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Come darkest night, becoming sorrow best; Light; leave thy light; fitt for a lightsome soule; Darknes doth truly sure with mee oprest Whom absence power doth from mirthe controle: The very trees with hanging heads condole Sweet sommers parting, and of leaves distrest In dying coulers make a griefe-full role; Soe much (alas) to sorrow are they prest, Thus of dead leaves her farewell carpett’s made: Theyr fall, theyr branches, all theyr mournings prove; With leavles, naked bodies, whose huese vade From hopefull greene, to wither in theyr love, If trees, and leaves for absence, mourners bee Noe mervaile that I grieve, who like want see.

Love like a jugler, comes to play his prise, And all minds draw his wonders to admire, To see how cuningly hee, wanting eyes, Can yett deseave the best sight of desire: The wanton child, how hee can faine his fire So pretely, as none sees his disguise! How finely doe his tricks, while wee fooles hire The badge, and office of his tirannies, For in the end, such jugling hee doth make As hee our harts, in stead of eyes doth take For men can only by theyr slieghts abuse The sight with nimble, and delightful skill; Butt if hee play, his gaine is our lost will: Yett childlike, wee can nott his sports refuse.

When I beeheld the Image of my deere With greedy lookes mine eyes would that way bend, Fear, and desire did inwardly contend; Feare to bee mark’d, desire to drawe still neere, And in my soule a speritt wowld apeer, Which boldnes waranted, and did pretend To bee my genius, yett I durst nott lend My eyes in trust wher others seemed soe cleere, Then did I search from whence this danger ’rose, If such unworthynes in mee did rest As my sterv’d eyes must nott with sight bee blest; When jealousie her poyson did disclose; Yett in my hart unseense of jealous eye The truer Image shall in triumph lye.

Love leave to urge, thou know’st thou hast the hand; ’T’is cowardise, to strive wher none resist: Pray thee leave off, I yeeld unto thy band; Doe nott thus, still, in thine owne powre persist, Beehold I yeeld: lett forces bee dismist; I ame thy subject, conquer’d, bound to stand, Never thy foe, butt did thy claime assist Seeking thy due of those who did withstand; Butt now, itt seemes, thou would’st I should thee love; I doe confess, t’was thy will made mee chuse; And thy faire showes made mee a lover prove When I my freedome did, for paine refuse. Yett this Sir God, your boyship I dispise; Your charmes I obay, butt love nott want of eyes.

1 finger family father the most used mother obscene i lift her up married sister well fed brother no common stem 2 bunker show shoes touch and stand behind others place hands take them off come right in here is the cure learning how to hide from planes helicopters turning ships falling to the ground 4 drawing from the lamp hangs sister swings frightens mother in the pot dumplings drop blue is kitchen furniture the table we cannot reach even from the chair she leaps from the lamp 5 sunny and fence huge gate mother angry head father over him swollen crows black magpies and 2 humps her face furrowed grind and bars 6 party in a spotted costume dancing to the big butterfly his end part dribbles juice lady cleans up the slippery floor do the twist 35 world’s favorite the african story our group’s as well i will also tell them a story but they will shake their heads and my remained mates leave because i won’t fit neither here nor there i’m like the snails but not sticky and even stringy mostly herma-and-phrodite i did not decide yet hesitating the rainbow comes after the rain so i also come out i’m like the snail spine freely chosen to imprint myself or someone else but i’m also hosting i don’t think i’m stringy and my trace is discrete the rainbow comes after the rain i also come out 43 black marked brush staining kit in sandpit unstriped monkey wet the sand and lie down cut shiny skin Translated from the Hungarian

Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the wasted, lying times. The age is a despot with two sleepy apples to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth. When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb arm of his son, who’s already senile. I know the breath growing weaker by the day Not long not till the simple song of the wrongs of earth is cut off, and a tin seal put on the lips. O life of earth! O dying age! I’m afraid no one will understand you but the man with the helpless smile of one who has lost himself. O the pain of peeling back the raw eyelids to look for a lost word, and with lime slaking in the veins, to hunt for night herbs for a tribe of strangers! The age. In the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime is hardening. Moscow’s sleeping like a wooden coffin. There’s no escaping the tyrant century. After all these years the snow still smells of apples. I want to run away from my own doorstep, but where? Out in the street it’s dark, and my conscience glitters ahead of me like salt strewn on the pavement. Somehow I’ve got myself set for a short journey through the back lanes, past thatched eaves, starling houses, an everyday passer-by, in a flimsy coat, forever trying to button the lap-robe. Street after street flashes past, the frozen runners crunch like apples ; can’t get the button through the button-hole, it keeps slipping out of my fingers. The winter night thunders like iron hardware through the Moscow streets. Knocks like a frozen fish, or billows in steam, flashing like a carp in a rosy tea-room. Moscow is Moscow again. I say hello to her. ‘Don’t be stern with me; never mind. I still respect the brotherhood of the deep frost, and the pike’s justice.’ The pharmacy’s raspberry globe shines onto the snow. Somewhere an Underwood typewriter’s rattled. The sleigh-driver’s back, the snow knee-deep, what more do you want? They won't touch you, won’t kill you. Beautiful winter, and the goat sky has crumbled into stars and is burning with milk. And the lap-robe flaps and rings like horse-hair against the frozen runners. And the lanes smoked like kerosene stoves, swallowed snow, raspberry, ice, endlessly peeling, like a Soviet sonatina, recalling nineteen-twenty. The frost is smelling of apples again. Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers the great vow to the Fourth Estate and oaths solemn enough for tears? Who else will you kill? Who else will you worship? What other lie will you dream up? There’s the Underwood’s cartilage. Hurry, rip out a key, you’ll find a little bone of a pike. And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter. But the simple sonatina of typewriters is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.

Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

chapter viii Tired    I walk toward everything except fear over seaweed-covered rocks I think that someday some new women will be allowed to see each other happy happy more than usual I looked in all the other open rooms of my heart A vague fear obscured the whole scene into a diorama of ruin As sharp as a sword-cut    the light struck    a half-reclining cloud Time and distance trembled in my body • To become in love with everything apropos of nothing To see without seeming to stare To change in the reflection To appear peculiar • We never refer to sadness as something that looks like secrecy but it does • I drifted on the fresh breeze I did not like it Joy     joy     joy although not joy    a bad thing I can feel it wet against my bosom My journey is mapped and ready I am only taking one dress • I don’t want to talk     of infinitesimal distinctions between man and man     see no difference     between men and maidens I am the modern Morpheus I made the minutes disappear I am thin an errant swarm of bees a naked lunatic faithful selfish old a tiger immensely strong a wild beast a paroxysm of rage mercy murder coming coming coming chapter xiv After a bad night I lock myself in my room and read I had only imagination I remember how on our wedding day    he said I shall never let trouble or nervousness concern you    you can trust me I must not forgive    I cannot I know the real truth now My imagination tinges everything with ill adventure I suppose a cry clears the air    as other rain does • I have a good memory for details it is not always so with young ladies    or so it had been said to me I cannot comprehend this husband Women all their lives are interrupted    considered hysterical summoned to make children for the strong and manly and for his sake must smile and not speak Now this man I began to think a weak fool I had trusted him    my husband even half believed his words when he said I would have an ordinary life    without dread • Let me tell you from experience of men his brain and heart are terrible things This man    impotent in the dark He succeeded in getting me to doubt everything took a hue of unreality I did not trust even my own senses You don’t know what it is to doubt everything    even yourself I am a wife he fashioned by his own hand to be sweet and earnest and so kind • An idea struck me Following great loss     people see things that others cannot Men want to explain explain explain see themselves new    pretend to be young Ladies’ bodies are deemed unholy by the very men who burn them Generations of men believe that women walk amongst them without knowledge My thesis is this I want to believe    to believe to believe in a universe    willing to understand chapter xxi A detail in a pool of blood the body gathered in an awkward kink I dress myself  in easy anything • I softened into a swollen confusion only slightly solid    I was shining He beckoned His hands    a dark mass like a thousand rats A cloud closed over my eyes I moistened myself with brandy I held tight to life I became like water • Kneeling on the edge of the bed    his face was turned his left hand    held both arms    his right gripped my neck    blood    a thin stream of it    his nostrils quivered • I lay in disarray my eyes    and from them came    an endless moment Cold moonshine dazed me    I began to pull on clothes I drew back    unclean Shame folded me like steel    tried to twist me in obedience I could not feel the rise of reddening dawn Silence    the sound of  what happened • I want you to know all this understand    how much I need to show you It was he who caused me to disappear My husband    my husband and other men hunt me and command    my flesh my blood my brain This is my pollution story • The eastern sky became clear as the awful narrative deepened in the morning light when the first red streak shot up my flesh

