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I remember that store, and the nasty redneck whose stink seemed a challenge to everyone in it. The scene is decades old, but I'm still confused that no one took up the challenge—including me, though I liked an occasional fight back then. The prospect of pain meant less to me once, I guess. An aneurism had just killed my brother, so the pain I'm talking about was my body's. I breathed up another pain that day. I checked the man's beat pickup; why would he want them, those skunks knee-deep in its bed? I left the lot still more confused, my sweet retriever shivering on the seat beside me. The godawful smell still clung to the dog's wet coat, and my own. There'd be no more hikes for us that morning: rain had arrived, bone-chilling. If you killed a skunk, why would you keep the thing? To kill some time, I stopped at The Jackpot View. We've always called it that. Five mountaintops bled into mists to my east in New Hampshire. The sudden squalls spilled leaves on the woods-floor's pall of nondescript hue. Now he was dead. Now my brother was dead. I can't define any God, but only this morning, I caught a whiff of road-killed skunk and thought I could speak of Him or Her or It as surely as I could tell you the slightest thing concerning the man I'm remembering now, the one who shot or trapped or clubbed those miserable reeking creatures. The smallest enigmas we ever encounter remain as hard to explain as all the epical ones. I've failed for years to fathom the death of my brother; but it's just as hard to understand why a scene in an old Vermont store should linger like dead-skunk odor, which if you've lately been tainted comes back to scent you whenever a rain blows in—or like some pains you may have thought you'd forever gotten over, but which at some odd prompting come back to haunt you.

Food in the underworld, the Death King In his seedy, green nightgown Holding up flowers. The warden of the underworld In her plastic, pink Wheelchair Serving silver trays of Shit and death and black Gelatinous. Birth, the music Reminds me and Will not stop When I turn it off, A warped music box Trapped inside. I repeat what I cannot bear: Chronic repetition. This poem is its own Language. It marks the mind Like a missing memory Marks the body. Then it Changes, makes it invisible. Back form the edge of what Becomes.

“A skeleton’s mouth makes few concessions to prettiness.” —Jacques Joubert Because your mouth is violet and you cannot speak Because maybe I like Thursdays the way I used to hate baths, and baths are boundaries whose sharpness will be blurred with more information Because movement itself is a form of currency Frozen in articulations Because don’t indulge yourself in the idea of restraint The blackened patches could have been pubic hair on dead bodies, or simply the wildness of neglect without horizons or spaces Because it’s a comfort to know waste is the fuel of contradictions a knife rusted before its first use Because in the barest of rooms, nothing is comprehensible Neither fanatic nor mystic Because the first weeks of September came and went and the weather held Not woven by innocent hands Because this stasis is preparation Because you’re deceased, maimed or in Philadelphia

They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, — Oh, they were blind, too blind to see Your faults had made me love you more.

Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant. Lean back, and get some minutes' peace; Let your head lean Back to the shoulder with its fleece Of locks, Faustine. The shapely silver shoulder stoops, Weighed over clean With state of splendid hair that droops Each side, Faustine. Let me go over your good gifts That crown you queen; A queen whose kingdom ebbs and shifts Each week, Faustine. Bright heavy brows well gathered up: White gloss and sheen; Carved lips that make my lips a cup To drink, Faustine, Wine and rank poison, milk and blood, Being mixed therein Since first the devil threw dice with God For you, Faustine. Your naked new-born soul, their stake, Stood blind between; God said "let him that wins her take And keep Faustine." But this time Satan throve, no doubt; Long since, I ween, God's part in you was battered out; Long since, Faustine. The die rang sideways as it fell, Rang cracked and thin, Like a man's laughter heard in hell Far down, Faustine, A shadow of laughter like a sigh, Dead sorrow's kin; So rang, thrown down, the devil's die That won Faustine. A suckling of his breed you were, One hard to wean; But God, who lost you, left you fair, We see, Faustine. You have the face that suits a woman For her soul's screen — The sort of beauty that's called human In hell, Faustine. You could do all things but be good Or chaste of mien; And that you would not if you could, We know, Faustine. Even he who cast seven devils out Of Magdalene Could hardly do as much, I doubt, For you, Faustine. Did Satan make you to spite God? Or did God mean To scourge with scorpions for a rod Our sins, Faustine? I know what queen at first you were, As though I had seen Red gold and black imperious hair Twice crown Faustine. As if your fed sarcophagus Spared flesh and skin, You come back face to face with us, The same Faustine. She loved the games men played with death, Where death must win; As though the slain man's blood and breath Revived Faustine. Nets caught the pike, pikes tore the net; Lithe limbs and lean From drained-out pores dripped thick red sweat To soothe Faustine. She drank the steaming drift and dust Blown off the scene; Blood could not ease the bitter lust That galled Faustine. All round the foul fat furrows reeked, Where blood sank in; The circus splashed and seethed and shrieked All round Faustine. But these are gone now: years entomb The dust and din; Yea, even the bath's fierce reek and fume That slew Faustine. Was life worth living then? and now Is life worth sin? Where are the imperial years? and how Are you Faustine? Your soul forgot her joys, forgot Her times of teen; Yea, this life likewise will you not Forget, Faustine? For in the time we know not of Did fate begin Weaving the web of days that wove Your doom, Faustine. The threads were wet with wine, and all Were smooth to spin; They wove you like a Bacchanal, The first Faustine. And Bacchus cast your mates and you Wild grapes to glean; Your flower-like lips were dashed with dew From his, Faustine. Your drenched loose hands were stretched to hold The vine's wet green, Long ere they coined in Roman gold Your face, Faustine. Then after change of soaring feather And winnowing fin, You woke in weeks of feverish weather, A new Faustine. A star upon your birthday burned, Whose fierce serene Red pulseless planet never yearned In heaven, Faustine. Stray breaths of Sapphic song that blew Through Mitylene Shook the fierce quivering blood in you By night, Faustine. The shameless nameless love that makes Hell's iron gin Shut on you like a trap that breaks The soul, Faustine. And when your veins were void and dead, What ghosts unclean Swarmed round the straitened barren bed That hid Faustine? What sterile growths of sexless root Or epicene? What flower of kisses without fruit Of love, Faustine? What adders came to shed their coats? What coiled obscene Small serpents with soft stretching throats Caressed Faustine? But the time came of famished hours, Maimed loves and mean, This ghastly thin-faced time of ours, To spoil Faustine. You seem a thing that hinges hold, A love-machine With clockwork joints of supple gold — No more, Faustine. Not godless, for you serve one God, The Lampsacene, Who metes the gardens with his rod; Your lord, Faustine. If one should love you with real love (Such things have been, Things your fair face knows nothing of, It seems, Faustine); That clear hair heavily bound back, The lights wherein Shift from dead blue to burnt-up black; Your throat, Faustine, Strong, heavy, throwing out the face And hard bright chin And shameful scornful lips that grace Their shame, Faustine, Curled lips, long since half kissed away, Still sweet and keen; You'd give him — poison shall we say? Or what, Faustine?

