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The generalissimo’s glands directed him to and fro.Geronimo! said the über-goon we called God, and we were off to the races. Never mind that we could only grow gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums in the gymnasium predicted a jagged road ahead. We were tired of hard news— it helped to turn down our hearing aids. We could already all do impeccable imitations of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion. That much was true. When we got jaded about joyrides, we could always play games in the kitchen garden with the prisoners. Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick the Kidney were our favorites. The laws the linguists thought up were particularly lissome, full of magical loopholes that spit out medals. We had made the big time, but night still nipped at our heels. The navigator’s needle swung strangely, oscillating between the oilwells and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves together by practicing quarterback sneaks along the pylons, but the race to the ravine was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

If there were gamebirds in our gables, shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves? Thus we went glass-faced into glory. We had our hearts set on staying here, so our steps seemed more hesitation waltz than straight-ahead tango. We danced the hokey pokey on holy days— put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about, we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati spoke to us over the intercom via interpreters. Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from our wounds and itch mites in our blankets. Ours was not a job to joke about. In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled with lead looked lovely. We would live this down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf was getting smaller—I wrote in margins, through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps. I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined. I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept everyone at the pageant, even the children from the poorhouse playing possum. We studied the protocol for astronaut removal the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth on the spaceship window. But though the scandal reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it slide. He was up there turning somersaults while we spun ever-so-slowly below.

The Linguisticator meets you at Carrefour. Un vrai galant, he buys you rouge à lèvres. Teaches socially accepted forms of extrication. If someone gropes you, say Arrête tes bêtises. If someone wonders why your hair is mussed, say C’est le mistral. If someone asks you to admire their ugly baby, say Je me sauve and leave. The Linguisticator is a veritable language experience. You programmed him in Oregon but he caught a virus. Now his Frenchness is cent fois off the spectrum. Sings Aznavour as you tour the centre historique and Piaf on the tram; Padam, Padam, when it clangs. The Linguisticator can stop a tram with one raised eyebrow, one soi-disant eyebrow. A fatalist, he has abandoned caution with certain potent liquors of the region. Ask him if he’s OK, 
he’ll say Le silence éternel de ces vastes espaces m’effraie. Ask him what irony means, he says Tout pour le mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles. But if his ennui peaks, he suspends all conversation. Broods for hours muttering Putain, je suis rien qu’un two-bit trompe l’œil. Malaise on a loop. It never fades.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time; Brimming with wonder and joy He spreads out his arms to the light, Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream. As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes, Where the snowy mountainous pass, Echoing the screams of the eagles, Hems in its gorges the bed Of the new-born clear-flowing stream; Whether he first sees light Where the river in gleaming rings Sluggishly winds through the plain; Whether in sound of the swallowing sea— As is the world on the banks, So is the mind of the man. Vainly does each, as he glides, Fable and dream Of the lands which the river of Time Had left ere he woke on its breast, Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed. Only the tract where he sails He wots of; only the thoughts, Raised by the objects he passes, are his. Who can see the green earth any more As she was by the sources of Time? Who imagines her fields as they lay In the sunshine, unworn by the plough? Who thinks as they thought, The tribes who then roam'd on her breast, Her vigorous, primitive sons? What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? What bard, At the height of his vision, can deem Of God, of the world, of the soul, With a plainness as near, As flashing as Moses felt When he lay in the night by his flock On the starlit Arabian waste? Can rise and obey The beck of the Spirit like him? This tract which the river of Time Now flows through with us, is the plain. Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. Border'd by cities and hoarse With a thousand cries is its stream. And we on its breast, our minds Are confused as the cries which we hear, Changing and shot as the sights which we see. And we say that repose has fled For ever the course of the river of Time. That cities will crowd to its edge In a blacker, incessanter line; That the din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream, Flatter the plain where it flows, Fiercer the sun overhead. That never will those on its breast See an ennobling sight, Drink of the feeling of quiet again. But what was before us we know not, And we know not what shall succeed. Haply, the river of Time— As it grows, as the towns on its marge Fling their wavering lights On a wider, statelier stream— May acquire, if not the calm Of its early mountainous shore, Yet a solemn peace of its own. And the width of the waters, the hush Of the grey expanse where he floats, Freshening its current and spotted with foam As it draws to the Ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast— As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night-wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

(Detroit, 1950) Because the jobs were there and a man could get rich working on the line, the South retreated North to Michigan, whole families eating crackers and baloney by the side of the road, changing drivers to keep moving through corn fields and foreign towns, sundown and darkness, the moon a prophecy of chrome, the stars 10 million headlights of the cars they would build. Ahead lay a city bright with steel; behind, the dark fields folded over everything they knew; and when they dozed on cramped back seats, they dreamed such dreams as the road can make, of drifting on a lake or stream or lying down in hay to dream of traveling, so that when they woke to a bump, a couch, a voice saying, “It’s your turn,” they were lost to themselves and took a few moments to remember their names. Mostly behind their backs, the locals called them rednecks, crackers, goddamned rebs. Strange to be strange, in their new neighborhoods, to be ethnic with a thick accent and a taste for food the grocers didn’t stock— hog jowl and blackeyes, turnip greens, roasting ears, souse-meat— the butcher shrugging, the produce man shaking his head. Sometimes their own voices took them by surprise, sounding odd and out of place in the din of a city bus, ringing lost in the evening air when they called their children in for supper. At work they touched parts of tomorrow, next year’s models always taking shape and vanishing, the present obsolete, the past merely a rumor, all hours blurring into one continuous moment of finishing a fragment, each piece the same piece, movements identical, endless, like a punishment in hell. No way out but back to their old lives, a future they already knew by heart, a few on the road each month in cars they may have helped assemble, tokens of their failed success, legacies for boys to find years later rusting on some lot, banged up but still a dream and fast enough when overhauled to make them feel they could blast straight into tomorrow, as they raced their engines at each stoplight and cruised their towns in circles.

I'm at a double wake in Springfield, for a childhood friend and his father who died years ago. I join my aunt in the queue of mourners and walk into a brown study, a sepia room with books and magazines. The father's in a coffin; he looks exhumed, the worse for wear. But where my friend's remains should be there's just the empty base of an urn. Where are his ashes? His mother hands me a paper cup with pills: leucovorin, Zovirax, and AZT.  "Henry wanted you to have these," she sneers. "Take all you want, for all the good they'll do."  "Dlugos. Meester Dlugos."  