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Your friend has died, with whom You roamed the streets, At all hours, talking philosophy. So, today you went alone, Stopping often to change places With your imaginary companion, And argue back against yourself On the subject of appearances: The world we see in our heads And the world we see daily, So difficult to tell apart When grief and sorrow bow us over. You two often got so carried away You found yourselves in strange neighborhoods Lost among unfriendly folk, Having to ask for directions While on the verge of a supreme insight, Repeating your question To an old woman or a child Both of whom may have been deaf and dumb. What was that fragment of Heraclitus You were trying to remember As you stepped on the butcher’s cat? Meantime, you yourself were lost Between someone’s new black shoe Left on the sidewalk And the sudden terror and exhilaration At the sight of a girl Dressed up for a night of dancing Speeding by on roller skates.

After the fierce midsummer all ablaze Has burned itself to ashes, and expires In the intensity of its own fires, There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze. So after Love has led us, till he tires Of his own throes, and torments, and desires, Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze, He beckons us to follow, and across Cool verdant vales we wander free from care. Is it a touch of frost lies in the air? Why are we haunted with a sense of loss? We do not wish the pain back, or the heat; And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.

Eph. What Friendship is, Ardelia show. Ard. ’Tis to love, as I love you. Eph. This account, so short (tho’ kind) Suits not my inquiring mind. Therefore farther now repeat: What is Friendship when complete? Ard. ’Tis to share all joy and grief; ’Tis to lend all due relief From the tongue, the heart, the hand; ’Tis to mortgage house and land; For a friend be sold a slave; ’Tis to die upon a grave, If a friend therein do lie. Eph. This indeed, tho’ carried high, This, tho’ more than e’er was done Underneath the rolling sun, This has all been said before. Can Ardelia say no more? Ard. Words indeed no more can show: But ’tis to love, as I love you.

1 Come, my Lucasia , since we see That Miracles Mens faith do move, By wonder and by prodigy To the dull angry world let’s prove There’s a Religion in our Love. 2 For though we were design’d t’ agree, That Fate no liberty destroyes, But our Election is as free As Angels, who with greedy choice Are yet determin’d to their joyes. 3 Our hearts are doubled by the loss, Here Mixture is Addition grown ; We both diffuse, and both ingross : And we whose minds are so much one, Never, yet ever are alone. 4 We court our own Captivity Than Thrones more great and innocent : ’Twere banishment to be set free, Since we wear fetters whose intent Not Bondage is, but Ornament. 5 Divided joyes are tedious found, And griefs united easier grow : We are our selves but by rebound, And all our Titles shuffled so, Both Princes, and both Subjects too. 6 Our Hearts are mutual Victims laid, While they (such power in Friendship lies) Are Altars, Priests, and Off’rings made : And each Heart which thus kindly dies, Grows deathless by the Sacrifice.

Over an edge of cloud the naked angel blasts his long horn downward and they rise, or try to, skeletons, half-skeletons, the still-fleshed bodies of the newly dead, rising and pushing up the stone lids, heaving the crypt doors open, clambering over one another, dumbstruck, frightened, warily peeking out from inside tombs, or out of ditches, their eye holes blacker than the black they peek from while some reach out of habit for a robe to hide a nakedness they have no longer, a phantom shame that must be all the bones remember of the living flesh they were, and all of them worn away to nearly nothing, more wisp of form than form, more wraith than wisp, as if before your eyes they’re sinking into what they’re rising out of, coming into view by fading from it, there and gone, as if the very stone, unsure of what it holds, can neither cling to nor relinquish now the dream of something in it more than stone, other than hard or heavy, as over the face of it the air of a wished-for morning ripples the robes to water while it washes through the skulls and half-skulls tilted back to see just what the noise is that won’t let them sleep.

After wandering years Basho returned to gaze at his umbilical cord pickled in a jar. Plopped in brine years ago like the frog in the pond in his famous haiku. Of course fame meant nothing to him. He stood in the blazing rain in his family graveyard and as a crow squawked overhead the stones proclaimed him the last of his line. He kept feeling inside his straw raincoat for a missing limb or the hole where the wind and rain flew in. I'll get drunk tonight, he thought, and his eyelashes glistened as he trudged back to his hermit's hut to gaze again at the jar.

