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Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, thinking of what you never can bring back, or else you’re off in some fog concerning —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark, a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

So there’s a cabbie in Cairo named Deif. So he found 5,000 bucks in the back seat. So meanwhile his daughter was very sick. So he needed the money for medicine bad. So never mind. So he looked for the fare and gave it back. So then the kid died. So they fired him for doing good deeds on company time. So the President heard it on the radio. So he gave him a locally built Fiat. So I read it in the papers. So you read it here. A poor man has less than weight, has negative gravity, his life a slow explosion. Barely he makes the days meet. Like doors they burst open. Money, job, daughter fly away from him. Irony, injustice, bits of horror come close, cohere. They are with us, the poor, like the inner life which is wantless too; our souls’ white globes float somehow in the blue, levitating and bobbing gently at middle height over the bubbling fleshpots. Our effort to remake the found world as the lost reverie is desire. So, little Yasmin was sick, sick to the point of dying. She was like a garden coughing and drying. And suddenly her salvation was there, a sheepskin, yes, a satchel of money meekly baaing from the rear. A miracle in the offing? That famous retired philanthropist named God was back in business? was starting to take a hand? directing things maybe from the back seat? Maybe. Restored to its rich owner (he tipped a fig and a fart, a raspberry of plump nil), lying safely on his lap, the money was mute again, was superfluity, and root and sum and symbol, both lettuce and lump, of all evil. She too approaching that state, Yasmin, a flower, meantime, dying. For the locally assembled daughter a locally assembled Fiat. Too wantless to imagine the money his? Spurned the miracle and thwarted the grace? So loved the law he gave it his only begotten daughter? Effed and offed his own kid? Saint and monster, poor man and fool, slowly exploding, Deif all this. Yes, one melts at his meekness, scoffs at the folly, trembles for his stupor of bliss of obedience, gasps at his pride, weeps for his wantlessness, grunts when irony that twists the mouth jabs the gut. Then horror—the dark miracle—roaring, leaps into the front seat, grabs the wheel and runs you down in the street —while you sit on a café terrace innocently reading the paper or, bent above a radio, feel the news waves break against your teeth. Deif in grief. Deif in mourning. Deif bereaved. Deif in the driver’s seat. Deif without a beef. And daily in four editions and every hour on the hour, the media heap your dish with images of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. (Our real griefs in their imaginary jargons.) And you cannot touch a single sufferer, comfort one victim, or stay any murderous hand. Consumer of woes, the news confirms you in guilt, your guilt becomes complicity, your complicity paralysis, paralysis your guilt; elsewhere always, your life becomes an alibi, your best innocence a shrug, your shrug an unacknowledged rage, your rage is for reality, nothing less. Yes, you feel, murder would be better than hanging around; if only your fist could penetrate the print, you too might enter the reality of news .... You switch the radio on, hungrily turn the page of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. Pasha, President, playboy swing masterfully above our heads—what style! what heroes!—fling themselves over the headlines into the empyrean beyond our lowly weather—ah, there all the news is blue and blank, those soarings, those mock descents are them writing their own tickets in heaven. Fortune, true, is spiteful and fickle, and glamour itself must stalk them—but cannot shoot so high as impotence dreams, as resentment wishes. Gorgeous, limber, and free, like our consciences, a law unto themselves, a darker law to us —in their suntans our shadow. And where they fly, the lines of force accompany, the patterns of deference continue to comfort, a maggotism distracting irony. Their rods flatten others, their staffs flatter them

after Gwendolyn Brooks I. 1981 When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is a school I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late. Standing in the middle of the street last night we watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We watched him run to us looking wounded and thin. He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin. He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June the boy would be locked upstate. That night we got down on our knees in my room.If I should die before I wake. Da said to me,it will be too soon. II. 1991 Into the tented city we go, we- akened by the fire’s ethereal afterglow. Born lost and cool- er than heartache. What we know is what we know. The left hand severed and school- ed by cleverness. A plate of we- ekdays cooking. The hour lurk- ing in the afterglow. A late- night chant. Into the city we go. Close your eyes and strike a blow. Light can be straight- ened by its shadow. What we break is what we hold. A sing- ular blue note. An outcry sin- ged exiting the throat. We push until we thin, thin- king we won’t creep back again. While God licks his kin, we sing until our blood is jazz, we swing from June to June. We sweat to keep from we- eping. Groomed on a die- t of hunger, we end too soon.

