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I sent him from home hardly more than a child. Years later, he came back loving avocados. In the distant kitchen where he'd flipped burgers and tossed salads, he'd mastered how to prepare the pear-shaped fruit. He took a knife and plied his way into the thick skin with a bravado and gentleness I'd never seen in him. He nudged the halves apart, grabbed a teaspoon and carefully eased out the heart, holding it as if it were fragile. He took one half, then the other of the armadillo- hided fruit and slid his spoon where flesh edged against skin, working it under and around, sparing the edible pulp. An artist working at an easel, he filled the center holes with chopped tomatoes. The broken pieces, made whole again, merged into two reconstructed hearts, a delicate and rare surgery. My boy who'd gone away angry and wild had somehow learned how to unclose what had once been shut tight, how to urge out the stony heart and handle it with care. Beneath the rind he'd grown as tender and mild as that avocado, its rubies nestled in peridot, our forks slipping into the buttery texture of unfamiliar joy, two halves of what we shared.

He’s supposed to call his doctor, but for now he’s the May King with his own maypole. He’s hallelujah. He’s glory hole. The world has more women than he can shake a stick at. The world is his brickbat, no conscience to prick at, all of us Germans he can

From a recessed hollow Rumble, I unearth as a creature Conceived to be relentless. Depend on me to hunt you Until you find yourself Counting all the uncorked Nightmares you digested. I will let you know the burning Endorsed by the effort of Matches. And you will claw Yourself inward, toward a Conference of heat as the steam Within you surrenders, caves You into a cardboard scar. Even what will wreck you Are your mother’s chapped lips. Even to drip your confession Of empty rooms. I know about Your recipe of rain, your apiary Ways. Trust me to be painful.

The Fathers put their trust in the end of the world And they were wrong.   The Gnostics were right and not Right.   Dragons copulate with their knobby tails. Some somnolent wealth rises unconcerned, Over there!   In the world!   Ponderous stubborn Sorrow weighs down the flying Gospels. Some enormous obstacle blocks our way. The untempered soul grumbles in empty light.

For those who ran in the streets, there were no faces to welcome them back. José escaped and loved the war. For those who swam with bitterness of a scorched love, there was a rusted car to work on. For those who merely passed and reclined in prayer, there was the tower and the cross. For those who dedicated tongues to the living and dying, there were turquoise painted doorways. For those who left their children tied to the water heater, there was a shout and a name. For those whose world was real and beautiful, there was a cigarette and a saint. For those who asked José to stay and feed his children, there were flowers at their funerals. For those who carried a shovel tattooed on their backs, there was a wet towel and a bottle. For those who swept the street of superstition and lie, there was the house to come home to. For those who came home late and put their swollen feet up, there was love and the smell of dirty socks. For those who feared the devil and spit on his painted arms, there was a lesson in rosaries. For those who had to leave before the sun went down, there was asphalt and a bus. For those who stared at wet plaster and claimed the face of Christ appeared, there was confinement and stale bread. For those who talked with each other and said it was time to go, there was lead in the paint and on the tongue. For those who left children behind, there was a strange world of sulphur and sparrow nests. For those who accused their ancestors of eating salt, there were these hands tracing what was left after the sweat.

As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music— long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule, free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn, might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers, as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp, silt fields, pale and singluar, like the snow fields of Newfoundland.  On its one runner blade the capsule slides, slips out through drift hummocks, through stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who plants, glides, at his head the flurry of a ship's chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs cast down through the winds of Newfoundland. The music these three absorb stops with the wreckage, with words lipped up through a microphone: flange,windlass,capstan,hull plating, then oddly, syllables at a slant, as light might slant through window slats, stairsteps,doorknob,serving bowl,teacup,Bordeaux. Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing. In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors ground down to a quiet palette, angles return, corners and spirals pull back to the human eye—as if from some iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal, a footboard and platter, each common shape brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval. The current spins silt like a sudden storm. With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts, temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three sit waiting, as in Whistler's Sad Sea three are waiting. All around them are dollops of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull of a red umbrella: each simple shape loved and awash in the landscape.

I hate your hills white with dogwood or pink with redbud in spring as if you invented hope, as if in the middle of red clay, limestone outcroppings, and oak trees dead with fungus something slight and beautiful should make us smile. I hate the way honeysuckle drapes fences, blooms in the ditch where everyone dumps garbage; the evening air sweet with cedar and fields of burley; the way irises and buttercups mark the old dimensions of a house destroyed a hundred years ago; how a span of Queen Anne’s lace rocks the whole moon, and the sumac runs dark against the hill. I hate the drawl, the lazy voice saying I’ve been away so long I sound like I’m from nowhere; the old hand gathering snowballs or peonies or forking up an extra dish of greens, bitter, just the way I like them.

Because she broke your heart,Shannon’s a badge— a seven-letter skidmark that scars up across your chest, a flare of indelible script. Between Death or Glory, and Mama, she rages, scales the trellis of your rib cage; her red hair swings down to bracket your ankles, whip up the braid of your backbone, cuff your wrists.  She keeps you sleepless with her afterimage, and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more. Her memory wraps you like a vise. How simple the pain that trails and graces the length of your body.  How it fans, blazes, writes itself over in the blood’s tightening sighs, bruises into wisdom you have no name for.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year— wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessèd break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job. Genius is what they know you had after the third volume of remarkable poems. Earlier they accuse you of withdrawing, ask why you don’t have a baby, call you a bum. The reason people want M.F.A.’s, take workshops with fancy names when all you can really learn is a few techniques, typing instructions and some- body else’s mannerisms is that every artist lacks a license to hang on the wall like your optician, your vet proving you may be a clumsy sadist whose fillings fall into the stew but you’re certified a dentist. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.