14 In the Wake Riding north on the bus after hours in cars or in the air or airports or bus stations, I felt almost happy for a moment as the tires hissed over the wet highway, I was both in the rain and protected from it, distracted from grief by the sensual pressure of the instant, water beading on the glass, the darkening hills. But how glad I was to be riding north! Sunoco on one side, Mobil on the other. His best friend was from Mobile. I always wanted to go there. He died too soon, or I left home, I can’t remember. Two days ago my stepfather’s body was laid to rest. Comatose, sucking air through a respirator, I can’t say he was resting; I saw him underground when I closed my eyes at night and went to bury the clock under mounds of towels and pillows—I had not heard it ticking so ferociously while he lived—and it would not quiet down. And the rain tonight, it’s not like any other, and I wish the bus would go faster. I saw the rain in the heavy hanging clouds. That’s a lie. Immense factories blackening under a charcoal sky— and rivers whose names I’ll never remember. I saw a sign reflected in my window: Milwaukee Light. * Whenever the Chicago White Sox beat the Braves it made his day. The Braves were in Milwaukee then, with lefty Warren Spahn and slugger Hank Aaron. The bus company is Peter Pan, and the Peter Pan coffee shop was our first stop in Chicago when we drove in; and that’s where I was when, though I didn’t know it then, he married my mother in Bermuda— watching Peter Pan in New York with my “real” father… And oh those prophetic lines, not to grow up, never to go to school. Never then to die! Only the living are immortal. Like these rain clouds. * The fact of death—a silence attends it; an absence with which we’re all He was the lightest sleeper I’d ever known; he’d open one eye if I merely peeked into his room. intimate. He’s there when I close my eyes but not when I reach out in the dark. At his bedside I peeled back his eyelids, rubbed his blue feet, his bloated hands, almost screamed in his ear, wake up, man, I’ll be lonely without you, I’ll be ANGRY if you don’t wake up; and in the silence of our nearness to death— the grinding hum of the generators working at their limit for too long to pump cool air in the killing heat; the glug of him swallowing through the respirator. * AT THE BUS STATION IN SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS The lateness of the bus angers a tough young woman from Montana travelling with her toddler son. And yet she knows the way: I can see it in her green peaked cap, her direct taut anger—bus late, I kill the driver—boy knock over suitcase—I kill him too. * BUS BOARDED The water bubbles on the windows break; there is less and less outside to see… And he was not even my real father. That should put a cap on it. It’s like knowing the name of the lake you pass never seeing it again and yet finding it tough to forget, that jagged square of black water just off the highway— that lake, and not another. * Baudelaire boasted that he laughed at funerals and wept at feasts. Now in the bus it’s only early evening; I turn around and everyone’s sleeping— mother and son, matron and magician. Half-awake, I stare at the tree line, and the blessing of rain, and I would like to lie down on the roadside and drink and drink and roll in the mud. * Mortifying, one’s presence in the face of nature’s sanguine gaze, green whitewashing the past. Whatever grooms the body for the afterlife pitches in this life like a tent in a night encampment before the dawn storming of the fortress. The yellow day lilies wag their heads at the first touch of wind and I see what others have always seen in flowers, a sign marked TRANSIENTS that keeps them awake; see now, as, standing catatonic at the kitchen sink, the overhead fluorescent light strip sinks into the pitch dark bottom of a coffee mug. Seeing is native to us and yet we stupefy our native sight. Not the eye’s sight. * Some mourners hurl dirt stiffly on the coffin because it seems the right thing to do. Some hold back. The flag-draped casket honors the first Army chaplain in the Pacific Theater, for praying good prayers above the bodies of the dead and of the living. Prelude to an Afterword Why should I feel compelled to write a thousand postscripts when I don’t work from life, but to hear the testimonials of people who knew the rider, the “little Rabbi,” moves me to tears while I am here to attend my mother who lies in bed with her stomach reaching toward the sky—(where Sam talks calmly to his “grandpa in heaven,” matter-of-fact celestial discourse)— and I listen to this Baptist preacher and hospice worker as he crouches beside my chair in her hospital room talk about his work with mourning; how difficult it is to get people to understand the element of surprise-over-time…; how he kissed the little Rabbi the first time he met him and the last time he saw him before “death took him so swiftly” there were no “last words” and he was enveloped in silence, in absence—“the way death often comes...” I see him more clearly through this stranger’s eyes. I wouldn’t have thought that he could help confirm my sense of what is real, but this man who knew him less than two years feels so indebted that I allow myself to think of the rider’s life in terms of the people he affected, the bizarre love he could elicit—not standard preacherly fare by any means but some connection by being entirely present for others— promiscuously present— meanwhile, as the nurses haul my mother from wheelchair to bed why do I feel impelled to turn away… (we think we have the answers) … and flash to an image of my friend caring for her father—bathing him?—but she didn’t come out of his penis, did she? or is that another wrong turning in my thought? The hospice preacher offers a prayer. He holds my mother’s swollen, psoriatic hand, the arthritic clumps poling from her fingers, and as the dry, flaky patches blaze in the unforgiving light, I find not a word to object to—except two— “religion” and “churches.” I tell him that I left home as soon as I could because I couldn’t stand being around the two of them; he admits he always felt sick “for hours afterward” when he’d been with them together; it wasn’t just quarreling, I have to add, seeking absolution for my absence, but hatred (can’t let my mother milk the bereaved widow role). He nods— matter-of-factly. And sets me free.

