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I saw my mother standing there below me On the narrow bank just looking out over the river Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope Of the braided swirling currents Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky There are some things we know before we know Also some things we wish we would not ever know Even if as children we already knew & so Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings I knew I could never even fate willing ever Get to her in time

Deep reaches of sleep until the unforeseen moment, like fugue, like petit mal, some kind of sign, a touch from a joker’s finger, to let him know what’s right, what’s wrong with the dream-within-a-dream. A sudden, slight shift in the order of things and all the past undone. He left what was left of himself in her care that night. • They went to the river and dropped their clothes on the bank. She struck out. He followed in the long, slow vee of her wake. She could sound and surface, bringing back with her what other lovers had dumped: hotel bill, gimcrack ring, a four-square shot from the photo booth. Later, they dipped their bottles and drank. She looked at him and laughed. “You think you’re safe? You’re not.” • In this, her fool is deaf and dumb and twirling a pink parasol. In this he’s doing a chicken dance. He turns away and puckers up for a kiss. He’s their stalker, familiar, spy, his slippy grin is all lipstick and green teeth. Words to the wise, or coffin-laugh, or catcall. In this, he watches from cover, maestro of the deadfall. He goose-steps them out of the tunnel of love and into the house of glass.

In our arteries and eyes, a hundred lightbulbs throb like drugs. The furnace: a permanent mishap. And up in the dusk, there is lucid debris— a conduit, a wire mask, a swastika of corn. Boy- and/or girl-small, we'll find some horizon, an intricate faking in which to lose way. Here we are, not speaking or dead. Here we are or dead. To what do we owe this forgetting not to kiss? Not that any given face is not afraid.

Her arms around me—child— Around my head, hugging with her whole arms, Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock, The apple in her hand—her apple and her father, and my nose pressed Hugely to the collar of her winter coat—. There in the photograph It is the child who is the branch We fall from, where would be bramble, Brush, bramble in the young Winter With its blowing snow she must have thought Was ours to give to her.

At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills, Steam rises like the spent breath of the night. At open windows, curtains stir on sills; There’s caging drawn across a market’s face; An empty crane, at its construction site, Suspends a cable into chasmed space. The roof shows other rooftops, their plateaus Marked with antennas from which lines are tied And strung with water beads or hung with clothes. And here and there a pigeon comes to peck At opaque puddles, its stiff walk supplied By herky-jerky motions of its neck. Downtown, tall buildings surmount a thinning haze. The newest, the world center of a bank, Has sides swept upward from a block-broad base, Obsidian glass, fifty stories tall; Against it hangs a window-washer’s plank, An aerie on a frozen waterfall. Nearer and eastward, past still-sleeping blocks, Crews on the waterfront are changing shifts. Trucks load at warehouses at the foot of docks; A tug out in the bay, gathering speed, With a short hollow blast of puffed smoke, lifts Gulls to a cawing and air-borne stampede. It is as if dawn pliantly compels The city to relax to sounds and shapes, To its diagonals and parallels: Long streets with traffic signals blinking red, Small squares of parks, alleys with fire escapes, Rooftops above which cloudless day is spread. And it’s as if the roofs’ breeze-freshened shelves, Their level surfaces of gravelled tar Where glassy fragments glitter, are themselves A measure of the intermediate worth Of all the stories to the morning star And all the stories to the morning earth.

Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts. I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards. Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in.

Up here, with June, the sycamore throws Across the window a whispering screen; I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose, Than anything else on this earth that is out in green. But I mean to go through the door without fear, Not caring much what happens here When I’m away:— How green the screen is across the panes Or who goes laughing along the lanes With my old lover all summer day.