A lamp snaps on. Raquel, not Welch, the chubby nurse, is standing by my bed. It's 6 a.m., time to flush the heplock and hook up the I.V. line. False dawn is changing into day, infusing the sky above the Hudson with a flush of light. My roommate stirs beyond the pinstriped curtain. My first time here on G-9, the AIDS ward, the cheery D & D Building intentionality of the decor made me feel like jumping out a window. I'd been lying on a gurney in an E.R. corridor for nineteen hours, next to a psychotic druggie with a voice like Abbie Hoffman's. He was tied up, or down, with strips of cloth (he'd tried to slug a nurse) and sent up a grating adenoidal whine all night. "Nurse . . . nurse . . . untie me,please. . . these rags have strange powers." By the time they found a bed for me, I was in no mood to appreciate the clever curtains in my room, the same fabric exactly as the drapes and sheets of a P-town guest house in which I once—partied? stayed? All I can remember is the pattern. Nor did it help to have the biggest queen on the nursing staff clap his hands delightedly and welcome me to AIDS-land. I wanted to drop dead immediately. That was the low point. Today these people are my friends, in the process of restoring me to life a second time. I can walk and talk and breathe simultaneously now. I draw a breath and sing "Happy Birthday" to my roommate Joe. He's 51 today. I didn't think he'd make it. Three weeks ago they told him that he had aplastic anemia, and nothing could be done. Joe had been a rotten patient, moaning operatically, throwing chairs at nurses. When he got the bad news, there was a big change. He called the relatives with whom he had been disaffected, was anointed and communicated for the first time since the age of eight when he was raped by a priest, and made a will. As death drew nearer, Joe grew nicer, almost serene. Then the anemia began to disappear, not because of medicines, but on its own. Ready to die, it looks like Joe has more of life to go. He'll go home soon. "When will you get out of here?" he asks me. I don't know; when the X-ray shows no more pneumonia. I've been here three weeks this time. What have I accomplished? Read some Balzac, spent "quality time" with friends, come back from death's door, and prayed, prayed a lot. Barry Bragg, a former lover of a former lover and a new Episcopalian, has AIDS too, and gave me a leatherbound and gold-trimmed copy of the Office, the one with all the antiphons. My list of daily intercessions is as long as a Russian novel. I pray about AIDS last. Last week I made a list of all my friends who've died or who are living and infected. Every day since, I've remembered someone I forgot to list. This morning it was Chasen Gaver, the performance poet from DC. I don't know if he's still around. I liked him and could never stand his poetry, which made it difficult to be a friend, although I wanted to defend him one excruciating night at a Folio reading, where Chasen snapped his fingers and danced around spouting frothy nonsense about Andy Warhol to the rolling eyes of self-important "language- centered" poets, whose dismissive attitude and ugly manners were worse by far than anything that Chasen ever wrote. Charles was his real name; a classmate at Antioch dubbed him "Chasen," after the restaurant, I guess. Once I start remembering, so much comes back. There are forty-nine names on my list of the dead, thirty-two names of the sick. Cookie Mueller changed lists Saturday. They all will, I guess, the living, I mean, unless I go before them, in which case I may be on somebody’s list myself. It’s hard to imagine so many people I love dying, but no harder than to comprehend so many already gone. My beloved Bobby, maniac and boyfriend. Barry reminded me that he had sex with Bobby on the coat pile at this Christmas party, two years in a row. That’s the way our life together used to be, a lot of great adventures. Who’ll remember Bobby’s stories about driving in his debutante date’s father’s white Mercedes from hole to hole of the golf course at the poshest country club in Birmingham at 3 a.m., or taking off his clothes in the redneck bar on a dare, or working on Stay Hungry as the dresser of a then- unknown named Schwarzenegger. Who will be around to anthologize his purple cracker similes: “Sweatin’ like a nigger on Election Day,” “Hotter than a half-fucked fox in a forest fire.” The ones that I remember have to do with heat, Bobby shirtless, sweating on the dance floor of the tiny bar in what is now a shelter for the indigent with AIDS on the dockstrip, stripping shirts off Chuck Shaw, Barry Bragg and me, rolling up the tom rags, using them as pom-poms, then bolting off down West Street, gracefully (despite the overwhelming weight of his inebriation) vaulting over trash cans as he sang, “I like to be in America” in a Puerto Rican accent. When I pass, who’ll remember, who will care about these joys and wonders? I’m haunted by that more than by the faces of the dead and dying. A speaker crackles near my bed and nurses streak down the corridor. The