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Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended! This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal; How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years, When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

A FORM, as any taper, fine ; A head like half-pint bason ; Where golden cords, and bands entwine, As rich as fleece of JASON. A pair of shoulders strong and wide, Like country clown enlisting ; Bare arms long dangling by the side, And shoes of ragged listing ! Cravats like towels, thick and broad, Long tippets made of bear-skin, Muffs that a RUSSIAN might applaud, And rouge to spoil a fair skin. Long petticoats to hide the feet, Silk hose with clocks of scarlet ; A load of perfume, sick'ning sweet, Bought of PARISIAN VARLET. A bush of hair, the brow to shade, Sometimes the eyes to cover ; A necklace that might be display'd By OTAHEITEAN lover ! A bowl of straw to deck the head, Like porringer unmeaning ; A bunch of POPPIES flaming red, With motly ribands streaming. Bare ears on either side the head, Like wood-wild savage SATYR ; Tinted with deep vermilion red, To shame the blush of nature. Red elbows, gauzy gloves, that add An icy cov'ring merely ; A wadded coat, the shape to pad, Like Dutch-women — or nearly. Such is CAPRICE ! but, lovely kind ! Oh ! let each mental feature Proclaim the labour of the mind , And leave your charms to NATURE.

Two guys sucking each other in the steam room didn’t want anything to do with me, evidently— I left them to their comedy. * Legato longings: wish for walnuts, wish for water, wish to exorcise this morning’s debauch— two Fauré nocturnes. * In slow motion Steve tussled with a motorcycle trying to run me over on the boulevard of moon smut splicing together bridges and lagoons, like the bride of Frankenstein rushing to overtake the inert Real, a mass of facts, some conjugal, some comic— contrapuntal tenebrae!

Fat, face the color of blanc on blanc, smelling of cheap tobacco and many unwashed garments, from the other end of the car, the unmistakable melody of La vi en rose scratched against tender ears of Parisian commuters. "Not La vi en rose again", said the young Frenchman facing me. I understood every word he said. The old woman singing was no tiny sparrow, no waif. Her corpulent canine companion was equally uncouth. She sang Piaf's signature song with a hostile gusto, each syllable enunciated loudly. We sniggered as the singing voice came closer. So close we began to sing along, conspirators, smiling. And we welcomed the doleful silence at the song's inevitable end. I gave her a centime or was it two? She deserved it. Was she blind? Did it matter? As for me, I am weary of speaking shattered Spanish with Argentinean intellectuals and outmoded American slang with the Moroccan grocer and his cousins on the Boulevard Saint-Michel near rue du Val-de-Grâce And I cannot seem to count past the number, sept! Gloved hands push apart the Metro's doors. It is journey's end. I try singing Piaf's mysterious refrain, grateful for my own soulful silly version on the walk towards the rue Henri-Barbusse, a short slice of street named for a revolutionary or was he a pirate philosopher? Tired and cheered outside my American language, I am puzzled with the battered glamour of this city built for electric illuminations, swift flirtations, as I follow the paths to dead poets shaped in solemn statuary harboring the austere lawns of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

