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Dropouts Mace had the kind of courage you could easily mistake for brawn. I don’t know why I call it courage. Sure, he stood up to greasers. And didn’t visibly fret on the days when his report card made hard fact of what was already apparent from his absences. Yet Mace was gifted with an uninflected quickness, a fine intelligence of his own despair, a knowledge— as he gunned the engine of his once white ’58 Chevy, with a four-on-the-floor he’d installed himself, to climb higher into the hills above the city— of where nowhere was… Light shadow cutting brusquely across the canyons— * Like everyone else in our class, Mace was a year older than me. He had stubble on his chin. I dragged a razor up and down my cheeks to inspire fast, early growth. “Don’t shave your jowls,” friends warned, knowing I overdid everything, “or you’ll grow hair there later.” Later was a word I disdained, its insistence on the future tense, postponement— life on the back burner. * Mace seemed incapable of worry. His coolness and insouciance made girls stare. He was always brushing back the shock of raven- black hair that fell over his right eyebrow. The same teacher who sent me lickety split to the principal’s office would lean over Mace’s desk and whisper warmly, compassionately in his ear. They would nod together. I could fill in every blank. “What’s the matter Richard?” “Nothing.” “If you’re having trouble,” this is where the whispering grew most intense, “I want you to feel you can talk to me as a friend. Your work in class is so good, you have so much ability, Richard…” Mace would never protest, never defend himself. Indignation was a country where he’d never been. “You may hate me,” I thought, praying she would not double the insult of the absence of her concern for me with a glance in my direction, “but deep down Mace and I are the same.” * Mace and I were running into the same problem at the same time. Mathematical wizards that we were we couldn’t solve advanced algebraic equations in our head; we were vexed by an added integer. We had gotten this far without lifting a pencil. History was being sold to us as a dead language of fixed events and we wouldn’t buy. What is a fact, I wondered, and I could see the same question wrinkling Mace’s brow. * Mace’s problems weren’t academic. His disgust thrummed like telephone wires in the wind, even his saturnine presence was deceptive, like his beat-up Chevy with its secret store of power concealed under the hood. Mace too began the year in the front row, placed there on the strength of pure ability. He sank slowly, buoyed as I was, by the one assigned book we read,Great Expectations. Mace attended to his tasks in the classroom. I dreamt of escape via the window’s easy access. There were unknown roads to be driven, gulleys to be plumbed; girls: a world of lovely distractions. * For all the years I lived in Salt Lake City I can’t remember seeing a single bird. I felt watched in Salt Lake City ever since that first day when the old geezer stepped out of the shadows, on a street vast and empty and without verticals, to reprimand my Double- mint gum wrapper for lighting in the gutter. But only around the time of Hitchcock’s The Birds did I start to withdraw from sight. I was keen to see The Birds the Wednesday afternoon it opened and I wanted the other—“good”—“Mark R.,” the irreproachable blond Mormon angel everyone loved, to join us. Our growling engine brought his mother to the porch. The sun glared on her helmet of curlers. Mark had “homework and chores,” she said, he “can’t come down.” But he had already descended. And stood framed in the doorway. I couldn’t get accustomed to the light in the trampled meadows around his house, the glow of dandelions, thistles, weeds. Mark’s red cheeks reeked of aspiration and I could read his thoughts:why couldn’t I wait until night? Why was I dragging myself down? Why skip history and rifle assembly? The movie would wait. But I would not. I was keen, and, seeking a purging terror to cleanse me of my dread, I sat alone with Mace in the vast empty theater alive to each click and flicker in the projection room, and the radiant impalpable dust caught in the unstinting beam; released from the limits of our world until the screeching stopped and, looked at askance by strangers, we stepped into an iron dark which held no trace of the light we’d left. * I forked over whatever change I had to fuel each day’s free-wheeling splendor. One morning, knowing Mace was down to smoking butts, I brought a pack of my mother’s Kents as an offering. Mace scorned them. He only smoked Marlboros. Yet later, desperate and broke in the maze of roads through the hills overlooking the city, he broke off the filters and smoked in silence. I was used to doing the talking for the two of us but this was different. He pulled up besides a long driveway. A vaulted roof jutted above columns of tall firs. This was where he lived. He’d be “a sec”—he had “some smokes” stashed in a drawer. I followed him past the plaster jockey and the massy trees toward an opulent, utterly contemporary house, fronted by oak door and gold bell-knocker, angular, white, high-ceilinged, skylit… Our apartment could have fit into the living room… Now I understood: Mace lived in the clouds. Though I couldn’t see beyond the back yard through the landscaping I knew what the view must be like: that was the reason to live there; for the nights, when the city, innocent as it was, still blazed through its grid of interlocking lights. * On May Day, Mace and I, long ago tossed out of R.O.T.C. for “insubordination,” but required to attend the final show-of-arms sat together in the bleachers, in splendid isolation, and watched as the rule-followers—led by the many-striped, other Mark R.— in their woolen khaki uniforms, shouldering their M 1 rifles, dropped like flies in the insuperable heat.

