, I would do anything to not remember who I resemble, I would do anything to not resemble who I resemble, to not resemble the resembled. reminding myself, I would do anything to not belong to a future human potential workshop, supported by a cast of thousands begging for all things mundane sanity brings, in general overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies.

Am I a character in the dreams of the god Hermes the messenger? Certainly many of my dreams have nothing to do with the common life around me. There are never any automobiles or airplanes in them. These dreams belong to an age in the distant past, to a time perhaps when nothing was written down, to the time of memory. I chose Hermes not out of vanity but because from what I’ve read about him he had a pretty good time, was not just a drunkard on Olympus. In his traipsings delivering divine messages he must have met some pretty girls who gave him pleasure. We know that he invented the lyre for the benefit of poets, and Lucian relates in his Dialogues of the Dead that he was the god of sleep and dreams. My dreams are not frightening, they are not nightmares. But their irrationality puzzles me. What is Hermes trying to tell me? Is he playing a game with me? Last Monday night I dreamt about a school for young children who had heads but no bodies. Last night it was a cow that was galloping in our meadow like a horse. Another night, and this one was a bit scary, I swam across the lake with my head under water, I didn’t have to breathe air. What is the message of these dreams? Into what kind of world is Hermes leading me? It’s not the world described daily in the New York Times. A world of shadows? A kind of levitation? How can I pray to Hermes to lay off these senseless fantasies, tell him that I want real dreams such as my shrink can explicate. I’ve looked up lustration in the dictionary. Its definition is not encouraging: “a prefatory ceremony, performed as a preliminary to entering a holy place.” That’s too impersonal. I want a man-to-man talk with Hermes, telling him to stop infesting my nights with his nonsense.