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I, the Lord, will make barren your fields and your fairways. Your refrigerators will be empty, no steaks and no leg bones, no butter and no cornbread. And I will remove your screen doors, force the mosquitoes indoors where you lie on the bed undead. For my house you have not readied, no flat screen and no broadband. My habitation is a wasteland of furniture from motel rooms. I will send the ostrich and badger in herds through your wrecked rooms; your beds will be entered by turnstile; the floor will seethe with bees. For my house is but a prefab; its roof lets in my rain. Woe is the Lord of Heaven who has no mansion on earth. Cries are heard from my fish traps, crows flap on my hat rack, pandemonium at the threshold as the owls and bats flit in. Silence reigns in the last place and the first place has no sway. For my knife-edge is impatient, my ledge crumbles like cake. I have warned you to beware. You await a handsome savior, but the plain man draws near... (Zephaniah)

Her e-mail inbox always overflows. Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all. She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call As music oozes forth to placate those Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows, Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall. Will He be in today? God only knows. She hasn’t seen His face—He’s so aloof. She’s long resigned He’ll never know or love her But still can wish there were some call, some proof That He requires a greater service of her. Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof, Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.

It must be troubling for the god who loves you To ponder how much happier you’d be today Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings Driving home from the office, content with your week— Three fine houses sold to deserving families— Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened Had you gone to your second choice for college, Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted Whose ardent opinions on painting and music Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion. A life thirty points above the life you’re living On any scale of satisfaction. And every point A thorn in the side of the god who loves you. You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments So she can save her empathy for the children. And would you want this god to compare your wife With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus? It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight Than the conversation you’re used to. And think how this loving god would feel Knowing that the man next in line for your wife Would have pleased her more than you ever will Even on your best days, when you really try. Can you sleep at night believing a god like that Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is And what could have been will remain alive for him Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill Running out in the snow for the morning paper, Losing eleven years that the god who loves you Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend No closer than the actual friend you made at college, The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight And write him about the life you can talk about With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed, Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

The Goddess who created this passing world Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled Cars & the variously shod feet were born And the past & future & I born too Light as airmail paper away she flew To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley Or both but instantly Clarified, composed, forever was I Meant by her to recognize a painting As beautiful or a movie stunning And to adore the finitude of words And understand as surfaces my dreams Know the eye the organ of affection And depths to be inflections Of her voice & wrist & smile

Godolphin Horne was Nobly Born; He held the Human Race in Scorn, And lived with all his Sisters where His Father lived, in Berkeley Square. And oh! the Lad was Deathly Proud! He never shook your Hand or Bowed, But merely smirked and nodded thus: How perfectly ridiculous! Alas! That such Affected Tricks Should flourish in a Child of Six! (For such was Young Godolphin's age). Just then, the Court required a Page, Whereat the Lord High Chamberlain (The Kindest and the Best of Men), He went good-naturedly and took A Perfectly Enormous Book Called People Qualified to Be Attendant on His Majesty,

One of them grants you the ability to forecast the future; another wrenches your tongue from your mouth, changes you into a bird precisely because you have been given this gift. The gods are generous in this way. I learned to avoid danger, avoid fear, avoid excitement, these the very triggers that prompt my wings from their resting place deep inside. And so, I avoided fights, avoided everything really. In the locker room, I avoided other boys, all the while intently studying that space between their shoulder blades, patiently looking for the tell-tale signs, looking to find even one other boy like me, the wings buried but there nonetheless. I studied them from a distance. When people challenge a god, the gods curse them with the label of madness. It is all very convenient. And meanwhile, a god took the form of a swan and raped a girl by the school gates. Another took the shape of an eagle to abduct a boy from the football field. Mad world. And what about our teachers? Our teachers expected us to sit and listen. In Theology, there was a demon inside each of us; in History, the demons among us. So many demons in this world. Who among us could have spoken up against the gods, the gods who continued living among us? They granted wishes and punishments much the way they always had. Very few noticed them casually taking the shape of one thing or another.

Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat.

We have been cruising, half a block at a time, my wife, my two children, all morning, and I have been pointing out unhurriedly and with some feeling places of consequence, sacred places, backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways. “There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood, That’s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.” “And in 1961,” I say, “at this very corner, Barry Sapolsky tripped me up with his gym bag.” My son has fallen asleep, my daughter has been nodding “yes” indiscriminately for the last half hour, and my wife has the frozen, wide-eyed look of the undead. “Maybe lunch,” I say, though I’m making now my fourth approach to Curtin Jr. High School, yellow-bricked, large-windowed, gothic, where Frank Marone preyed on our terror once and Janice Lehman walked in beauty. “Salute, everyone,” I say, “salute,” bringing my hand up to my brow as we pass the gilded entrance, “This is where things of importance happened,” and I am pulling out from under the car seat a photo album of old school pictures, “Page 8,” I say, “Fred Decker, John Carlson by the bike rack, Mr. Burkett … ,” and driving on, following the invisible map before my eyes. Now we are drifting toward my boyhood house and I am showing my wife trellised porches, bike routes, more than she’d care to see; “Why this longing?” she says, “What about now, the kids, our lives together, lunch, me?” I give her a kiss and turn right on Cherry and there in front of our eyes, barely changed, is the house where all my memories converge. “Look at the windows of my room,” I say, “see, there, the shadowy figure moving behind them?” And before anyone can hope to answer, I have grabbed my camera, I am snapping pictures through the windshield, bricks, dormers, railings, fences, streets, all are falling thrall to my aim. “We could be happy here,” I say, putting another roll of film in and beginning to nose my car toward Bill Corson’s house. “Really, Daddy,” my daughter says; “No chance,” my wife tacks on, but all I’m hearing is the crack of bats in the neighborhood lot and Danny’s pearl-handled cap gun going off and the drone of bees around honeysuckle and Dewey Waugh’s gravelly voice urging on his mower, and the sound of wind in the cottonwoods is like water, I am coasting, there is time for everything.

Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday’s attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when, among the fixed stars in paradise, he sees Adam suddenly, the first man, there in a flame that hides his body, and when it moves to speak, what is inside seems not free, not happy, but huge and weak, like an animal in a sack. Who had captured him? What did he want to say? I lay down beside you again, not knowing if I’d stay, not knowing where I’d been.

No matter how she tilts her head to hear she sees the irritation in their eyes. She knows how they can read a small rejection, a little judgment, in every What did you say? So now she doesn’t say What? or Come again? She lets the syllables settle, hoping they form some sort of shape that she might recognize. When they don’t, she smiles with everyone else, and then whoever was talking turns to her and says, “Break wooden coffee, don’t you know?” She pulls all she can focus into the face to know if she ought to nod or shake her head. In that long space her brain talks to itself. The person may turn away as an act of mercy, leaving her there in a room full of understanding with nothing to cover her, neither sound nor silence .