And yesterday something shattering happened. Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming a favorite word) weeks ago I came across Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept: there he was in the very image of my stepfather; the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic, the same skinny legs, the same misguided attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s watching?), the same abstractedness, the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not at the landscape flashing past with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one tug the countryside would vanish, or listening to the tick of the rails, but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities, white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ; no: looking both beyond and through physical space into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows? It’s his glimpse into another world. * My mother’s father hunted and rode. My father rode and fished. My stepfather never budged from his Barca Lounger once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life and a social life and no physical life. But he liked it that I was always outside: maybe that’s why he never got on my back about grades; he might have thought that this boy has to be outside at this time in his life. Maybe it’s more important that he roam the canyons and the hills that he know the streets that he come home covered with leaves and bark and mud, than that he sit there like a good young scholar like I was, a Rabbi at twenty giving money home to my parents in their cabbagy tenement in the Bronx. This is a boy who needs space. One time— I think I had my learner's permit— he rented a Mustang convertible in L.A. and for several days I drove around past the long rows of used car lots and the bruised facades of restaurants digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced arthritic aunt in the shadows of her goldenrod colored ranch house, limping like Ruffian after her last run in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes. * But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep. It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker seeking comfort on a train, and Rembrandt’s taut youth setting off into the rampant amber on horseback; it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed with the image of sedentary contemplation— though no one travels on horseback now and heroism has become attending AIDS patients or sheltering the homeless. The raw youth’s feet are planted lightly yet firmly in his stirrups. His coat glows with many colors. Not so The Jewish Rider. And yet—there's something more. * Michael Hoffman writes that New York is not what it was when I was too young to have marked the existence of The Blue Note, but I can pick up this trail by walking across the park to the Frick. And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959 (they don’t allow children under sixteen) in black skin tight pants, black sweater, (the female uniform of our generation whose male version substitutes black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket— though who knows what decorous garments she’d checked in the cloakroom), and white boots with plenty of Elizabethan ruff at the edges, pausing to look at The Polish Rider while I scribbled notes. Her white boots stood out against the dominant dark like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers. And that was good because the light in the painting is brief whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset, and the rider’s gaze, looking out over unknown space, is inward. I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases where clouds roll over harbors against the whiteness of sails or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms, then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength… (Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve to call his painting Woman With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto? Why an allegorical title when the bare flesh and bones and sinew would have done?) He spends his life looking not at far off hills or citadels or the lights in the village below: he has no choice but to fix on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple. I can’t figure out what landscape he might be facing in the painted world. The clatter of rocks and hooves echoes over the stony plain. * I was no rider, but a pretend horse and rider always rode beside my train window—at a canter no matter how fast the rails clicked by— and though he wore a bandana and leaned slightly forward in the saddle to pull himself aboard, his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent, was like the Polish Rider’s. Even as an only child I was never lonely. My mother's father rode until he was old and on a narrow pass his horse jammed him up against rockface. In his narrative of his life this collision marked the ruin of his hip the rise of his cataracts. My father rode “every morning before work.” I never witnessed that, but at a ranch in upper New York State while I bloodied my hands tugging the reins of a frothing giant who would not budge from a weedpatch, I watched him disappear in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs as he galloped over a far off hill: more at ease in the saddle—in the air— than I’d ever seen him in civilian life. My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride. Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride! * That’s the stuff of events. What about the signature inscribed by the sun, the dark clouds sinister in just being there; thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below, candles lit in the deep interiors, bread, wine, the plate making its way around the table; what about— leaping centuries ahead— the energy from generators blazing like auras through the clouds the scattered lights, the rotating tops of ambulances; the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese making the rounds, apple sauce passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate, children eating, heads down, in silence, communicating through eye movements, the mother wiping her lips, the father grinning stupidly and drooling; the television quacking in the background, the perfect suburban night unfolding in bedroom and drive-in and den, the sprinkler system ticking. The snipers in the tower—. This is what the riders, guests everywhere and nowhere, say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter as night comes down. And last night, driving to Connecticut, I understood that the Polish Rider gleans the permutations of light after dusk, that its olive-gray smudges reflect the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong about the Polish Rider all along: he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?) in the night, because, as the faint light rimming the edges of the sky makes clear, night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious. The rider lives in order to depart. The Woman Who Rode She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house. Bare trees, frost, the whole bit. I wanted our lives to be like that: as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting. She came to me in her stride. Dropped her crop on the chair. Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled under the covers. Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.” I felt like an accessory. The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled onto her, no longer caring if she was using me. As the new year wore on and black ice made riding a fast track to certain death or paralysis, she grew tense. Came to me now with clinical terms, “schi” words I worked hard to break down. The good news was she was not a true “split personality”—the glitch that “she was divorced from herself, and could not love or care.” * The light in her house was like the light before dawn. On the last of my rare visits her mother jarred preserves while we watched instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die. Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter; or taking precautions I would not overhear what words were ricocheting on his “hot line” to the patent office. * Any objective observer standing back from the distraction of the impinging present could see that her torment overleapt any visible signs and that she was— as a WASP “rider”—the wrong person for the place she was in. Her resilience could not be in question. She lived to stray from known paths to leap stone fences and break into open fields. When her horse went down in an Irish bog and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek— the next day she up and mounted him again. * When she came to me in the dream last night her smile had loosened. How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse. How well it lit up the colors of her hair.