4 But you had the sense that he was always competing with your father for your affection. Not only my father. He didn’t understand my need to develop ties in these new worlds. He tried to legislate over my feelings. He was subject to extraordinarily inappropriate fits of jealousy. How are you the judge of that? Many small incidents. Such as… * The boy’s name was Warren. He was an orphan. As we pulled into the weed lot of the camp in the uncertain March air and patented silence, I could see him peeking down at us from a second story dormer window, like someone who had been dreaming of escape from the run-down resort: torn up turf; dirt basketball court, net hanging for its life by one thin strand of rope; horseshoes, shuffle board; musty, mildewed cabins with wet bedding; the stars pressing too hard against our faces in the catastrophic silence of the nights… I’d never been left so happily alone, alone, that is, in Warren’s wonderful company. His talk mimicked the cadence of the stones he kicked. Warren showed me the mica glow in the arrowheads and quartz-tipped spears he'd unearthed. Warren's cigar box overflowed with other people's souvenirs, miniature monuments, key chains, lighters, and initialed items like cuff links and bracelets. He scoured the corners of the rooms of the departed while his “mother,” slip of the tongue there, vacuumed. “People always leave something behind,” he said. I knew what he meant: taking their clothes on and off so many times something had to go. I wanted an initial bracelet even with someone else’s initials. The kids at summer camp in the Poconos all had initialed bracelets, except for me, but who among them had been west of the Mississippi? Warren wanted a home. I didn’t know what I wanted. I asked to bring Warren home and give him a home. “That’s ridiculous, he has a home here. Besides, you only just met.” My mother lamented his stick-thin, soot-blackened frame, the smell he gave off and his yellow teeth, his urchin eating with his hands, his short and choppy hair, his blousy shirt and baggy fatigues that gave him a bulk, a volume, he didn’t otherwise possess. What about his fits of giddy delight? As the days passed I forgot myself. I became more and more like Warren. I would brook no insults about my brother. It would no longer be me, but me and Warren. I’d share my meals with Warren, and my desk at school. Warren could stay and I would just—slip away. Next to Warren, I felt like I was on a clipper ship lifted out of the water by the powerful wind-breath of my two distant coastal families; my warring mother and “blood” father, her lovely companionable family in Los Angeles and Manhattan; his friendly, compliant relations in Manhattan and Bensonhurst… I dreamt both families were jammed on the deck of the ship, waving, gesticulating, shouting, and that I clung to a raft’s rope as a great wave flung me back and back, but the truth was I wasn’t sure I wanted to be near. I wanted to fly apart—in the nowhere—. When our two-door Chrysler Windsor edged off the gravel onto the highway I thrust my head right where the plush fabric of the front seat parted like the Red Sea, and said to my new dad. “You know what. I love Warren more than I love you.” “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “He’s just a little putz,and I can get rid of him with a snap of my fingers. Presto. See. Now—where is he?” The seat beside me was empty. I was empty. And my heart pounded in wild longing for its fullness lost. I should have kept my mouth shut but I thought my heart would burst with that secret locked in it: why doesn’t he understand? It wasn’t that I loved him less than I had but that I loved Warren more. He had the same reaction several years later, in Chicago, when I announced my love for Carol, a round-faced, soft spoken blond girl I’d brought home to play with my electric trains and drink hot chocolate one brutal winter afternoon. I loved her and I kissed her in the elevator on the way up. I wanted him to say:I’m so happy for you, let’s put on some 45’s and dance. He said, “You don't know what love is.” And for the first time slapped me in the face. I wrote my “blood” father of my love and he wrote back he was glad I was “making friends out there.” Why didn’t these men understand, I know what words mean, by love I meant love, however transitory. One word, two fathers, two red stone faces, unblinking, dismayed.