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As the stores close, a winter light opens air to iris blue, glint of frost through the smoke grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk. As the buildings close, released autonomous feet pattern the streets in hurry and stroll; balloon heads drift and dive above them; the bodies aren't really there. As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens, a woman with crooked heels says to another woman while they step along at a fair pace, "You know, I'm telling you, what I love best is life. I love life! Even if I ever get to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know? Limping along?—I'd still ... "

The tint of the sky between sunset and night. And wandering with you and your nephew in that maze, half-lost—Madrid of the Austrias—looking for Plaza of the Green Cross where, days before you arrived, an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels straddling the curb, and so the van heading for the barracks that morning had to slow to squeeze past . . . Back at the hotel your mom is holding up her gift—Amethyst, she says admiring how light when passing through a prism bends. At his window that morning before we began my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift and descend, settling on roofs and cars. And I think of you and your wife and daughter: getting to see Madrid in white, your visit winding down, and how I had wanted that lesson to end to get to the park—Retiro, they say, is the city’s one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps cease when grass is completely covered as if walking on a cloud. The year before on a visit from the coast, a friend sitting at a window watched the flakes flutter and fall, dissolving before reaching the ground—aguanieve, he said while from a town near Seville B-52s were lifting off . . . I was in a trance that week though like most things the war in the Gulf was soon another backdrop, like the string of car bombs the following year. And yet that morning as soon as I heard, something led me not to the park but down to City Hall, workers in the street evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached the site—of course it was cordoned off, the spray of glass, the heap of twisted metal, and so later learned their names their lives. Of the five there was one: a postal clerk who as a boy, would plunge his hands into the white, the cold a sweet jolt whenever he got to touch the stuff, scooping it tightly into a ball like the ones he would dodge and throw years later at his wife-to-be: those weekends, those places—away from city air— a release . . . Miraflores, Siete Picos, Rascafría . . .It’s in his blood, she would come to say chatting with a neighbor about his thing for snow—the way it falls softly, blanketing roofs and groves, villages nestled in the Sierra’s hills: it is February and she is picturing him and the boy, up there now playing, horsing around

Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way —addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips are still simmering in a pot on the stove.

I like that antique tea wagon and small television. I like the computer built by your brother. I like the man in the yellow jacket as the guide. I like free will and predestination and fate. I like how the mind reaches out to touch, literally, the light of the stars. I like how the reader is possessed. I like illusions of self that each new self is born into. I like if you love someone set them on fire. I like how the older lady steals the parking space. I like the sickness of soul. I like how the reader is also being watched by the narrator. The kangaroo leather documentary in the pub really pulled me in. The many levels of watching really pulled me in. I like how the narrator flickers in and out. The last chapter is sharp and honest. The last chapter has many serpents eating their tails. This builds habits of nature. This builds emotional connection. This embodies the novel.

I am tired of people combing their hair and dripping in gold. Too much lacking the raw of a natural fondness, and I’m bloated with a craving; pack afewthings. Three times I’ve loved ya. I am tired of wanting you. Of dressing myself. Of putting myself forth at every spoonful of cereal or artificial glory. I am rabid with a consciousness, teeming with an illness coagulated with thought, BUYing your art magazines your red pants your new soles. Porn is free! Did you know that? Porn is free. Untitled, 2014 by Esme Blegvad

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed. We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant. His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall. He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always, we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying, as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me to wait here, with the worms!” Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right” before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right for the first time.” And then the vessel burst, and we were kneeling around an emptiness. We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us, yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm, the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word. Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress— a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we could do right if we would bless him? The dying must feel the pressure of that question— lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot cowards there above protesting their love, and saying, “What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens and the blue night pours through. “What can we do? We want to do what’s right.” “Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be with me. Feel with me.Feel me to do right.”

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split and I with no way to make her come back and everywhere the world is bare bright bone white    crystal sand glistens dope death dead dying and jiving drove her away made her take her laughter and her smiles and her softness and her midnight sighs— Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and democracy and communism fuck smack and pot and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck the whole muthafucking thing all i want now is my woman back so my soul can sing

At sunrise the deer eat pieces of the quiet, they eat spaces between the quiet & the sounds—; & the numbers on the calendar lie flat in their boxes, they leak through tiny holes in the minutes, evenly so, so evenly, an active sense, before the sense was made… There, now, opposite to set down, the agreed-upon, the shape of the obvious drawn by an earlier enchantment before the new anxiety set in: the workers are safe; the terror stilled for an hour; a lover’s outline, dreamed or imagined, before you read the one-page book again, what was that book, it had no copyright— & what was before? a life, the dazzler, the dark, the singing dust, it turned when you turned, it orpheus-knew what you forgot when you took the bowl of burning time across the room— & if the previous is closer to you now, should you look, doesn’t matter if you do, you carry the some of it with it, out into it— for LG

We were young and it was an accomplishment to have a body. No one said this. No one said much beyond “throw me that sky” or “can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not. The lake was sent home and I ate too many beets, went around with beet-blood tongue worrying about my draft card-burning brother going to war. Other brothers became holes at first base at war, then a few holes Harleying back from war in their always it seemed green jackets with pockets galore and flaps for I wondered bullets, I wondered how to worship these giants. None of them wanted to talk to me or anyone it seemed but the river or certain un-helmeted curves at high speed, I had my body and flung it over branches and fences toward my coming sullenness as the gravity of girls’ hips began and my brother marched off to march against the war. I watched different masses of bodies on tv , people saying no to the jungle with grenades and people saying no to the grenades with signs and my father saying no to all of them with the grinding of his teeth he spoke with. I’d pedal after the nos up and down a hill like it was somehow a rosary, somehow my body was a prayer I could chant by letting it loose with others like me milling around the everything below five feet tall that was ours, the everything below the adult line of sight that was ours to hold as long as we could: a year, a summer. Until the quarterback came back without . . . well, without. When the next Adonis stepped up to throw the bomb.

Crow school is basic and short as a rule— just the rudiments of quid pro crow for most students. Then each lives out his unenlightened span, adding his bit of blight to the collected history of pushing out the sweeter species; briefly swaggering the swagger of his aggravating ancestors down my street. And every time I like him when we meet.