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for Paul Levitt Be perpendicular to the basket, toes avid for the line. Already this description is perilously abstract: the ball and basket are round, the nailhead centered in the centerplank of the foul-circle is round, and though the rumpled body isn’t round, it isn’t perpendicular. You have to draw “an imaginary line,” as the breezy coaches say, “through your shoulders.” Here’s how to cheat: remember your collarbone. Now the instructions grow spiritual—deep breathing, relax and concentrate both; aim for the front of the rim but miss it deliberately so the ball goes in. Ignore this part of the clinic and shoot 200 foul shots every day. Teach yourself not to be bored by any boring one of them. You have to love to do this, and chances are you don’t; you’d love to be good at it but not by a love that drives you to shoot 200 foul shots every day, and the lovingly unlaunched foul shots we’re talking about now— the clinic having served to bring us together—circle eccentrically in a sky of stolid orbits as unlike as you and I are from the arcs those foul shots leave behind when they go in.

Taken: “duck foot skin; an owl with five owlets; nesting minks; caught in a fish trap. A bird egg found in winter.”

What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this: Gifts freely given, that you never earned; Open affection with your wife and kids; Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit; Few days in court, with little consequence; A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours In the office; close friends who speak the truth; Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich Enough to build the future with; a bed In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love; A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep, And sleep to trim the long night coming; Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be None other; freedom to forget the time; To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined Yet does not seek the terms of its release, Like a child’s kite catching at the wind That flies because the hand holds tight the line.

Somebody left this white T-shirt like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter— the magic marks upon its back say:I QUIT METH 4-EVER. A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb. Extra large, it has been customized with a pocketknife or a canine tooth to rough the armholes where my boobs wobble out as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb, feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair and half like that Hell’s Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy. Dear reader, do you know that guy? I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same TV. But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying, and also the sinister bulked-up crows carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks: you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics. I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36 is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™— which means you can’t hijack my name; no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave. You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse goes staccato like a Teletype machine— then blam you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being. Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know because once I was a baby blue convertible but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.

In the men’s room at the office today some wag has labelled the two stalls the Erotic and the Political. The second seems suitable for the results of my business, not for what thinking ordinarily accompanies it. So I’ve locked myself into the first because, though farther from the lightbulb overhead, it remains the more conventional and thereby illuminating choice. The wit on its walls is more desperate. As if I had written them there myself, but only because by now I have seen them day after day, I know each boast, each plea, the runty widower’s resentments, the phone number for good head. Today’s fresh drawing: a woman’s torso, neck to outflung knees, with breasts like targets and at her crotch red felt-tip “hair” to guard a treasure half wound, half wisecrack. The first critic of the flesh is always the self-possessed sensualist. With all that wall as his margin, he had sniffed in smug ballpoint OBVIOUSLY DONE BY SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER SEEN THE REAL THING. Under that, in a later hand, the local pinstripe aesthete had dismissed the daydreamer’s crudity and its critic’s edgy literalism. His block letters had squared, not sloping shoulders: NO, BY SOMEONE WHO JUST CAN’T DRAW. Were the two opinions converging on the same moral point? That a good drawing is the real thing? Or that the real thing can be truly seen only through another’s eyes? But now that I trace it through other jokes and members, the bottom line leads to a higher inch of free space on the partition— a perch above the loose remarks, like the pimp’s doorway or the Zen master’s cliff-face ledge. THERE ARE NO REAL THINGS writes the philosopher. But he too has been misled by everything the mind makes of a body. When the torso is fleshed out and turns over in the artist’s bed, when the sensualist sobs over her, when the critic buttons his pants, when the philosopher’s scorn sinks back from a gratified ecstasy, then it will be clear to each in his own way. There is nothing we cannot possibly not know.

In the east, the day breaks; do not say we have started too early; For we shall cross many hills yet Before we grow old; here the land is surpassing in beauty. Mao Tse Tung 1934 I look out the bars upon the Castle the crust caked row of age in a corner my friendly spider crouches for the unwary gnats of my days. So much there is we must atone. There are spires of faith in the invisible claws of spiders in the flight and curve of gulls. These know, I swear, the contours of the rolling Saharas and the destitute oceans of our history. We sit, debating the charity of our captors. At night lights come on the shoreline bends into a broad bay near the Castle the sea is gray Yesterday it rained on the eve of my forty-first year and left all my defeats intact Let me lead you into the country It is only as half clansman of the ritual goat that I bring my song to the place of sacrifice here in the pain fields asphalt and smoke of a large hearth I lead my rope is short. I shall soon arrive under the tree. I will stage a hundred fights in honor of our Gods and our beloved leader Here, I could care less for the toiling masses I retreated here before Lent to my own stretch of sea front (I cannot see the damned sea because of old caked walls built by Dutchmen) But the shore falls into a deep gulf there are no cliffs. They found a week-old baby buried in a shallow grave on the front lawn of the fort. I want my grave to be deeper. They are sawing through our firewood Today is cassava day The flutist is silent Perhaps his troops have arrived in Georgia Not to arrive upsets me And for the path that I have trod I have no regrets

Myths of the landscape— the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces, the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses, then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings, across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . . Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder, then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash. The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off, my eyes begin to tear, and I'm leaning against a wall, short of breath, my heart as large as my father's, alone in such poverty my body scars the light. Arable fields, waste and stony places, waysides— the day he got the job at the Wellbaum and Company Foundry he wept, and later, in the truck, pulled the plug on a bottle. In the metallurgy of ore and coal and limestone, in the conversion of the green world to gray, in the face of the blue-white fires, I remember the fencerow, the white campion, calyx and coronal scales, the hawthorns, cut to the size of hedge, the haws so deep in the blood of the season they bled. The year we were poor enough to dig potatoes we had to drive there, then wait for the men to leave who let fires go out. There'd be one good hour of daylight, the rough straight rows running into shade. We'd work the ground until the sun was a single line. I can see my father, now cut in half by the horizon, coming toward me, both arms weighted down. I can see him bending over, gone. Later, in the summer, I'd have painted the dead rust undulant sides of all the buildings aluminum, which in the morning threw a glare like water on the garden.

