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The gooseberry’s no doubt an oddity, an outlaw or pariah even—thorny and tart as any kindergarten martinet, it can harbor like a fernseed, on its leaves’ under- side, bad news for pine trees, whereas the spruce resists the blister rust it’s host to. That veiny Chinese lantern, its stolid jelly of a fruit, not only has no aroma but is twice as tedious as the wild strawberry’s sunburst stem-end appendage: each one must be between-nail-snipped at both extremities. Altogether, gooseberry virtues take some getting used to, as does trepang, tripe à la mode de Caen, or having turned thirteen. The acerbity of all things green and adolescent lingers in it—the arrogant, shrinking, prickling-in-every-direction thorn- iness that loves no company except its, or anyhow that’s what it gets: bristling up through gooseberry ghetto sprawl are braced thistles’ silvery, militantly symmetrical defense machineries. Likewise inseparably en- tangled in the disarray of an uncultivated childhood, where gooseberry bushes (since rooted out) once flourished, is the squandered volupté of lemon- yellow-petaled roses’ luscious flimflam— an inkling of the mingling into one experience of suave and sharp, whose supremely im- probable and far-fetched culinary embodiment is a gooseberry fool. Tomorrow, having stumbled into this trove of chief ingredients (the other being very thickest cream) I’ll demonstrate it for you. Ever since, four summers ago, I first brought you, a gleeful Ariel, the trophy of a small sour handful, I’ve wondered what not quite articulated thing could render magical the green globe of an unripe berry. I think now it was simply the great globe itself’s too much to carry. December 1981

A collector of   walks, I was practicing my llamastep when one of   those white geese with the knob of cheddar on its bill honked at the goslings ignoring the art of the rank and file so adored by Mussolini and other assorted lunatics who I have trouble believing could ever raise one leg parallel to the earth they scorched without falling prey to gravity that was given a special kind of dominion over the fascist paunch, a shabby thing I have never seen hang around the waist of a goose, though who can say for sure under all that heavenly down where the hips of a goose begin and end; and even if   tomorrow some budding scholar published a treatise titled The Mystery of Goose Hips to fanfare, it would be an exaggeration of   the grossest kind to equate a goose’s trumpet with the barking from the balcony by the sad bullies whose love of   the locked leg I will never understand since the knee was so obviously made to flex, which means locking one is most likely a kind of sin against Darwin or God, both of whom I think would disapprove of anything so unnatural as even twenty people moving in stiff unison to music unless the brass and strings were just about to sway and bend to the hot version of  “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

It will be a while before recollections in tranquility set in, as time in its adversary mode of darker days ticks on transfixing you in newsprint. It will be a while before those sudden winds descend upon the Po. A while before the laughter echoes in the dark; before the sounds of seagulls and accordions, harmonicas mix in those parting shots of long-forgotten flicks with names like La notte brava, I Pugni in tasca, L’oro di Napoli. Your show-offy had intelligence; not the “unconscious” your friend Calvino claims you lacked. Ha-ha. It will be a while before the tranquility comes round again. A while before you’re able to get up and move about; stare out from your Swallow’s Nest on those dappled waters of Salerno’s Gulf, almost fable-like. “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?” your buddy Howard once sweetly asked. It will be a while and sometimes more and not your last.

for Alvester James Long after it was necessary, Uncle Vess ate the leavings off the hog, doused them with vinegar sauce. He ate chewy abominations. Then came high pressure. Then came the little pills. Then came the doctor who stole Vess’s second sight, the predication of pig’s blood every fourth Sunday. Then came the stillness of barn earth, no more trembling at his step. Then came the end of the rib, but before his eyes clouded, Uncle Vess wrote down the gospel of barbecue. Chapter one: Somebody got to die with something at some time or another. Chapter two: Don’t ever trust white folk to cook your meat until it’s done to the bone. Chapter three: December is the best time for hog killing. The meat won’t spoil as quick. Screams and blood freeze over before they hit the air. Chapter four, Verse one: Great Grandma Mandy used to say food you was whipped for tasted the best. Chapter four, Verse two: Old Master knew to lock the ham bacon chops away quick or the slaves would rob him blind. He knew a padlock to the smokehouse was best to prevent stealing, but even the sorriest of slaves would risk a beating for a full belly. So Christmas time he give his nasty leftovers to the well behaved. The head ears snout tail fatback chitlins feet ribs balls. He thought gratitude made a good seasoning. Chapter five: Unclean means dirty means filthy means underwear worn too long in summertime heat. Perfectly good food can’t be no sin. Maybe the little bit of meat on ribs makes for lean eating. Maybe the pink flesh is tasteless until you add onions garlic black pepper tomatoes soured apple cider but survival ain’t never been no crime against nature or Maker. See, stay alive in the meantime, laugh a little harder. Go on and gnaw that bone clean.

