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A cento I have some sad news for you I am but a symbol, a shadow cast on paper If only you knew how things look within me at the moment Trees covered in white blossom The remains of my physical self Do you really find my appearance so attractive? Darling, I have been telling an awful lot of lies lately If only I knew what you are doing now? Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street? Not a mermaid, but a lovely human being The whole thing reminds me of the man trying to rescue a birdcage from the burning house (I feel compelled to express myself poetically) I am not normally a hunter of relics, but ... It was this childhood scene ... (My mother ... ) All the while I kept thinking:her face has such a wild look ... as though she had never existed The fact is I have not yet seen her in daylight Distance must remain distance A few proud buildings; your lovely photograph I find this loss very hard to bear The bells are ringing, I don’t quite know why What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity Yesterday and today have been bad days This oceanic feeling, continuous inner monologues I said, “All the beautiful things I still have to say will have to remain unsaid,” and the writing table flooded

A cento I became a therapist against my will A strange feeling of forlornness, a feeling I could not have stood Painful isolation, quite steep and slanting A beautiful forest which had the one drawback of seeming never to end I have had to struggle so long I have always been frank with you, haven’t I? I wanted to explain the reason for my inaccessibility I am lying here on a short leash in this filthy hole So far I haven’t been locked up Several people point to gaps in my face where the little girl has been cut out She screams and screams without any self-control Ravaged by the heat and the blood-&-thunder melodrama Neither describable nor bearable I felt I had known her all my life

Something needs to be done—like dragging a big black plastic sack through the upstairs rooms, emptying into it each waste basket, the trash of three lives for a week or so. I am careful and slow about it, so that this little chore will banish the big ones. But I leave the bag lying on the floor and I go into my daughter’s bedroom, into the north morning light from her windows, and while this minute she is at school counting or spelling a first useful word I sit down on her unmade bed and I look out the windows at nothing for a while, the unmoving buildings—houses and a church—in the cold street. Across it a dark young man is coming slowly down the white sidewalk with a snowshovel over his shoulder. He’s wearing a light coat, there’s a plastic showercap under his dirty navy blue knit hat, and at a house where the walk hasn’t been cleared he climbs the steps and rings the doorbell and stands waiting, squinting sideways at the wind. Then he half wakes and he says a few words I can’t hear to the storm door that doesn’t open, and he nods his head with the kindly farewell that is a habit he wears as disguise, and he goes back down the steps and on to the next house. All of this in pantomime, the way I see it through windows closed against winter and the faint sounds of winter. My daughter’s cross-eyed piggy bank is also staring out blankly, and in its belly are four dollar bills that came one at a time from her grandmother and which tomorrow she will pull out of the corked mouthhole. (It’s not like the piggy banks you have to fill before you empty them because to empty them you have to smash them.) Tomorrow she will buy a perfect piece of small furniture for her warm well-lit dollhouse where no one is tired or weak and the wind can’t get in. Sitting on her bed, looking out, I didn’t see a bundled-up lame child out of school and even turned out of the house for a while, or a blind woman with burns or a sick bald veteran—people who might have walked past stoop-shouldered with what’s happened and will keep happening to them. So much limping is not from physical pain—the pain is gone now, but the leg’s still crooked. The piggy bank and I see only the able young man whose straight back nobody needs. When he finally gets past where I can see him, it feels as if a kind of music has stopped, and it’s more completely quiet than it was, an emptiness more than a stillness, and I get up from the rumpled bed and I smooth the covers, slowly and carefully, and I look around the room for something to pick up or straighten, and I take a wadded dollar bill from my pocket and put it into the pig and I walk out.

Glory be to God for breaded things— Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh, Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings, Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye, That in all oils, corn or canola, swim Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!); Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim, These greasy, battered bounties of the South: Eat them.

Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants, Intent upon the apples of his eyes; A heavy bandoleer hung like a prize Around his neck, and tropical red ants Mounted his body, and he heard advance, Little by little, the thin female cries Of mortar shells. He thought of Paradise. Such is the vision that extremity grants. In the clean brightness of magnesium Flares, there were seven angels by a tree. Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt They were not really from Elysium. And his flesh opened like a peony, Red at the heart, white petals furling out.

The yolk went down my leg Like a beautiful snail without a shell, Went down the hill To the skillet of water, to the nymphflies, Into the lips of pond minnows, Down the long belly of the gar – the hellbenders Having dived and lost, then into The paw of the lame panther Who loped back to her lair with it. As for the white, it stayed with me, Mark of the beast, birth, and trade.

The Friend wriggled out and stood, a smiling tree, his shimmering head turning left and right. A person came along and looked up and said, “Who are you?” The Friend said, “Come on, get a buzz. It’s awesome!” The person said, “I don’t need that,” and walked off. “Wait!” The Friend caught up and tickled him, his fingers hooking him and reeling him in. The Friend promised he would be popular. The person said, “Really?” He wasn’t convinced. The Friend poured it on, slathering him until he reeled. The Friend slathered and slathered until his head bubbled. Reeling in circles, he fell down. “Hey!” The Friend tried to wake him up. “Oh no! He’s dead!” He scooped up dirt, dropped the person in, and patted it down. He acted as if nothing had happened. Then came along another person. The Friend perked up and waved. Translated from the American Sign Language

We sat across the table. he said, cut off your hands. they are always poking at things. they might touch me. I said yes. Food grew cold on the table. he said, burn your body. it is not clean and smells like sex. it rubs my mind sore. I said yes. I love you, I said. That’s very nice, he said I like to be loved, that makes me happy. Have you cut off your hands yet?

For Nate Pritts The friend lives half in the grass and half in the chocolate cake, walks over to your house in the bashful light of November, or the forceful light of summer. You put your hand on her shoulder, or you put your hand on his shoulder. The friend is indefinite. You are both so tired, no one ever notices the sleeping bags inside you and under your eyes when you’re talking together about the glue of this life, the sticky saturation of bodies into darkness. The friend’s crisis of faith about faith is unnerving in its power to influence belief, not in or toward some other higher power, but away from all power in the grass or the lake with your hand on her shoulder, your hand on his shoulder. You tell the friend the best things you can imagine, and every single one of them has already happened, so you recount them of great necessity with nostalgic, atomic ferocity, and one by one by one until many. The eggbirds whistle the gargantuan trees. The noiserocks fall twisted into each other’s dreams, their colorful paratrooping, their skinny dark jeans, little black walnuts to the surface of this earth. You and the friend remain twisted together, thinking your simultaneous and inarticulate thoughts in physical lawlessness, in chemical awkwardness. It is too much to be so many different things at once. The friend brings black hole candy to your lips, and jumping off the rooftops of your city, the experience. So much confusion — the several layers of exhaustion, and being a friend with your hands in your pockets, and the friend’s hands in your pockets. O bitter black walnuts of this parachuted earth! O gongbirds and appleflocks! The friend puts her hand on your shoulder. The friend puts his hand on your shoulder. You find a higher power when you look.

are all that’s left of Gray’s Papaya on 8th St.