You recount the history of the French garden. From above, I see tight rows of trees beside threadbare grass. When the language teacher talks about le capitalisme: the gesture of three fingers rubbing imaginary fabric. I’m a tourist, vulnerable and stupid, my legs showing, shoes practical, face red. Together, we try to reconstruct an anecdote whose contents have scattered. A motorcycle passes, a French police siren you say sounds innocuous then we both laugh sourly. I hadn’t seen a woman slap a child in some time. A truck reversing, and the alarm that continues for hours one morning. Porn on a handheld device, its tinny echo in a room with bare floors and very little furniture. Across the courtyard, this T-shirt on a hanger out the window turns in the light breeze as if trying to look behind itself. I’m consumed with not knowing where to buy paper, safety pins, stamps. The window frames of that building are red, emerging from gray gables. Enormous bumblebee at the threshold investigates the doorway, doesn’t enter. The flies do; they’re promiscuous; they leave. I don’t know the word for because. So each act is disconnected from another. I can almost imagine there are no consequences, the days just pass, one sunny, one cloudy, someone unseen shouts, sirens every few hours, clouds move in a solemn procession across a wide sky staggered with chimneys, people wait to cross the street, a large tree tosses its wig a little. Other small trees in the courtyard flicker. They are responsive. The sun heats the pavement; le pavé répond. You send me a short erotic video, you’re naked, propositioning me. Do you act more like the coin or the water? Across the narrow street this bird sipping from roof puddles seems more dove than pigeon. Pacing, grandmotherly, she stops to look at me. Do you just know how to love another person like someone knew to paint those window frames red? Most of the architecture looks floral, like a boring math problem. The crosses that reach and reach. Why does the scrape of the furniture when I rearrange it sound like crass American English to me? I slept late, now I’m watching the clouds, like clouds in an eighteenth-century painting. Overly articulate. Except these clouds are not trying to symbolize anything. Where’s my dove. I always want to go look at people. A booth selling copies of copies of Louis Vuitton. The small shadow the roof makes on another roof right next to it. When my friend came to Paris she wanted to break everything. Impeccable shoes on the impeccable feet. Clothes so new they’re creamy, and to seem to never have to 
compromise. I feel tattered when I’m actually not. I’m an American, I eat. A huge decorative basket of citrus snugged beside me in the upscale bistro. The woman from a building opposite comes down, indignant: Who threw a pomelo into my window? You read to me about the history of the barricade. I picture the drab suburbs. The shoulders and elbows of people in the museum evoke more reaction in me than most of the paintings. A young lithe person with live eyes tends bar,gender trouble tattooed up their arm. I count twenty-nine sleeping bags lined up beneath the overhang and each one inhabited. I read to you about the history of enclosure. Two people talking on a balcony, their black hair blowing. One leaning over into the courtyard. Behind the cathedral, vulgar black felt stapled in the raised flowerbeds to mask their frames. The river stinks, allures, as a specific person can. A repository, a consequence, a long sentence, an ongoing story. The generous current cut through by a party boat shouting wooo! wooo! wooooooo! wooo! emitting an obscene light waving at whatever will wave back.

My dear, your eyes are weary; Rest them a little while. Assume the languid posture Of pleasure mixed with guile. Outside the talkative fountain Continues night and day Repeating my warm passion In whatever it has to say. The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears. Thus your soul ignited By pleasure’s lusts and needs Sprays into heaven’s reaches And dreams of fiery deeds. Then it brims over, dying, And languorous, apart, Drains down some slope and enters The dark well of my heart. The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears. O you, whom night enhances, How sweet here at your breasts To hear the eternal sadness Of water that never rests. O moon, o singing fountain, O leaf-thronged night above, You are the faultless mirrors Of my sweet, bitter love. The sheer luminous gown The fountain wears Where Phoebe’s very own Color appears Falls like a summer rain Or shawl of tears.

Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough. Cunning life keeps asking for more and then a drop more. Our ankles are weighted with lead, we delve under the wave. We bend to our spades, we survive the force of the gusher. Our bodies fountain with sweat in the deeps of the sea, Our forehead aches and holds like a sunken prow. We are out of breath, divining the heart of the geyser, Constellations are bobbing like corks above on the swell. Earth is a waterwheel, the buckets go up and go down, But to keep the whole aqueous architecture standing its ground We must make a ring with our bodies and dance out a round On the dreamt eye of water, the dreamt eye of water, the dreamt eye of water. Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough. Come rain, come thunder, come deluged dams washed away, Our thirst is unquenchable. A cloud in the water’s a siren. We become two shades, deliquescent, drowning in song. My love, under the tall sky of hope Our love and our love alone Keeps dowsing for water. Sinking the well of each other, digging together. Each one the other’s phantom limb in the sea.