black guy on the respirator next door bought the farm, Maria tells me later, but only when I ask. She has tears in her eyes. She’d known him since his first day on G-9 a long time ago. Will I also become a fond, fondly regarded regular, back for stays the way retired retiring widowers return to the hotel in Nova Scotia or Provence where they vacationed with their wives? I expect so, although that’s down the road; today’s enough to fill my plate. A bell rings, like the gong that marks the start of a fight. It’s 10 and Derek’s here to make the bed, Derek who at 16 saw Bob Marley’s funeral in the football stadium in Kingston, hot tears pouring down his face. He sings as he folds linens, “You can fool some of the people some of the time,” dancing a little softshoe as he works. There’s a reason he came in just now;Divorce Court drones on Joe’s TV, and Derek is hooked. I can’t believe the script is plausible to him, Jamaican hipster that he is, but he stands transfixed by the parade of faithless wives and screwed-up husbands. The judge is testy; so am I, unwilling auditor of drivel. Phone my friends to block it out: David, Jane and Eileen. I missed the bash for David’s magazine on Monday and Eileen’s reading last night. Jane says that Marie-Christine flew off to Marseilles where her mother has cancer of the brain, reminding me that AIDS is just a tiny fragment of life’s pain. Eileen has been thinking about Bobby, too, the dinner that we threw when he returned to New York after getting sick. Pencil-thin, disfigured by KS, he held forth with as much kinetic charm as ever. What we have to cherish is not only what we can recall of how things were before the plague, but how we each responded once it started. People have been great to me. An avalanche of love has come my way since I got sick, and not just moral support. Jaime’s on the board of PEN’s new fund for AIDS; he’s helping out. Don Windham slipped a check inside a note, and Brad Gooch got me something from the Howard Brookner Fund. Who’d have thought when we dressed up in ladies’ clothes for a night for a hoot in Brad (“June Buntt”) and Howard (“Lili La Lean”)’s suite at the Chelsea that things would have turned out this way: Howard is dead at 35, Chris Cox (“Kay Sera Sera”)’s friend Bill gone too, “Bernadette of Lourdes” (guess who) with AIDS, God knows how many positive. Those 14th Street wigs and enormous stingers and Martinis don’t provoke nostalgia for a time when love and death were less inextricably linked, but for the stories we would tell the morning after, best when they involved our friends, second-best, our heroes. J.J. Mitchell was master of the genre. When he learned he had AIDS, I told him he should write them down. His mind went first. I’ll tell you one of his best. J.J. was Jerome Robbins’ houseguest At Bridgehampton. Every morning they would have a contest to see who could finish the Times crossword first. Robbins always won, until a day when he was clearly baffled. Grumbling, scratching over letters, he finally threw his pen down. “J.J., tell me what I’m doing wrong.” One clue was “Great 20th-c. choreographer.” The solution was “Massine,” but Robbins had placed his own name in the space. Every word around it had been changed to try to make the puzzle work, except that answer. At this point there’d be a horsey laugh from J.J. —“Isn’t that great?” he’d say through clenched teeth (“Locust Valley lockjaw”). It was, and there were lots more where that one came from, only you can’t get there anymore. He’s dropped into the maw waiting for the G-9 denizens and for all flesh, as silent as the hearts that beat upon the beds up here: the heart of the drop- dead beautiful East Village kid who came in yesterday, Charles Frost’s heart nine inches from the spleen they’re taking out tomorrow, the heart of the demented girl whose screams roll down the hallways late at night, hearts that long for lovers, for reprieve, for old lives, for another chance. My heart, so calm most days, sinks like a brick to think of all that heartache. I’ve been staying sane with program tools, turning everything over to God “as I understand him.”  