People walk through you, the wind steals your voice, you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and half — both woman and man, neither — a new gender. —Gloria Anzaldúa Jasmine garlands thin for the rib’s cartilage ring. The heart shudders with pure mission. She spreads & knows herself as Adam, Ometéotl, but through himself, Omecíhuatl, he is Eve. He knows but what the garden gives: the garden’s soot awakened tongueless in root. Cerise chrysantha coils around his leg. Gathering the tides of the seas to his side, she conceives where impossibilities seed. Clarity burning coal,                he takes two knots of grass & strings four birds-of-paradise through the ceiba’s rotted leaves: she fashions the sorrows from winter’s purse, sea & sun sifted for sum. Entrammeled, Ometéotl rises one among one body stitched in strange altar.

The mask? Because we were never ugly enough. Because our ugliness was epic. Because we were given to it, because we were so misgiven. You wear one. I wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten. Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico the living wear them, not to scare the dead away, but as invitation. They leave candy on the mounds of those they mourn. New Orleans? Women wear them in order to bare everything else. Men wear them in order to watch. I can remember, back before it all grows grim, making one out of the news, trying to paste it together. I remember my mother helping me. I don’t really remember my father. Something like a face, like the man in the moon. I understand we’re hardwired this way, to make faces before anything else. It’s why we see the Madonna in mold, alien architecture in Martian crater creep. We keep looking for those first faces, first familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one hundred seventy centuries gone. They call him Sorcerer. They call me Knight. We have always lived in the dark.

Framed by our window, skaters, winding in and out the wind, as water reeling so kept in motion, on a well-honed edge spin out a gilded ceiling. Fish, reflecting glow for glow, saints around the sun, are frozen with amazement just one pane below. Skates flash like stars, so madly whirling one can hardly tell which is sky and which the watery floor ... one night two straitlaced couples, a footman over them, rode out in a dappled-horse-drawn sleigh onto the river, a moonlit lark. The ice broke and they—sleigh, footman and all—riding in state, rode straight on into the lidded water. That winter all winter folks twirled over them who—framed in lace, frost the furs, the shiny harness and their smiles the fire that keeps the place—sat benignly watching. “One foot out, one foot in, are we real,” thought one, “we who wander sheepishly in dreams, or they, the really sleepless eyes, under us? And every night who knows (a laughter troubles us like dreams) who skates (a thousand watch fires the stars) above, peering through the pane?”

What makes you think I’m an eccentric, he said, in London To the rag of the reporters who had gathered to report On his eccentricities — the tin sink light enough for traveling, but Deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice. A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith. You are trembling now like the librarian reading To herself out loud in her Arctic room Composed entirely of snow. A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land and The Mennonite who told him We are in this world, but are not of this world, You see. From the notebook of  your partial list of symptoms, phobias: Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon, The possibility of  bluish spots. Everything one does is fear Not being of this world or in this world enough. There is no world I know, without some word of   it.

He changes into a bird, and that’s the only difference. Rain on the improved sidewalk seems inspired after so much heat. Look at the objects that have already wilted and died. Someone is losing hair trying to penetrate the meaning of death—rather language which postpones dying is inventing a drug to keep us alive. Being similar never made this body more true. Bills for electricity and answering service are burning inside the hearth. My dream, to have a hearth and set an example for fading youth. The conspicuous peacock neither turns nor changes, yet suddently loses its feathers, buckles in the dust and dies. The meaning is as fantastic as any truth. Language invents a painkilling drug for restoring youth—an occasion inviting feelings which jolt and never subside. I mean he is dying again, slowly, as he gains time.

The government spent a Patricia on me, “a huge waste,” it lamented, “when we could have been spending it on another Nixon,” the government spent all its beauty on the great light leap on the deer- crossing sign — there was hardly any beauty left for anything else in America, and looking around them the government said, “Is there none left? Print more,” you are born, you barely contain yourself, you grow, inside you, someone spends a billion to make prison more luxurious; inside you, someone spends a billion to keep libraries open one hour later; then oh god, you feel wonderful, you must be on welfare, the government spent its whole education on me, at least that is how it feels right now, I am bursting with educational dollars, I am bursting with other dollars as well, I’m rounded up, I’m one long row of ohs, I get so many commas that the sentence doesn’t stop, the dollars in me are a map of  Missouri my mother can’t fold back up, oh no the map is everywhere, but I know the way, I am hot on a trail, I am bursting with the dollars that put that knowing breath in drug dogs, all the spending of  the space program is in me, the stars seem especially close, this is because they are a government handout, they are spending millions on moonlight research, when I am President I will cut the arts and let my right arm flow downhill, I am ready, there is nothing trivial about me left, I am eliminating the penny every second, a dollar is peeled off a roll of  thousands, it is the day, the mint of  it is in my mouth, I open it, completely fresh.