I maaku You told me ba ko tangirai I maaku I maaku My arms were awkward so ko taua baiu I maaku I maaku The dancer trembles because te ruoia is a kind of sorcery I maaku I maaku The frigate birds fly high above us and I’m afraid of falling I maaku

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had: As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight, Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through, Though someone always said I’d be all right— Just don’t look down or See,it’s not so bad (The nothing rising underfoot). Then later The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch, Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view, The merest thought of airplanes. You can call It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep; But it isn’t the unfathomable fall That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch, It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.

As a child I parleyed with animals, stuffed and real. Making my kitten pilot of a boot, I guided from one end of a string the dizzy flight and collapse. I was fearful of people as well as things, and my faithful toy shepherd with his painted face sat by me on the bed in the gloom. I was disdainful of dolls as weak people. In the favorite story I told myself my parents were made over into fair-limbed, brave angels who smiled into their god’s eyes when summoned. I was benevolent, afraid to let go of this image at night because I couldn’t hide deep enough under the covers to be overlooked by death, the angel bending over me who had been wronged. I read histories of queens, regal and barbarian, whose leopard’s eyes restrained man or wild beast. I rambled along tidal rivers and in the marshes where the green-golden grasses dazzled the sun, and felt the ache of sea-air in my lungs. I saw water spume near Atlantic cliffs. I examined lichen. I saw great light drown darkness. Then at thirteen I lay in the bleak bed before sleep and heard the pleadings and the murderous kisses; and burned, like a bear his fat, my soul. I quaked at the sound of my voice whispering,No, or turned my face to the wall and wept salt onto my knuckles. In the serene light of sun-up, before sparrows tumbled up from the earth, whispering and singing, and the exquisite sea and sky mobilized their heavy, blue currents, I was consoled. I walked through beauty without knowing why and told no one, wanting nothing else to touch me and never to move anyone in any way. I hid away from the house and learned the dark was not a dream but could show the pale gravel of a real driveway. I saw for the first time later the new moon and the full moon in one piece. I no longer feared the night, night like a bear at ease in his wide habitat. In the greatness of such space I said,This is me.

Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow, bilious glaring eyes, tufted ears, recidivous criminality in the slouch, —This is not the latest absconding bankrupt but a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from Kuala Lumpur. 7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A. are taking his profitable likeness; 28 reporters and an essayist are writing him up. Sundry ladies think he is a darling especially at mealtimes, observing that a firm near the docks advertises replicas fullgrown on approval for easy cash payments. ♂Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise up and down his cage before feeding in a stench of excrements of great cats indifferent to beauty or brutality. He is said to have eaten several persons but of course you can never be quite sure of these things.

Bitaug, Siquijor, Philippines Three women dragged the spiky, bulky mass onto a bamboo table on the side of an island road. A raised hunting knife glinted in sunlight, then plunged with a breathless gasp, slicing into the unseen. To a passerby they were a curious wall, a swarm of onlookers, barrio children and younger women, buzzing with a rising gleeful cadence as a mother busied herself with the butchering. Surprisingly, a citrusy, sugary scent sweetened the stranger’s face when offered the yellow flesh like thickened petals, licorice to the touch, he stood awed at the monstrous jackfruit, bloodless armadillo halved, quartered, sectioned off for feasting. His tongue tingled ripely.This country’s foreign to me