Mortal oddment, there’s no wish in the blood But beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demands To keep within veins this ore’s diffuse gold, These voices that know without being known — These voices that riddle thought with herself, Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternal Gowns a child can tear in half   with a breath — That chorus arterial, unbribable, Blowing song through self as a child blows A dandelion apart — All those weeds? — Thistle’s down and thistle’s thorn, dumb yellow Globes below that bind grass to their hollow creed, Wind’s meager flute, sere song, the whole field’s late Doom? Heart-blood? Voices, you? That’s my portrait? — I kept repeating, repeating, kept re — To repair, to repair my, or not my —the Mind’s bower, but whose — who mines urgency — Or whose mind regrets all those violets rooted In violence — or I only mean thought, in thought, Not violence, thinking, and the stupid leaf Unfolding, mine, mine, mind. Here’s the plot All untended: Psyche and, and — some thief Unnamed — no, some unnamed leaf, and the sun, Yes, only the sun that through open eyes Turns the livid leaf green. Not leaf. Meant wound — Or is it wind, is it wind that split in half   by A gnat, by a blade of grass, always heals its gale — What is the wound that is being healed, healed —

They weighed the human soul — twenty-one grams — a tremor on the air becoming trance, becoming nimbus. No. It is a deadweight, a plummet, drawing down to its harbor beside the heart. It is Breath and Word, they said. No. It is pig-iron and salt. The dying feel its slow lift as riddance, a bar of darkness hoisting against the light. Something shifted under his skin, it puckered, as might a worm going slither-and-tuck close to the nape of his neck, then up past the cheekbone and onto the sill of his eye to gorge on the image trapped there, the last of her, the last lost thing before the sky grew dark and all the windows closed. The dead are given permission to walk among us. They smile dead smiles, they have no need for speech. The familiar goes for nothing. Each evening they hold up to our windows their silent, smiling children. Salt flats of dream of memory of dream ... limitless horizons and out on the utmost rim (can you see?) a house white-on-white abstract except for the room-within-a-room which can’t be seen but can be known, white being one thing in sunlight another under moonlight, not oblivion, not revival, and the soul’s song across that windless landscape, unheard; by night the heart-stopped silence, by day the rising glare. Graves under bramble and a wet light through the trees. A quietness something like stealth or sudden absence; it seemed to gather and disperse. Rat-run, ground for stray dogs, a place where lovers come to be swallowed whole by half-light. You could lie down here on thorn, on stone, and find your match. Wind-driven salt in the crevice of the rock is how memory works: image, invention, regret. It maddens with its ersatz colors, unknowable language, sudden reversals, shoreline, skyline, cityscape, landscape ... There are those who wake with the whole thing fixed at the forefront of their minds: a stage-set, people held in a frozen moment who will break to action soon, one fearful, one laughing, one clawing at her eyes. He was wearing a dead man’s coat: knee-length, snug, the lining rich shot silk in midnight blue. “As I thought,” she said, “a perfect fit. Of course, you look nothing like him, nor do you have that rangy, loose-limbed stride or straightness of back.” One side-pocket was sewn up, in the other, a letter. He threw it away as he left. Music at every turn, music by accident, a voice between the phrases, between the notes, calling, calling, and this not song but touchstone, blind bargain, last chance. Dust-devil, derecho, twister, cyclone, clean sweep, she is locked-off in this and the place is dark the way a pebble is dark at its center ... then her prophecy-in-song, eyes wide open in sleep, his hand across her mouth. What they did to him was unwatchable; what they did lay far beyond belief — daytime terrors, waking dreamtime, the lock-up, breeze-block walls, chain-drag, the Black & Decker kicking in: winged creatures, they sing as they work. Dust and shadow, come back to that, come back with a heavy heart. Is there nothing more: is that what you heard yourself say? Children in the garden, the headlong rush, the wolf pack between trees and snowfall under moonlight: the story you told is the story you were told: snow and a frost-moon, as clear, as pitiless. He untangled the thing that had snagged in her hair, his hand through a spectrum, spectral, blurring, a rail of fingers, to lift the thing in her hair. It would rain that day: cloud low to the hills, morning as nightfall, her window open to that. Slow sacrament of cheese and olive oil and bread, the creep of sundown-sunlight on the wall. “How safe do you feel at times like this?” Laughing, he bared his teeth. A thing flew in at the open window, bird or bat. “It’s like looking at clear water through clouded glass.” They were far off from anywhere. A salted seam, just fool’s gold, leavings of a dream wherein you give a true report of who you were, of what you could become. In rainfall you’re invisible, in sunlight the same, that’s all the dream gives up: a sense of place and sudden banishment.