What’s the matter with you today sed John you and Jan fighting? On no I said it’s not that it’s a letter I got that’s bothering me. Must be from the govament or the insurance, I can understand that. No, John, it’s not them this time it’s from a friend. Did he die or summin? You aint sed a decent word all morning I might as well be working by myself and let you set on the nailkeg unrolling barbwore Oh dammit, John, it’s just a letter that pissed me off, I said. It’s from a writer who saw something I wrote about coyotes killing sheep and he wrote saying that never happens. He sez what? sez John. He said there’s no documented evidence that a coyote ever killed a sheep unless it was rabid, I said. And he said my story was a lie and should never have been written. He’s a writer? sez John. What does he write about? Oh, he writes novels, I said. Books about cowboys and Indians and the California mountains. He sez that sed John did he? You know most chickens I known of is layers and most folks I known is liars and most of them don’t know the different but that don’t get in the way of their opinions. It was a preacher got his first call to come to our town back home his first sermon that everbody showed up to hear was how all people is good it aint no such of a thing as a bad person he wasn’t in town half a year before Travis Newberry knocked up his daughter in the eighth grade and he was twenty-four by then. He’d started preaching late after giving up on farming and owning a grocery store must of been too late he run out of words after bout a year we had to elect him to office to give him something to do. First thing he voted no taxes and no pay raises to schoolteachers so they all known he’d be a good one mebbe governor some day had to move him out of the parsonage and into a house where he had to pay rent like real people so they found him a place out on the end of town where they could be alone with that pregnant girl they took out of school. It was skunks out there a mama and four babies and his wife and that girl sez oh they’re purdy let them alone we like them so he did by the time she had her baby they’d killed all their chickens the Easter ducks and the cats it was mice and skunks running all over that place they couldn’t live there no more so he run for state office they sent that girl off to Christian school we never heard of her again and tried to raise the baby boy but couldn’t do that neither. He got elected to the campaign of no taxes and close down the schools cause he blamed it all on Travis Newberry hanging around the jr-high parking lot and moved to the state capital to live and before they could rent that house again they had to set out traps for two months and rat poison sed they got twenty-four skunks but nobody counted the mice it was awful took a year for the smells to go off and it wasn’t no hippies back then to rent it to they had to wait it out so he run for Warshington office six years later and put the boy in the orphanage up for adoption he might of been a scandal but he didn’t get elected they made him a judge instead after that and he’s rich still there and being so famous he don’t pay no rent the state gave him a house and a car and a maid but that still don’t mean he known one damn thing about people or skunks or mice or preaching or farming or running a grocery store. I seen it with my own eyes a coyote running through a herd of sheep and killed nine lambs just to do it and we set up five nights in our pickups waiting for him until he come back and he killed four more before we shot him and that’s nothing to what Allen Dalley out to Summit lost that one year when they say coyotes got half his lamb crop that’s just a bunch of bullshit because he done one thing don’t mean he knows nothing about anothern and if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about you tell him to just keep his mouth closed or run for office that’s what it’s there for so why don’t you forget about it and you can forget him too for now let’s get to work cause all this is real not something in a book and has to be got done for sure not just by thinking about it and if you don’t get that frown put in a drawer this is gone be a long day of work

Mouths full of laughter, the turistas come to the tall hotel with suitcases full of dollars. Every morning my brother makes the cool beach new for them. With a wooden board he smooths away all footprints. I peek through the cactus fence and watch the women rub oil sweeter than honey into their arms and legs while their children jump waves or sip drinks from long straws, coconut white, mango yellow. Once my little sister ran barefoot across the hot sand for a taste. My mother roared like the ocean, “No. No. It’s their beach. It’s their beach.”

An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow glimmered in the deeper reaches where my son and I could hear the slub of water riddling through the muck. We’d stumbled on it following a stream, his first cave made stranger still by a chill that closes on the goblined heart of a boy inflamed by stories where gnome-clans hoarded underground bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland, and eel. And so, grave Hansel paying out his last scraps of bread, he inched inward looking back and gathering himself as he devolved step by step along the wet-ribbed walls, the omphalos seepage of a subterranea that dreamed us into its kingdom come, where like some secret dreams make known the burnt-punk smell of marijuana cluttered up the air, and just beyond, just close enough to see, a spur of light that like a dwindling eyemote disappeared. Then the sound a human soul makes as it slips out from the throat. Composed in darkness, my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent to whisper we could turn back now, but his voice was there before me saying, “Something’s here.” And something was, something that in that instant rose, and moved off from us, or drew up close. In either case, my son came to me almost weightlessly at first, then hungry for what was filling up my arms, the startled, upriding bodyweight of a boy I’d never before felt rock so solidly into the place I was, blind and hunkered in the earthen air. I held him only a moment there. We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears, for weeks to come, settling him back to sleep at night, or waking him from some troubling dream, I’d hear the soft concussion of an outsized heart- beat I could not decide was mine, or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to. Or if what happened would happen again, years from now, when he is grown, and I have grown newly strange to him.

