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Wherever the flamingo goes, she brings a city’s worth of furbelows. She seems unnatural by nature— too vivid and peculiar a structure to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity. Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act. Descending on her egg or draping her head along her back, she’s too exact and sinuous to convince an audience she’s serious. The natural elect, they think, would be less pink, less able to relax their necks, less flamboyant in general. They privately expect that it’s some poorly jointed bland grey animal with mitts for hands whom God protects.

The man Flammonde, from God knows where, With firm address and foreign air, With news of nations in his talk And something royal in his walk, With glint of iron in his eyes, But never doubt, nor yet surprise, Appeared, and stayed, and held his head As one by kings accredited. Erect, with his alert repose About him, and about his clothes, He pictured all tradition hears Of what we owe to fifty years. His cleansing heritage of taste Paraded neither want nor waste; And what he needed for his fee To live, he borrowed graciously. He never told us what he was, Or what mischance, or other cause, Had banished him from better days To play the Prince of Castaways. Meanwhile he played surpassing well A part, for most, unplayable; In fine, one pauses, half afraid To say for certain that he played. For that, one may as well forego Conviction as to yes or no; Nor can I say just how intense Would then have been the difference To several, who, having striven In vain to get what he was given, Would see the stranger taken on By friends not easy to be won. Moreover, many a malcontent He soothed and found munificent; His courtesy beguiled and foiled Suspicion that his years were soiled; His mien distinguished any crowd, His credit strengthened when he bowed; And women, young and old, were fond Of looking at the man Flammonde. There was a woman in our town On whom the fashion was to frown; But while our talk renewed the tinge Of a long-faded scarlet fringe, The man Flammonde saw none of that, And what he saw we wondered at— That none of us, in her distress, Could hide or find our littleness. There was a boy that all agreed Had shut within him the rare seed Of learning. We could understand, But none of us could lift a hand. The man Flammonde appraised the youth, And told a few of us the truth; And thereby, for a little gold, A flowered future was unrolled. There were two citizens who fought For years and years, and over nought; They made life awkward for their friends, And shortened their own dividends. The man Flammonde said what was wrong Should be made right; nor was it long Before they were again in line, And had each other in to dine. And these I mention are but four Of many out of many more. So much for them. But what of him— So firm in every look and limb? What small satanic sort of kink Was in his brain? What broken link Withheld him from the destinies That came so near to being his? What was he, when we came to sift His meaning, and to note the drift Of incommunicable ways That make us ponder while we praise? Why was it that his charm revealed Somehow the surface of a shield? What was it that we never caught? What was he, and what was he not? How much it was of him we met We cannot ever know; nor yet Shall all he gave us quite atone For what was his, and his alone; Nor need we now, since he knew best, Nourish an ethical unrest: Rarely at once will nature give The power to be Flammonde and live. We cannot know how much we learn From those who never will return, Until a flash of unforeseen Remembrance falls on what has been. We've each a darkening hill to climb; And this is why, from time to time In Tilbury Town, we look beyond Horizons for the man Flammonde.

For  Jack Agüeros (1934–2014) I was eight when the blackout struck and the lights died all across the city like a massacre of fireflies. In the projects of Brooklyn, I steered myself to 14F, fingers spread against the cool tiles of the hallway, past the concrete and chicken-wire terrace where I once burnt ants with a magnifying glass. Many years later, at the Chinese restaurant uptown, Jack said:They got any flan here? He was my first poet. I had seen the fireflies in his sonnets blink and float away: Fulano the philosopher in the unemployment line; Blanco the painter, painting in the madhouse; Monterosa the dealer killed by shotgun in a bar on Avenue A; his mother the seamstress and the quick needle of her sewing machine; Jack the moving man, his hands sliced raw. He stacked his apartment with dictionaries in three languages. I knew the raconteur’s grin with every tale:Raúl Juliá is a friend of mine: a Puerto Rican playing Macbeth. He took14curtain calls on opening night. Maybe he would tell me now that flan was not Puerto Rican, or Mexican, or Spanish, but Chinese, invented by a trembling cook to satisfy the palate of an emperor in the Ming Dynasty.No flan, Jack, I said.This is a Chinese restaurant. Two minutes later, he said:They got any flan? I showed him the dog-eared and fingerprinted menu.No flan, I said. When the waiter unfurled his pad, Jack said to him:You got flan? He sang this song for an hour. The egg roll was not flan. The fried rice was not flan. The fortune cookie was not flan.Can we get some flan? he said.Goddammit, Jack, I said. The poets crowded into the bar, striding to the mic. Jack stood with poem in hand, read the title, tilted his head and said it again, studied the page as if the words shriveled up like ants burnt under a magnifying glass, then sat down. I witnessed the massacre of fireflies. A few of us clapped, not knowing what to do with our hands, staring at the sonneteer who lost all his quatrains and couplets in the denim jacket he left on the subway, the words of Fulano still waiting on the unemployment line:The faster you spin, the stiller you look./There’s something to learn in that, but what? After the diagnosis, I handed Jack a book of poems. He dangled the book upside down like a stiff mouse by the tail, something we would sniff  behind the refrigerator. I wanted sonnets. Jack kept singing the chorus of a song: Get me to the church. Get me to the church. Get me to the church on time. At the end, I leaned over Jack’s bed to read his own poem in his ear, but some words come home after the blackout, fingers crawling on the wall. I know what I should have said at the Chinese restaurant:Jack, let’s get some flan. We should have braved the subway at rush hour, straphangers rocking all the way to 14th Street and 8th Avenue, to La Taza de Oro, gone now like Jack, for rice and beans, squid in its own ink, café con leche y flan, Jack: a spoonful of flan for you after all the years of sonnets and bread for me, the steam rising when your hands cracked the crust at the table.