I don’t understand him. Thank God I read so much Calvin last spring; the absolute necessity of blind obedience to a sometimes comforting, sometimes repellent, always incomprehensible Source of light and life stayed with me. God can seem so foreign, a parent from another country, like my Dad and his own father speaking Polish in the kitchen. I wouldn’t trust a father or a God too much like me, though. That is why I pack up all my cares and woes, and load them on the conveyor belt, the speed of which I can’t control, like Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times or Lucy on TV. I don’t need to run machines today. I’m standing on a moving sidewalk headed for the dark or light, whatever’s there. Duncan Hannah visits, and we talk of out-of-body experiences. His was amazing. Bingeing on vodka in his dorm at Bard, he woke to see a naked boy in fetal posture on the floor. Was it a corpse, a classmate, a pickup from the blackout of the previous night? Duncan didn’t know. He struggled out of bed, walked over to the youth, and touched his shoulder. The boy turned; it was Duncan himself. My own experience was milder, don’t make me flee screaming from the room as Duncan did. It happened on a Tibetan meditation weekend at the Cowley Fathers’ house in Cambridge. Michael Koonsman led it, healer whose enormous paws directed energy. He touched my spine to straighten up my posture, and I gasped at the rush. We were chanting to Tara, goddess of compassion and peace, in the basement chapel late at night. I felt myself drawn upward, not levitating physically, but still somehow above my body. A sense of bliss surrounded me. It lasted ten or fifteen minutes. When I came down, my forehead hurt. The spot where the “third eye” appears in Buddhist art felt as though someone had pushed a pencil through it. The soreness lasted for a week. Michael wasn’t surprised. He did a lot of work with people with AIDS in the epidemic’s early days but when he started losing weight and having trouble with a cough, he was filled with denial. By the time he checked into St. Luke’s, he was in dreadful shape. The respirator down his throat squelched the contagious enthusiasm of his voice, but he could still spell out what he wanted to say on a plastic Ouija board beside his bed. When the doctor who came in to tell him the results of his bronchoscopy said, “Father, I’m afraid I have bad news,” Michael grabbed the board and spelled, “The truth is always Good News.” After he died, I had a dream in which I was a student in a class that he was posthumously teaching. With mock annoyance he exclaimed, “Oh, Tim! I can’t believe you really think that AIDS is a disease!” There’s evidence in that direction, I’ll tell him if the dream recurs: the shiny hamburger-in-lucite look of the big lesion on my face; the smaller ones I daub with makeup; the loss of forty pounds in a year; the fatigue that comes on at the least convenient times. The symptoms float like algae on the surface of the grace that buoys me up today. Arthur comes in with the Sacrament, and we have to leave the room (Joe’s Italian family has arrived for birthday cheer) to find some quiet. Walk out to the breezeway, where it might as well be August for the stifling heat. On Amsterdam, pedestrians and drivers are oblivious to our small aerie, as we peer through the grille like cloistered nuns. Since leaving G-9 the first time, I always slow my car down on this block, and stare up at this window, to the unit where my life was saved. It’s strange how quickly hospitals feel foreign when you leave, and how normal their conventions seem as soon as you check in. From below, it’s like checking out the windows of the West Street Jail; hard to imagine what goes on there, even if you know firsthand. The sun is going down as I receive communion. I wish the rite’s familiar magic didn’t dull my gratitude for this enormous gift. I wish I had a closer personal relationship with Christ, which I know sounds corny and alarming. Janet Campbell gave me a remarkable ikon the last time I was here; Christ is in a chair, a throne, and St. John the Divine, an androgyne who looks a bit like Janet, rests his head upon the Savior’s shoulder. James Madden, priest of Cowley, dead of cancer earlier this year at 39, gave her the image, telling her not to be afraid to imitate St. John. There may come a time when I’m unable to respond with words, or works, or gratitude to AIDS; a time when my attitude caves in, when I’m as weak as the men who lie across the dayroom couches hour after hour, watching sitcoms, drawing blanks. Maybe my head will be shaved and scarred from surgery; maybe I’ll be pencil- thin and paler than a ghost, pale as the vesper light outside my window now. It would be good to know that I could close my eyes and lean my head back on his shoulder then, as natural and trusting as I’d be with a cherished love. At this moment, Chris walks in, Christopher Earl Wiss of Kansas City and New York, my lover, my last lover, my first healthy and enduring relationship in sobriety, the man with whom I choose to share what I have left of life and time. This is the hardest and happiest moment of