Picture yourself, child, garred in a coign of the newborn city: father and infant brother dead though life, that other half of nothing, spills out the same from the hill into the harbour. You take your spyglass to the sea, late in the afternoon when the big hulls loom against the pier, watch the ladies overdressed on the embankment or the sailors tumbling from steamers into bars. There is a tunnel below where the cargo trains go. Could it be you found on foot without the tram for smoothness west on West towards Victoria where in the salt stupor of the market a veiny hand patted a fat amethyst eyeball in your palm? In the freshly planted suburbs, the smoke of wet dirt in gardens: “Those who do not belong here wear a uniform— consider this when sleep falls on you.” * The man who sleeps in your mother’s bed drinks tea with the British ambassador so the house is kosmos enough. In one room a calliope like an engine plays; in another, a stone horse smooth enough to ride or a carved wooden mask with a nose-hole stinging skin. There’s a monocle and a pipe, a flyer for Ruth St. Denis, there’s a feathery moth’s wing, part of a chewed-up but bright pink Europe. (You tick in sticky names the pages of your enemies— Plato, Ptolemy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Conan Doyle and the schoolboys who scrape you on the ground until your knees go red. You see a girl playing in the street and feel pity.) * “The poet, a fake, lacks conviction: he’s stuck with both absence and substance. These are the laws of things, this is the index finger, pointing.” Camoens who sailed in search of Portugal, Magellan who wrote his name in the sky elliptical— that was the country dreamed by pilgrims whose tears flowed into óur sea— it was ways to make every estranged brook feel special, to hawk deeds of Europe to Asia and vice versa. The cannonade drools and sputters to a stop, the ship pulls away from the cliff and wheels toward a new mass. The vespertine light drains by degrees into the night-time as if through bright perforations of stars. The lamps of the ports dim in economic sequence. on the tip of the land’s triangle where you killed the Khoikhoi for their cattle, the Dutch are bastards and those Brits to whom you owe, those bureaucrats and beautiful engineers, are very polite but rather shy. They slaughter hearts too, scientifically. But song remained at close of day. Song took root in the decaying estate: song in the house of faith, alone in the end, after the machines, after the former masters, after the fields, recaptured by trees, and the pedigreed dogs abandoned. * Helpless, the love of precision for territory. Helpless, your green discoloured bust on an island among commuters, on the corner of Commercial and Soldier’s Way. You are ever a stranger from Tongaat to Isipingo though the beaches have been seized and the cuter cottages turned away from loamy burial ground to face a reopened sea. But we carry Bambatha’s name in our mouths and inherit your teeth; the highway gutter-drawls into stacked flats or tin doors, curling dirt roads, satellite towns on satellite maps, and the moon is still red and the ancestors reach down like willows. You among them know well: smoking your cigarette, to spite the gods, writing, “They must eat my little boy or die,” as another way of saying, “Let every tongue be foreign.”

I’m jotting down these lines, having borrowed a pen from a waitress in this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines prop up the sky in the windows. My soup gets cold, which implies I’ll eat it cold. Soon I too will leave a tip on the table, merge into the beehive of travelers and board one of the ferries, where there’s always a line to the loo and no one knows where the captain is. Slightly seasick, I keep on writing of the wind-rose and lobster traps, seagulls, if any—and there always are. Check the air and you’ll see them above straw hats and caps. The sun at noon glides like a monstrous star- fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea, training binoculars on a tugboat. When I finish this letter, I’ll take a gulp from the flask you gave me for the road in days when I was too young to care about those on the pier who waved goodbye. I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses, my mother, you, boys in light summer shirts. Life is too long. The compass needle dances. Everything passes by. The ferry passes by ragged yellow shores.

At the festival of almost getting there Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks directions, half-heartedly, to the train, admits he’s been riding on the tortoise, been running after arrows to watch them stand still. He understands course, path, way, even relative position (dichotomize, divide) but motion’s still a figment: distance halved and halved (split infinity, twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments, instants, continuous or discrete) for some unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress, portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort? No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.