Fashion makes me less crazy It should be looked at Never discussed It's an honest joy To be shocked by beauty In the 21 st century I was shocked when my lover was caught stealing From Dean and DeLuca I was thinking of a line By Robert Hass The floor manager stopped us We simply went to a different store Poetry A requiem for leisure, pleasure, thought I cannot take your high school friend's Hoop earrings seriously And every picture on my phone is obscene Look at it All these effetes Boring travel stories Details of somebody's dreams Champagne condensating On leather seats All summer long I wish I could afford a room At the Peninsula New York Suites with TVs above soaking tubs with city views And all that sun on Fifth Ave. I live inside it too I am at Uniqlo Buying underwear And after I paid I stayed and shopped again A surprising second erection After you've just finished And you know it's time

Boston Common, December 6, 1882 during the Transit of Venus I love all sights of earth and skies, From flowers that glow to stars that shine; The comet and the penny show, All curious things, above, below, Hold each in turn my wandering eyes: I claim the Christian Pagan’s line, Humani nihil,—even so,— And is not human life divine? When soft the western breezes blow, And strolling youths meet sauntering maids, I love to watch the stirring trades Beneath the Vallombrosa shades Our much-enduring elms bestow; The vender and his rhetoric’s flow, That lambent stream of liquid lies; The bait he dangles from his line, The gudgeon and his gold-washed prize. I halt before the blazoned sign That bids me linger to admire The drama time can never tire, The little hero of the hunch, With iron arm and soul of fire, And will that works his fierce desire,— Untamed, unscared, unconquered Punch! My ear a pleasing torture finds In tones the withered sibyl grinds,— The dame sans merci’s broken strain, Whom I erewhile, perchance, have known, When Orleans filled the Bourbon throne, A siren singing by the Seine. But most I love the tube that spies The orbs celestial in their march; That shows the comet as it whisks Its tail across the planets’ disks, As if to blind their blood-shot eyes; Or wheels so close against the sun We tremble at the thought of risks Our little spinning ball may run, To pop like corn that children parch, From summer something overdone, And roll, a cinder, through the skies. Grudge not to-day the scanty fee To him who farms the firmament, To whom the Milky Way is free; Who holds the wondrous crystal key, The silent Open Sesame That Science to her sons has lent; Who takes his toll, and lifts the bar That shuts the road to sun and star. If Venus only comes to time, (And prophets say she must and shall,) To-day will hear the tinkling chime Of many a ringing silver dime, For him whose optic glass supplies The crowd with astronomic eyes,— The Galileo of the Mall. Dimly the transit morning broke; The sun seemed doubting what to do, As one who questions how to dress, And takes his doublets from the press, And halts between the old and new. Please Heaven he wear his suit of blue, Or don, at least, his ragged cloak, With rents that show the azure through! I go the patient crowd to join That round the tube my eyes discern, The last new-comer of the file, And wait, and wait, a weary while, And gape, and stretch, and shrug, and smile, (For each his place must fairly earn, Hindmost and foremost, in his turn,) Till hitching onward, pace by pace, I gain at last the envied place, And pay the white exiguous coin: The sun and I are face to face; He glares at me, I stare at him; And lo! my straining eye has found A little spot that, black and round, Lies near the crimsoned fire-orb’s rim. O blessed, beauteous evening star, Well named for her whom earth adores,— The Lady of the dove-drawn car,— I know thee in thy white simar; But veiled in black, a rayless spot, Blank as a careless scribbler’s blot, Stripped of thy robe of silvery flame,— The stolen robe that Night restores When Day has shut his golden doors,— I see thee, yet I know thee not; And canst thou call thyself the same? A black, round spot,—and that is all; And such a speck our earth would be If he who looks upon the stars Through the red atmosphere of Mars Could see our little creeping ball Across the disk of crimson crawl As I our sister planet see. And art thou, then, a world like ours, Flung from the orb that whirled our own A molten pebble from its zone? How must thy burning sands absorb The fire-waves of the blazing orb, Thy chain so short, thy path so near, Thy flame-defying creatures hear The maelstroms of the photosphere! And is thy bosom decked with flowers That steal their bloom from scalding showers? And hast thou cities, domes, and towers, And life, and love that makes it dear, And death that fills thy tribes with fear? Lost in my dream, my spirit soars Through paths the wandering angels know; My all-pervading thought explores The azure ocean’s lucent shores; I leave my mortal self below, As up the star-lit stairs I climb, And still the widening view reveals In endless rounds the circling wheels That build the horologe of time. New spheres, new suns, new systems gleam; The voice no earth-born echo hears Steals softly on my ravished ears: I hear them “singing as they shine”— A mortal’s voice dissolves my dream: My patient neighbor, next in line, Hints gently there are those who wait. O guardian of the starry gate, What coin shall pay this debt of mine? Too slight thy claim, too small the fee That bids thee turn the potent key The Tuscan’s hand has placed in thine. Forgive my own the small affront, The insult of the proffered dime; Take it, O friend, since this thy wont, But still shall faithful memory be A bankrupt debtor unto thee, And pay thee with a grateful rhyme.

