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The happy ones are almost always also vulgar; happiness has a way of thinking that's rushed and has no time to look but keeps on moving, compact and manic, with contempt in passing for the dying: Get on with your life, come on, buck up! Those stilled by pain don't mix with the cheerful, self-assured runners but with those who walk at the same slow pace. If one wheel locks and the other's turning the turning one doesn't stop turning but goes as far as it can, dragging the other in a poor, skewed race until the cart either comes to a halt or falls apart.

In a room more chicken coop than room, I rent a fan that feels on my face like sound. Low traffic from San Fernando, named for a king who became a city, a valley, a saint. We are meant to repeat his name. Instead I say prickly pear, a cactus which spreads its many-paddled hands into the space around itself. No pears. I call Mom to ask what the latest austerity measures mean. Some ants on the wall make their way from one unseeable point to another; the banks have closed. I tell her to barter; barter what, she says. An acquaintance posts “Tourism: The Best Way to Be an Ally to Greece” as if in each tourist’s pleasure bloomed a charity. Mules clabber down the stone paths loaded with grapes to make next year’s wine, if the tourists come back next year, and we hope they will. I say we, but I’m closer to they. Living temporarily in a neighborhood named for the happy, who were who exactly? I grow a little stiff with, a little lean with, a little faint with, a little worn with seeming. I must need to conquer my mind. The roses dead because of drought because whoever lives here cares enough to let their roses die. I must need to conquer the notion anything needs conquering. Something in me can’t tell what belongs. The ants for whom anything is a street. What sounded like a gate opening was eucalyptus branches dragging themselves along the tin roof. A yellow butterfly that has no interest in me. I have no interest in kings.

Off-season and in the burnt forest of my nightgown, a feral undergrowth that marks me as burial site— to be still enough or just enough. My arms become fat arms: hearth. I eat dirt for doubt, a secret bleached old as lie. I out-want like a spindly winged monster. If I were a bug— were I—then you'd hope for reparation, and paint more brown into the plot.

Off what Thornbjörg calls the stern, or what I refer to as where you look upon the place you cannot return, one broke on through. With little purpose but to tease, eye our sound ship, or take leave of the dog whistle our prop pitches ineptly into the eerie. Suturing the path to where it was bound, it hung split seconds in a realm unsoundable by its sonar. If only we could enter our dreams thus. The cruise ship’s marriage counselor spoke to me in Norwegian, and I agreed, knowing there was only so much she could have said as it took the sun—and unlike beach stones once you get them home, kept its sodden hue going black into sea.

Passing through huddled and ugly walls, By doorways where women haggard Looked from their hunger-deep eyes, Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands, Out from the huddled and ugly walls, I came sudden, at the city's edge, On a blue burst of lake, Long lake waves breaking under the sun On a spray-flung curve of shore; And a fluttering storm of gulls, Masses of great gray wings And flying white bellies Veering and wheeling free in the open.

Ain’t no use as I can see In sittin’ underneath a tree An’ growlin’ that your luck is bad, An’ that your life is extry sad; Your life ain’t sadder than your neighbor’s Nor any harder are your labors; It rains on him the same as you, An’ he has work he hates to do; An’ he gits tired an’ he gits cross, An’ he has trouble with the boss; You take his whole life, through an’ through, Why, he’s no better off than you. If whinin’ brushed the clouds away I wouldn’t have a word to say; If it made good friends out o’ foes I’d whine a bit, too, I suppose; But when I look around an’ see A lot o’ men resemblin’ me, An’ see ’em sad, an’ see ’em gay With work t’ do most every day, Some full o’ fun, some bent with care, Some havin’ troubles hard to bear, I reckon, as I count my woes, They’re ’bout what everybody knows. The day I find a man who’ll say He’s never known a rainy day, Who’ll raise his right hand up an’ swear In forty years he’s had no care, Has never had a single blow, An’ never known one touch o’ woe, Has never seen a loved one die, Has never wept or heaved a sigh, Has never had a plan go wrong, But allas laughed his way along; Then I’ll sit down an’ start to whine That all the hard luck here is mine.

What words or harder gift does the light require of me carving from the dark this difficult tree? What place or farther peace do I almost see emerging from the night and heart of me? The sky whitens, goes on and on. Fields wrinkle into rows of cotton, go on and on. Night like a fling of crows disperses and is gone. What song, what home, what calm or one clarity can I not quite come to, never quite see: this field, this sky, this tree.

The new root of the fern is the part you eat in famine. Harsh words are spoken, but they’re not the ones that make you turn. Where the muscle’s smooth. That’s where it doesn’t fray. The hard part is what comes easy. The hard part isn’t hard. It only seems. It only seems. It only seems that way. The snail inside the shell is tough. It holds the tooth, not tongue. The fingernail. The hair. What the old ropes come from. What’s left, dug up, and laid aside. Not the nick that never healed. There are lice that live inside the quill of every feather of every bird. You spoil it with a fingerprint. Artichokes have hearts. The alligator pear has an endosperm that, when squeezed, weeps only oil. You shed your skin as you grow cold. The hard part isn’t hard.

Hard Rock / was / “known not to take no shit From nobody,” and he had the scars to prove it: Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut Across his temple and plowed through a thick Canopy of kinky hair. The WORD / was / that Hard Rock wasn’t a mean nigger Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head, Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back, Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose, Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status. And we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep, To see if the WORD was true. As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak Of his exploits: “Man, the last time, it took eight Screws to put him in the Hole.” “Yeah, remember when he Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?” “He set The record for time in the Hole—67 straight days!” “Ol Hard Rock! man, that’s one crazy nigger.” And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit. The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame. A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch And didn’t lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock From before shook him down and barked in his face. And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly, His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence. And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name, We told ourselves that he had just wised up, Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long, And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed. He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do, The fears of years, like a biting whip, Had cut deep bloody grooves Across our backs.

Is made up of reservoirs, Birds flying South, mailmen Snow falling or rain falling, Railmen, Howard Johnson and airmen Birds of Paradise Silk lined caskets Prize poems and guitars, Beatitudes and bestiaries, Children taught contemporary manners, Time taking time away With a haymaker or a sleigh, Hope always belaboring despair. Form is a jostle, a throstle, Life a slice of sleight, Indians are looking out from the Cheekbones of Connecticut Yankees, Poltergeists deploy northward To tinderboxes in cupboards in Maine, The last chock knocked, the vessel Would not go down the Damariscotta Until the sick captain’s four-poster, Moved to the window by four oldsters Gave him a sight of her, and He gave her a beautiful sign, And there was the witch of Nobleboro Who confounded the native farmers Who, having lost the plow-bolt Right at their feet, found it Concealed in her apron: she laughed, And made the earth fecund again. The hard structure of the world, The world structure of illusion. From seeing too much of the world We do not understand it. There is something unknown in knowing. Unfaith is what keeps faith going.