Aiee! It is the ceremony of the first blades of winter. Horticulture, horticulture, the little steam train says puffing up the mountainside. As if he had never known a home of his own, only ditches. Three stomps with a stone stump and the colloquium started. Beggars under the drainpipe, another hand’s cast of the bone dice. Whatever name the event has, it can be understood as an invitation. Epilepsy, epilepsy, the little steam train said, descending at evening. They bowed so low that their wigs tangled and I had to laugh.

Stuck pat with strawberry magnets to her sub-zero are all the stages: gill slits, lungs, sex—stopped at the third month, when the fetus is sucked out into a clear plastic bag. Reaching in for a quick soda, you can almost feel that flexible wind on your face. The fetus (named Jennifer, it says) develops in color-photo sequence till the second trimester, when (more bold-face) the kid's a murder victim, in cold blood, of Mom. You beckon to nothing: milk cartons, cans, stand in the chill blast of the suction door and grab your Sprite. Day and night she stands outside the clinics with the other Lifers. My advice: don't take her on. I once learned phylogeny provides intelligent options—but survival does not always select for insight. Down the line: there's a smug printed sign talking up adoption: Right. So, knocked up, I'd owe my body to an forgiving god, who'd swallow my offspring t00? Here's a fat man rattling a blood red genie in a pickle jar. No wedding ring. See that woman, head bent—they're hurrying her through the police cordon, past the screaming faces? I've walked where she's walking now— and where she lies now, I once lay, behind that secured door, near that white waiting table. My mind divided, momentarily, as if the world were just birth or no birth, what I could or could not do and still seem human to myself. Who first fixed in my head that slashed membrane between life and death? (I'd go toe-to-toe against her, but she stops me cold with her small, past due figure of remorse.)God, what next? she asks, leaning against her icebox, her T-shirt shouting how she pities the unborn. So do I. But not as much as I pity her, quickening with hate. And love: for those would-be lives inbred to a set of family gestures. One day on our way to the frog pond we take my daughter's hands, saying nothing—one on each side. She asks me why I don't see what she believes. I want to say I do, I see through all the cross- wielding apologists to why she, alone in her kitchen, grieves. It's sad. The big frogs croak like TV preachers pad to pad. But look: at the pond rim she points out tadpoles—hundredsm ink-black, legless. See? we both say. My daughter kneels, tries to cup them in her fist, but they're too fast. Born again and again into the limits of our perception, they swim intuitively, the way we think. She calls that revelation. We're surrounded by the bull chorus, a booming, backlit percussion.Call it revelation

Be kind and tender to the Frog, And do not call him names, As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’ Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’ Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’ Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’: The Frog is justly sensitive To epithets like these. No animal will more repay A treatment kind and fair; At least so lonely people say Who keep a frog (and, by the way, They are extremely rare).

No, not in the flesh — if Jesus was ever in ordinary flesh — but in the faces of the Christian ladies, heads held high chanting their sorrows and joys for all to share. He had turned away, Froggy said, from sacred things since he was old enough to pay his way. And here he was half-gone on muscatel when he felt the soul soar loose from the wreck of his body, all 350 misshapen pounds of it. No, not in church, but on “the damn crosstown streetcar running late.” A distant Sunday night in the City of Dreams, Froggy on his way to his weekend of the usual low-notes, cheap cigars, Michigan wine, and stud poker, when Jesus “come a knockin’.” At Twelfth Street the trolley stopped and a dozen ladies mounted, each in her best flowered dress, each with her worn Bible in hand, each one blessed and glowing. “Changed my life,” Froggy says — for maybe the hundredth time — though how is hard to say. Orphan of destiny, descendant of voyagers, fur traders, whiskey priests run amok in the final wilderness, Froggy takes his ease on the battered throne of history — a sprung barrel chair — his tiny slippered feet resting on a mismatched ottoman out on the driveway. Sunday’s his day, he tells us. Sleeps late, breakfasts on OJ and sips of “Morgan Davis” — a consecrated beverage — , and delivers his great truths to anyone slow enough or dumb enough to listen.