Red and blue plaid, pockets with buttons, my camping shirt is flannel, worn soft, pine smells, campfire, forest moss. I keep it hidden in my bottom drawer— where no one will find it and wash away my memories.

DC Comics, November 1990, #44 “Never Look Back, Flash Your Life Might Be Gaining On You” When I’m running across the city on the crowded streets to home, when, in a blur, the grass turns brown beneath my feet, the asphalt steams under every step and the maple leaves sway on the branches in my wake, and the people look, look in that bewildered way, in my direction, I imagine walking slowly into my past among them at a pace at which we can look one another in the eye and begin to make changes in the future from our memories of the past— the bottom of a bottomless well, you may think, but why not dream a little: our past doesn’t contradict our future; they’re swatches of the same fabric stretching across our minds, one image sewn into another, like the relationship between a foot and a boot, covariant in space and time— one moves along with the other, like an actor in a shadow play— like a streak of scarlet light across the skyline of your city sweeping the debris, which is simply confetti, candy wrappers, a can of soda, all the experience of a day discarded and now picked up even down to the youthful screams of play that put smiles on the faces of the adults who hear remnants of their own voices through a doorway leading back to a sunrise they faintly remember.

1.  Mary-Frances applied continual pressure on me to start the job and helped in recording and editing. 2.  Thanks to Sandra for her heroic typing, although this need not be taken to indicate her agreement with various points. 3.  Peter provided information about the notorious perpetual pills. 4.  As someone who gloried in seeing dogma overturned, he would have delighted in the irony of seeing arguments for the reverse. 5.  And without their willingness to take on the chore of responding to our whims and fancies over a 3-year period, this book would have fallen short of its goals. 6.  The production of this tome would have been unthinkable without the marvelous electronic tools that are now widely available. 7.  However, Chapter 7 was written in a relatively self- contained fashion, so the serious student may skip Chapter 6 and delve directly into the theory. 8. The late abbess of Shasta Abbey proved that looking through different windows into the same room is not a metaphor. 9.  Nick, who is writing a book on oxygen, gave much appreciated data concerning that element. 10. The filmstrip format employed in Chapter 10 originated with Elizabeth. 11.  I have been very fortunate in being able to use such penetrating minds. 12.  In recent months, I have often felt like a small child in a sweet shop as astronomers all round the world have sent me the most mouthwatering new data. 13.  Suffice it at this point to observe that I am not just talking about wallpaper patterns on shirts and dresses, although many of these patterns do turn out to have interesting properties. 14.  I do not expect that many readers will want to be masochistic enough to want to read the book in order from cover to cover.

Forget about it for you’ll never win, never hit the jackpot, move in to a solar-powered eco mansion and modest philanthropy, become a panjandrum of diaphanous pleasures but must sink or swim beneath mood- mutable skies, coconut milk clouds, in the shadow of high flats, low sales, bright fronts, strung crowds of literally miraculous people in expensive skin like bed sheets you would wrap yourself in and which you now touch lightly as you enter this café past a clutch of mitching schoolgirls with pierced noses and Tintin hairdos who look at you as if to say is it dial-a-dickhead day in here? or maybe that’s aimed instead at the guy eating flatbread with five thousand friends on his phone who types with a grin all is well with the world, when all is not well with the world — the burden of debt as your granny might say heavy as sin — although who would begrudge this incense of crushed coffee in steam this clatter and chatter latex flowers under halogen lights and who’d demean that woman with her small child wiping the small child’s chin to the delight of a lonely well-off older person or w.o.o.p. — I believe they call them woopies — at the next table over who scoops two shaking spoons of sugar into a steaming cup then begins to call her son Oh my lost Son asking after her granddaughter while the mitching girls swagger out the door — look, one forgot her phone — ah good, someone caught her — and who would begrudge the yin and yang of this moment sitting here coming or going anyone and no one here or somewhere else stuck nowhere and flowing in the mix like everyone for you are blurring below indigo and ink-dim skies as time passes by like steam vapors into the run-of-the-mill gray coat you put on pausing, before leaving to meet this falling day which as your granny might say is the only day you’re in.

The eagle floats and glides, circling the burnished aspen, then takes the high pines with a flash of underwing. As surely as the eagle sails toward the bay’s open curve, as surely as he swoops and seizes the struggling fish, pulling it from an osprey’s beak; so too, autumn descends, to steal the glistening summer from our open hands.