the day. G-9 is no place to affirm a relationship. Two hours in a chair beside my bed after eight hours of work night after night for weeks … it’s been a long haul, and Chris gets tired. Last week he exploded, “I hate this, I hate your being sick and having AIDS and lying in a hospital where I can only see you with a visitor’s pass. I hate that this is going to get worse.” I hate it, too. We kiss, embrace, and Chris climbs into bed beside me, to air-mattress squeaks. Hold on. We hold on to each other, to a hope of how we’ll be when I get out. Let him hold on, please don’t let him lose his willingness to stick with me, to make love and to make love work, to extend the happiness we’ve shared. Please don’t let AIDS make me a monster or a burden is my prayer. Too soon, Chris has to leave. I walk him to the elevator bank, then totter back so Raquel can open my I.V. again. It’s not even mid-evening, but I’m nodding off. My life’s so full, even (especially?) when I’m here on G-9. When it’s time to move on to the next step, that will be a great adventure, too. Helena Hughes, Tibetan Buddhist, tells me that there are three stages in death. The first is white, like passing through a thick but porous wall. The second stage is red; the third is black; and then you’re finished, ready for the next event. I’m glad she has a road map, but I don’t feel the need for one myself. I’ve trust enough in all that’s happened in my life, the unexpected love and gentleness that rushes in to fill the arid spaces in my heart, the way the city glow fills up the sky above the river, making it seem less than night. When Joe O’Hare flew in last week, he asked what were the best times of my New York years; I said “Today,” and meant it. I hope that death will lift me by the hair like an angel in a Hebrew myth, snatch me with the strength of sleep’s embrace, and gently set me down where I’m supposed to be, in just the right place.

1. If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront? I’m a child then, yet already I’ve composed this conscience-beast, who harries me: is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he, could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse, and orchestrate ever undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself? 2 The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying their call, take me along, and I’m sent out with the dead boy’s brother and some others to play. We’re joking around, and some words come to my mind, which to my amazement are said. How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies? is what’s said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet, everyone stares, and I want to know now why that someone in me who’s me yet not me let me say it. Shouldn’t he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me, it didn’t matter that I’d really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when? 3 I could hear the boy’s mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing then stopping. Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her it would end? Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, still does, me, for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes? She didn’t laugh, though, or I never heard her.How do you know when you can laugh? Why couldn’t someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but to explain? The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn’t hear anything more from inside. The way now sometimes what’s in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really, forgets.

Aulder than mammoth or than mastodon Deep i’ the herts o’ a’ men lurk scaut-heid Skrymmorie monsters few daur look upon. Brides sometimes catch their wild een, scansin’ reid, Beekin’ abune the herts they thocht to lo’e And horror-stricken ken that i’ themselves A like beast stan’s, and lookin’ love thro’ and thro’ Meets the reid een wi’ een like seevun hells. ... Nearer the twa beasts draw, and, couplin’, brak The bubbles o’ twa sauls and the haill warld gangs black. Yet wha has heard the beasts’ wild matin’-call To ither music syne can gi’e nae ear. The nameless lo’enotes haud him in a thrall. Forgot are guid and ill, and joy and fear. ... My bluid sail thraw a dark hood owre my een And I sail venture deep into the hills Whaur, scaddows on the skyline, can be seen —Twinin’ the sun’s brent broo wi’ plaited horns As gin they crooned it wi’ a croon o’ thorns— The beasts in wha’s wild cries a’ Scotland’s destiny thrills. The lo’es o’ single herts are strays; but there The herds that draw the generations are, And whasae hears them roarin’, evermair Is yin wi’ a’ that gangs to