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Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson and tried to haul, up toward my block, a cross section of a maple grown too large, chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso, Super for All Buildings east of the projects, stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe. “Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands deep in his pockets. I nodded, barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt, transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it against his shoulder like a man who bears a handmade cross for miles on his pentitent back. I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark. I stood on the side and righted the thing and together we rolled this boulder of tree past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair, the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,” he said, as we reached my stoop, wood in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat. And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour it was filling the whole of my apartment— the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence— light brown rings so perfect my whole life fell right down inside them, concentric circles, tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself— suddenly it was thirty-five years ago: I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate, and looked up into the branches of my first true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs— after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby, to see through branches to the sun—I believed the world was mine, there was sap in my veins, the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree, the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline, which goes on to the edge of the known world.

Men who have hardly uncurled from their posture in the womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not in prayer, but in contemplation of the earth they came from, that suckled them on the brown milk that builds bone not brain. Who called them forth to walk in the green light, their thoughts on darkness? Their women, who are not Madonnas, have babes at the breast with the wise, time-ridden faces of the Christ child in a painting by a Florentine master. The warriors prepare poison with love’s care for the Sebastians of their arrows. They have no God, but follow the contradictions of a ritual that says life must die that life may go on. They wear flowers in their hair.

In this land the children tear their hearts in half. Let me explain. If ten things are wanted, only ten can be had. If a stand of birches is found to be made of tin, the soil around them will bleed with rust. In this land children study their magazines in broad daylight, and in their books any soldier who stumbles will not fall. No one will fall, a gift parents try not to make much of. At every meal some is set aside. In every garden a patch lies fallow. At parties there are whispers of illegal cheeses. Camembert, especially, is said to taste alive. And so the children learn to make room. To leave some. Nothing will come, but nothing will go. To love like this half must rattle in its pit.

I’m practicing my I-belong-here no-twig-snap no-leaf-rustle no-branch-crack see-all, know-all float-like-fog like-smoke pine-needle-soft forest walk. No one will know I’m coming. No one will know when I’m gone.

No more than that Dead cat shall I Escape the corpse I kept in shape For the day off Immortals take

Forever – is composed of Nows – ‘Tis not a different time – Except for Infiniteness – And Latitude of Home – From this – experienced Here – Remove the Dates – to These – Let Months dissolve in further Months – And Years – exhale in Years – Without Debate – or Pause – Or Celebrated Days – No different Our Years would be From Anno Dominies –

I was conceived in the cruelest month in whatever spring California could muster. A little rain—with some more likely. And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground? Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes, other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called the

It is pretty to be sweet and full of pardon like a flower perfuming the hands that shred it, but all piety leads to a single point: the same paradise where dead lab rats go. If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the small, a whole planet of minor gods simpering in the weeds. I don’t know anyone who would kill anyone for me. As boys my brother and I would play love, me drawing stars on the soles of his feet, him tickling my back. Then we’d play harm, him cataloging my sins to the air, me throwing him into furniture. The algorithms for living have always been delicious and hollow, like a beetle husk in a spider’s paw. Hafez said fear is the cheapest room in a house, that we ought to live in better conditions. I would happily trade all my knowing for plusher carpet, higher ceilings. Some nights I force my brain to dream me Persian by listening to old home movies as I fall asleep. In the mornings I open my eyes and spoil the séance. Am I forfeiting my mystique? All bodies become sicker bodies. This is a kind of object permanence, a curse bent around our scalps resembling grace only at the tattered edges. It’s so unsettling to feel anything but good. I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows. Rockabye, now I lay me down, et cetera. The world is what accumulates — the mouth full of meat, the earth full of meat. My grandfather taught his parrot the ninety-nine holy names of God. Al-Muzil: The Humiliator. Al-Waarith: The Heir. Once, after my grandfather had been dead for a year, I woke from a dream (I was a sultan guzzling flies from a crystal boot) with his walking cane deep in my mouth. I kept sucking until I fell back asleep. There are only two bones in the throat, and that’s if you count the clavicle. This seems unsafe, overdelicate, like I ought to ask for a third. As if anyone living would offer. Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies

I remember watching my father stop halfway up the driveway because my tricycle was blocking the way to the garage, and how he solved the problem by picking up the tricycle by the handlebars and smashing it through the windshield of our brand new family station wagon, his face red with scotch, his black tie and jacket flapping with effort, the tricycle making its way a little farther with each blow into the roomy interior of the latest model as the safety glass relented, the tricycle and the windshield both praiseworthy in their toughness, the struggle between them somehow making perfect sense in midday on our quiet suburban street, the windshield the anvil, the trike the hammer, the marriage the forge, and failure glowing in the heat, beaten and tempered, slowly taking shape.

My brother wore bags over his boots to keep the grease & grime from his time at the steel mill off the carpet & steps he mounted, heaving each foot like a monster born of the grave -yard shift — stiff & awkward, his arms smeared w/dark matter, the lather of machine & industry bathing his clothes & face in a glaze of sweat & smoke, oil & the dirt of what’s been done before — the work of uncles & cousins who wore the same jumpsuit, goggles & gloves to grab hold of cold finished bars using their backs & shoulders to move the weight around w/the help of machines, the knobs to control the two-ton bundles held by a buckle above the heads of hard-hatted men that could snap & let loose the mass of all that metal meant to weld into a foundation, a beginning to build upon when it was his time to work, to clock in clean & leave feeling filthy no matter the shift or stiffness in the bones creaking like the wooden stairs he climbed