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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.

In that aftertime I wasn't writing. I never wrote, I didn't know what the aftertime was for. I felt little, collected nothing. I talked to myself, but it was boring.

The pack is filing from my nowheresvilles filling the halfway hotels, braving the ruts and calling one another via satellite. A dollar says hello. At home I try growing a new life, one of many women bored by my womb’s mystery. Who has time to run a thumb between her legs and calculate the temperature — chipper and bitter netherworld weathergirl.

It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lights burned distant, dull. I was tired, but you insisted on one more, so I chalked the cue—the bored blue—broke, scratched. It was always possible for you to run the table, leave me nothing. But I recall the easy shot you missed, and then the way we both studied, circling—keeping what you had left me between us.

Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue, Nor swifter greyhound follow, Whose foot ne’er tainted morning dew, Nor ear heard huntsman’s hallo’, Old Tiney, surliest of his kind, Who, nursed with tender care, And to domesticate bounds confined, Was still a wild jack-hare. Though duly from my hand he took His pittance every night, He did it with a jealous look, And, when he could, would bite. His diet was of wheaten bread, And milk, and oats, and straw, Thistles, or lettuces instead, With sand to scour his maw. On twigs of hawthorn he regaled, On pippins’ russet peel; And, when his juicy salads failed, Sliced carrot pleased him well. A Turkey carpet was his lawn, Whereon he loved to bound, To skip and gambol like a fawn, And swing his rump around. His frisking was at evening hours, For then he lost his fear; But most before approaching showers, Or when a storm drew near. Eight years and five round-rolling moons He thus saw steal away, Dozing out all his idle noons, And every night at play. I kept him for his humor’s sake, For he would oft beguile My heart of thoughts that made it ache, And force me to a smile. But now, beneath this walnut-shade He finds his long, last home, And waits in snug concealment laid, Till gentler Puss shall come. He, still more agèd, feels the shocks From which no care can save, And, partner once of Tiney’s box, Must soon partake his grave.