mak’ or mar The spirit o’ the race, and leads it still Whither it can be led, ’yont a’ desire and will. I Wergeland, I mind o’ thee—for thy bluid tae Kent the rouch dirl o’ an auld Scots strain, —A dour dark burn that has its ain wild say Thro’ a’ the thrang bricht babble o’ Earth’s flood. Behold, thwart my ramballiach life again, What thrawn and roothewn dreams, royat and rude, Reek forth—a foray dowless herts condemn— While chance wi’ rungs o’ sang or silence renshels them. (A foray frae the past—and future tae Sin Time’s a blindness we’ll thraw aff some day!) ... On the rumgunshoch sides o’ hills forgotten Life hears beasts rowtin’ that it deemed extinct, And, sudden, on the hapless cities linked In canny civilisation’s canty dance Poor herds o’ heich-skeich monsters, misbegotten, ... Streets clear afore the scarmoch advance: Frae every winnock skimmerin’ een keek oot To see what sic camsteerie cast-offs are aboot. Cast-offs?—But wha mak’s life a means to ony end? This sterves and that stuff’s fu’, scraps this and succours that? The best survive there’s nane but fules contend. Na! Ilka daith is but a santit need. ... Lo! what bricht flames o’ beauty are lit at The unco’ een o’ lives that Life thocht deid Till winnock efter winnock kindles wi’ a sense O’ gain and glee—as gin a mair intense Starn nor the sun had risen in wha’s licht Mankind and beasts anew, wi’ gusto, see their plicht. Mony’s the auld hauf-human cry I ken Fa’s like a revelation on the herts o’ men As tho’ the graves were split and the first man Grippit the latest wi’ a freendly han’ ... And there’s forgotten shibboleths o’ the Scots Ha’e keys to senses lockit to us yet —Coorse words that shamble thro’ oor minds like stots, Syne turn on’s muckle een wi’ doonsin’ emerauds lit. I hear nae ‘hee-haw’ but I mind the day A’e donkey strunted doon a palm-strewn way As Chesterton has sung; nae wee click-clack O’ hoofs but to my hert at aince comes back Jammes’ Prayer to Gang to Heaven wi’ the Asses; And shambles-ward nae cattle-beast e’er passes But I mind hoo the saft een o’ the kine Lichted Christ’s craidle wi’ their canny shine. Hee-Haw! Click-Clack! And Cock-a-doodle-doo! —Wull Gabriel in Esperanto cry Or a’ the warld’s undeemis jargons try? It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken E’en herts that ha’e nae Scots’ll dirl richt thro’ As nocht else could—for here’s a language rings Wi’ datchie sesames, and names for nameless things.

I find it in a field of feathers, pink-crested, a knuckle of bone picked clean by the wind, a pale mohawk mounted on stone. I bend down. Zeroed out of its head are two sockets, two airy planets full with sun, and taking asylum in one a millipede is coiled, a slick black hypnotist. Polished, it spirals in on itself like one of Saint Hilda’s fossil snakes we studied in the school chapel’s stained glass. As if the eye could dig itself into the earth then extend a curled feeler out, like a fern. I turn the skull round in my palm like a pebble— it will not settle. Otherwise, all is still: the grasses claw in, the world does not tilt. Even the blue stand of scrub grows over; it has nothing on its mind. But the skull will outlast the summer, a thought cut short, and I will pass it every day as I walk and stop just here, where the air hones its teeth on bone, where the mind remembers itself only as a shell, and I will mourn what was once a world: one eye rolled to the daylight moon, the other pressed down into the earth.

pilipinas to petatlán she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots spilling snakes’ blood virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree one day’s walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman’s dinghy dimensions washes ashore virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines virgin of ocean voyage peril she will herself born virgin of mud brick ruins; virgin of sandstorm echoes she is saint of commonplaces; saint of badlands virgin of jade, camphor, porcelain; virgin of barter for ghosts penitents, earthdivers of forgotten names praying skyward virgin of scars blossomed from open veins of fire she slips across the pacific’s rivers of pearldiving children virgin of copper coins she is bloodletting words, painting unlikeness virgin of anachronism children stained with berries and rust, their skeletons bend, arrow-tipped; smoke blurs eyes’ edges virgin of mineral depletion; virgin of mercury at other altitudes she remembers to breathe; a monument scraping cloud virgin of tin deposits extracted from mountains these are not divinations; there is goldleaf about her skin virgin of naming and renaming places in between