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. Genesis 4:9–12

Cain tended to break rules and saving the introduction of a principal character for episode 3 was the most signifcant early decision. Previously associated with both Cain and Fr. K, Adah had been away on a busi- ness trip for three months, returning to find diplomatic relations between her country and its bellicose neighbor in tatters. Staff writer James Ingram recalls the atmosphere in the room when they realized that the letters b, i, t, c, h, d, i, t, t, o were left over after Fr. K’s feverish definitions. “We just started opening windows and whooping at the world,” he says. “It was character defining. This was Adah in her own words wresting control idiot with her Whatever I’ve I’m probably that.” Not unlike accident” of later (punctuation free-for-all), we that the writers signifcance of      a coincidence. charged with a hysterical joint the male leads, desires for Adah, name her with back from the first breath. worked on since proudest of the famous “B- season favorite is naturally a may reflect now overlooked the so terrifying The episode is sexual tension, chorus from their hopes and their need to many names, <Doorbell.>   Adah in Burberry, bathed in hall light. Adah, rosebud torturer, co-author of overset thermometers. Adah, outshining hydrogen trinketry. Soothe their wrathful orphanhood then come hither, nutrient. Heavyweight statuette. Handbook for esh data & VAT theft; the lighthouse den where redemption inducts honey. Brunette A.D.D., ol’ mouthwash. Adahhhh! Tetchy demon & conventional Frenchwoman. Death, wishbone, horse- shoe. “Ditto, bitch.” to take ownership of her in some way or in one very specific way. Indeed there is an unabashed eroticism to the episode, albeit entirely set in the corridor, which saw early accusations of gratuity. The show would grow accustomed to courting controversy in this way, occasionally falling foul of the Bechdel test (a scene cut from episode 12 featured Adah in conversation with herself about the two male leads for half an hour). Halberg remains impenitent. “Adah isn’t just the love interest — that’s exactly what we wanted to send up in this show. She’s supposed to be the rudder, the only one with a handle on the situation who might do something about it.Of course Cain and Father K just spend the whole time drooling and lusting after her: they’re imbeciles.”

It is generally believed that the writers had to make the most of a low budget and that this led to the grim determination of writing through restriction, bottle episodes, and constraints. In reality the show was generously bankrolled by Thud, but several costly set pieces had been planned which depleted the kitty. Nevertheless, episode 4, comprising solely an intimate kitchen dialogue between Fr. K and Adah, remains a fan favorite. “It was one of the last things we shot,” recalls Halberg. “Kitty [Beaulieu, who plays Adah], had really got into the role by then which was important as we wanted to imply years of previous talk between them. They mics and I got every line so most completely gives the scene personal you’re overhear- neighbors wall.” Adah find that in the she has been no longer has and privileges a cleric. To be be excessively alcohol which points out, for Father K’s within their probes further. to fob her off both had contact them to whisper that it was al- inaudible. It that indecently atmosphere, as if ing your own through the is dismayed to three months away, Father K the obligations to function as bibulous is to fond of drinking is, as Adah hardly unusual line of work culture. She Father K tries by talking about — Tell me again how you were defrocked. — Overnight. — That’s half. — Bibulously. — That’s hardly uncharacteristic. — Alright. There are things we don’t fathom: the “noumenon.” — That’s better. Humor me. — March 5th, The Hour of Botheration: the invertebrates trashed the transept, uprooted the     boutonniere ... This     vermivorous, backhanded ordination... — Wood! — Bonded, drowned hobo. — Oh, Eden! Oh, heeded ode! — And faith? —N- No, th- th... H- h- h- h- h- h- h- —You’re crying. Why? — It’s all that’s left. Kantian philosophy (the noumenon is a posited thing, object, or event which is known, if it is known at all, without the use of the senses), but it soon emerges that a violent overthrow of the church has taken place, the transept vandalized, Father K (and, we suppose, his ilk) booted out and replaced by patsies during The Hour of Botheration. Its having been titled shows that the recent event has already passed into myth — a further indication that there is no planned resistance. This augurs very ill, and the look on Adah’s face as Father K sobs in her lap really says it all. She realizes that she will have to act as leader, as cheerleader, as mother, as father to the household.