There was terror already in her love even before she knew for sure her lover was the god. Her forehead skidded a little on the sweat of his chest and close to his ear Semele begged again for proof. And it didn’t feel like a myth or a metaphor to her as she burned up with the brightness she saw.

paint over the dead end sign are police writers? yes they are writing into books our little cherub of misunderstanding a thinking to push us back into body of the whole love yourself more next time their reports read stones sink as they please everything expands at the very end a lit cigarette into our dark hello

this is exactly the kind of space I want to follow you into holding your little mute worm on a twig make it marble make it touch like tough winter in the next life we will have longer love better places with extended embraces now we leave the song to return to the front leaf closing on closeness of mothers in the next world overseeing premium waste of the planet reincarnate anywhere but here land on a different rim

I. Ille Ego Oh! list to me: for I’m about To catch the fire of Chaucer, And spin in doleful measure out The tale of Johnny Raw, sir; Who, bent upon a desperate plan To make the people stare, Set off full speed for Hindoostan Upon Old Poulter’s mare. Tramp! tramp! across the land he went; Splash! splash! across the sea; And then he gave his bragging vent— “Pray who can ride like me? “For I’m the man, who sallied forth To rout the classic forces, And swore this mare was far more worth Than both fierce Hector’s horses. “Old Homer from his throne I struck, To Virgil gave a punch, And in the place of both I stuck The doughty Mother Bunch, “To France I galloped on my roan, Whose mettle nought can quail; There squatted on the tomb of Joan, And piped a dismal tale. “A wild and wondrous stave I sung, To make my hearers weep: But when I looked, and held my tongue, I found them fast asleep! “Oh! then, a furious oath I swore, Some dire revenge to seek; And conjured up, to make them roar, Stout Taffy and his leek. “To Heaven and Hell I rode away, In spite of wind and weather: Trumped up a diabolic lay; And cursed them all together. “Now, Proteus! rise, thou changeful seer! To spirit up my mare: In every shape but those appear, Which Taste and Nature wear.”

We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of their terror as they plunge across vast, glowing glacial faces. All of this takes place alongside an abstractly relentless gunmetal sea. I can feel you turn to me, wetness marking the corners of your lips and eyes. I, too, am mesmerized, my vision limited to a sense of motion on the peripheries. Later, I am summoned for an impromptu scan and, miraculously, I pass.

You are smaller than I remember And so is the house, set downhill Afloat in a sea of scrub oak. From up here It’s an ordinary box with gravel Spread over its lid, weighting it, but Inside it’s full of shadows and sky. Clouds pull themselves over dry Grass, which, if  I’m not mistaken, will erupt Any minute in flame. Only A spark, a sunbeam focused. From up Here, enjoying the view, I can finally Take you in. Will you wave back? I keep Slingshotting around. There’s gravity For you, but all I ever wanted was to fly.