I To see my father lying in pink velvet, a rosary twined around his hands, rouged, lipsticked, his skin marble ... My mother said, “He looks the way he did thirty years ago, the day we got married,— I’m glad I went; I was afraid: now I can remember him like that ...” Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with you or marry, because you wanted her to pay half the expenses, and “His drinking almost drove me crazy—” Ruth once saw you staring into a mirror, in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy hat, say: “Why can’t I look like a cowboy?” You left a bag of money; and were the unhappiest man I have ever known well. II It’s in many ways a relief to have you dead. I have more money. Bakersfield is easier: life isn’t so nude, now that I no longer have to face you each evening: mother is progressing beautifully in therapy, I can almost convince myself a good analyst would have saved you: for I need to believe, as always, that your pervasive sense of disappointment proceeded from trivial desires: but I fear that beneath the wish to be a movie star, cowboy, empire builder, all those cheap desires, lay radical disaffection from the very possibilities of human life ... Your wishes were too simple: or too complex. III I find it difficult to imagine you in bed, making love to a woman ... By common consensus, you were a good lover: and yet, mother once said: “Marriage would be better if it weren’t mixed up with sex ...” Just after the divorce,—when I was about five,—I slept all night with you in a motel, and again and again you begged me to beg her to come back ... I said nothing; but she went back several times, again and again you would go on a binge, there would be another woman, mother would leave ... You always said, “Your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.” IV Oh Shank, don’t turn into the lies of mere, neat poetry ... I’ve been reading Jung, and he says that we can never get to the bottom of what is, or was ... But why things were as they were obsesses; I know that you the necessity to contend with you your helplessness before yourself, —has been at the center of how I think my life ... And yet your voice, raw, demanding, dissatisfied, saying over the telephone: “How are all those bastards at Harvard?” remains, challenging: beyond all the patterns and paradigms I use to silence and stop it. V I dreamed I had my wish: —I seemed to see the conditions of my life, upon a luminous stage: how I could change, how I could not: the root of necessity, and choice. The stage was labelled “Insight”. The actors there had no faces, I cannot remember the patterns of their actions, but simply by watching, I knew that beneath my feet the fixed stars governing my life had begun to fall, and melt ... —Then your face appeared, laughing at the simplicity of my wish. VI Almost every day I take out the letter you wrote me in Paris. ... Why? It was written the year before you married Shirley; Myrtle, your girlfriend, was an ally of mine because she “took care of you,” but you always made it clear she was too dumpy and crude to marry ... In some ways “elegant,” with a pencil-thin, neatly clipped moustache, chiselled, Roman nose, you were a millionaire and always pretended you couldn’t afford to go to Europe ... When I was a child, you didn’t seem to care if I existed. Bakersfield, Calif July 9, 1961 Dear Pinon, Sorry I haven’t wrote to you sooner but glad to hear that you are well and enjoying Paris. I got your fathers day wire in the hospital where I put in about twelve days but I am very well now. I quit the ciggeretts but went through ten days of hell quitting and my back had been giving me hell. It had been very hot here but the last few days has been very nice. Emily just got out of the hospital yesterday. She had her feet worked on. I guess she will tell you about it. Glad to hear you are learning some French. We are just about through with potatoes. Crop was very good but no price at all which made it a poor year. Cattle are cheap too. It look like a bad year for all farmer’s. I don’t know anything else to tell you. Take care of your self and enjoy it. Maybe you will never have another chance for another trip. I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to go, so if you run into a extra special gal between 28 & 35 send her over here to me as all I know over here don’t amount to mutch. Well I guess I’ll close now as I am going over to see Emily. Hoping to hear from you right away. This address is 4019 Eton St. be sure and get it straight. Myrtle would like to know how much that watch amounts to. Let us know Will close now and write soon. Love ‘Shank’ P.S. Excuse this writing as its about 30 years since I wrote a letter. VII How can I say this? I think my psychiatrist likes me: he knows the most terrible things I’ve done, every stupidity, inadequacy, awkwardness, ignorance, the mad girl I screwed because she once again and again teased and rejected me, and whose psychic incompetence I grimly greeted as an occasion for revenge; he greets my voice with an interest, and regard, and affection, which seem to signal I’m worth love; —you finally forgave me for being your son, and in the nasty shambles of your life, in which you had less and less occasion for pride, you were proud of me, the first Bidart who ever got a B.A.; Harvard, despite your distrust, was the crown;—but the way you eyed me: the bewilderment, unease: the somehow always tentative, suspended judgment ... —however much you tried (and, clearly, you did try) you could not remake your taste, and like me: could not remake yourself, to give me the grace needed to look in a mirror, as I often can now, with some equanimity ... VIII When did I begin to substitute insight, for prayer? ... —You believed in neither: but said, “My life is over,” after you had married Shirley, twenty-five years younger, with three small children, the youngest six months old; she was unfaithful within two months, the marriage was simply annulled ... A diabetic, you didn’t take your insulin when you drank, and almost managed to die many times ... You punished Ruth when she went to Los Angeles for a weekend, by beginning to drink; she would return home either to find you in the hospital, or in a coma on the floor ... The exacerbation of this seeming necessity for connection—; you and mother taught me there’s little that’s redemptive or useful in natural affections ... I must unlearn; I must believe you were merely a man with a character, and a past—; you wore them, unexamined, like a nimbus of furies round your greying, awesome head ... IX What should I have done? In 1963, you wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars from me, so that we could buy cattle together, under the name “Bidart and Son,”— most of your money was tied up in the increasingly noxious “Bidart Brothers,” run by your brother, Johnny ... I said no, that I wanted to use the money for graduate school; but I thought if you went on a binge, and as had happened before, simply threw it away ... The Bidarts agreed you were not to be trusted; you accepted my answer, with an air of inevitability I was shocked at ... I didn’t want to see your self-disgust; —somehow, your self-congratulation had eroded more deeply, much more deeply, than even I had wished,— but for years, how I had wished! ... I have a friend who says that he has never felt a conflict between something deeply wished or desired, and what he thought was “moral” ... Father, such innocence surely is a kind of Eden—; but, somehow, I can’t regret that we are banished from that company—; in the awareness, the history of our contradictions and violence, insofar as I am “moral” at all, is the beginning of my moral being. X When I began this poem, to see myself as a piece of history, having a past which shapes, and informs, and thus inevitably limits— at first this seemed sufficient, the beginning of freedom ... The way to approach freedom was to acknowledge necessity:— I sensed I had to become not merely a speaker, the “eye,” but a character ... And you had to become a character: with a past, with a set of internal contradictions and necessities which if I could once define, would at least begin to release us from each other ... But, of course, no such knowledge is possible;— as I touch your photographs, they stare back at me with the dazzling, impenetrable, glitter of mere life ... You stand smiling, at the end of the twenties, in a suit, and hat, cane and spats, with a collie at your feet, happy to be handsome, dashing, elegant:— and though I cannot connect this image with the end of your life, with the defensive gnarled would-be cowboy,— you seem happy at that fact, happy to be surprising; unknowable; unpossessable ... You say it’s what you always understood by freedom. 1968-69.

If I don't say it someone will: the wind blows through the goldenrod like death flows through a crowd. I watch it from a distance as the whole field lifts and stirs. Close up, it holds the promise of a less than perfect world. I knew the thing before I knew its name. Now all I know is what the name infers: a life of pure sensation or the rod some angel brings— announcing a momentous death or birth, each face expectant, brightly-lit. I say the name and what it means until the meaning blurs. The wind blows through the goldenrod like death flows through a crowd. Nothing is accomplished and the world is changed by it.

Sirs, when you are in your last extremity, When your admirals are drowning in the grass-green sea, When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe— I just want you to know how you can not count on me. I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral halls, I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill, I have fallen through the window of the highest room, But don’

Gone, gone again, May, June, July, And August gone, Again gone by, Not memorable Save that I saw them go, As past the empty quays The rivers flow. And now again, In the harvest rain, The Blenheim oranges Fall grubby from the trees, As when I was young— And when the lost one was here— And when the war began To turn young men to dung. Look at the old house, Outmoded, dignified, Dark and untenanted, With grass growing instead Of the footsteps of life, The friendliness, the strife; In its beds have lain Youth, love, age, and pain: I am something like that; Only I am not dead, Still breathing and interested In the house that is not dark:— I am something like that: Not one pane to reflect the sun, For the schoolboys to throw at— They have broken every one.

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark And cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse. (If certain it wouldn't be idle to call I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall And warn them away with a stick for a gun.) I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm. "How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below." I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an axe— Maples and birches and tamaracks. I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard's arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God.

Jerk that bitch, urges my guide, and I give my shuddering pole a jerk, hooking the throat of the first steelhead of my life. Reel 'em, he mutters and revs the motor. I horse my pole and reel and horse. The boat's mascot whines, her claws clicking.Let it take some line. My father, uncle, and cousin are reeling.First fish! they shout, and I shout,What a fighter! A silver spine touches the air. There, he points,a hen. And guess what? She's gonna join the club, somehow spotting in that glimpse the smooth place along her back where a fin had been snipped. He leans over the gunwale, dips a net, and scoops her into the boat. She is thick with a wide band of fiery scales, slap- slapping the aluminum bottom. Welcome to the club, he says, and clobbers her once, and again, and once more before she goes still. A bleeder, he says, shaking his head and handing her to me. I curl a finger through a gill the way you're supposed to, determined not to let her slip and flop back to the river, a blunder I'd never live down. A good fist. Fish, I mean. A good fish.

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is, And as the other Spheares, by being growne Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, And being by others hurried every day, Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit For their first mover, and are whirld by it. Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, And by that setting endlesse day beget; But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, Sinne had eternally benighted all. Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see That spectacle of too much weight for mee. Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; What a death were it then to see God dye? It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? Could I behold that endlesse height which is Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, Humbled below us? or that blood which is The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? If on these things I durst not looke, durst I Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, They'are present yet unto my memory, For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; I turne my backe to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.