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It came to pass that I boarded a plane and as I edged past the man in the aisle seat he said My name is Dov. I knew you would come.

I call to ask my mother the name of the street where we bought the suitcases when we left Brooklyn. A better question would have been how did it feel to be sliced from the rib of Pine and Loring and sent, like a kite, up North. Or tell me what your mother said to you in her grand rear room the night we left, seated on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, muted in the low light. So many bellies in the house. Cacophony of kreyol and Brooklyn buk and sweet sweat across the walls. Did she tell you to follow your husband. Did she tell you anything about us. How, above all, you should keep us anchored to here, where the distance between comfort and safety is measurable by the length of the hallway, the distance from one room to the next. The rooms, like capsules, each with its own medicine for Black kids. Or, tell me what you wore on the plane ride. I only remember what I wore: stockings and Mary Janes and the pink knit pleated skirt. I did not remember this was your first time flying, a grown woman over thirty, and you had never seen how small the world looked beneath your feet.

In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream .... One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking back one sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. —George Steiner Outside my window the wasps are making their slow circle, dizzy flights of forage and return, hovering among azaleas that bob in a sluggish breeze this humid, sun-torn morning. Yesterday my wife held me here as I thrashed and moaned, her hand in my foaming mouth, and my son saw what he was warned he might. Last night dreams stormed my brain in thick swirls of shame and fear. Behind a white garage a locked shed full of wide-eyed dolls burned, yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps as I watched, feet nailed to the ground. In dining cars white table cloths unfolded wings and flew like gulls. An old German in a green Homburg sang lieder,Mein Herz ist müde. In a garden in Pasadena my father posed in Navy whites while overhead silver dirigibles moved like great whales. And in the narrowing tunnel of the dream’s end I flew down onto the iron red road of my grandfather’s farm. There was a white rail fence. In the green meadow beyond, a small boy walked toward me. His smile was the moon’s rim. Across his egg-shell eyes ran scenes from my future life, and he embraced me like a son or father or my lost brother.

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic— back from bone the echoes stroke, back from the halved heart, the lungs three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills. From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs dangle, as back they come, sounds a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape. The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved and halved, until a roof appears, black as space. I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut, who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow, a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself and half again some metamorphic click, extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground, he says, and back it comes, his glint of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

Just seen, running, and silver-gray along the top tube of a fence between myrtles and me, too slinky for a bird and even at this distance unmistakably a quadruped and nimble, some sort of unspoiled animal, but which? It ran as if away from a threat, peril was everywhere, a footsole crunches it, it is mangled by a tire’s treads, hawk scoops it, turkey buzzard pecks at it, no speech mitigates its pains, even the cat fools with it, until, inedible, it is kicked into the gutter. There she goes, the slinky silver-gray Atalanta of reptiles vanishes in no time, for the wind whisks from her feet such tenuous gusts of air — brisk now where turnpikes stretch their webs, and not forever can an earthiness so sweet as this propel such grace. She’ll have got to the mantis eggs by now, at each gulp of hatchling she slowly blinks with satisfaction.

That day I hired a private detective to follow me, and could not read his notes. In a tangled grove, I hid behind white pines, compressed my body, then watched him write, left-handed and myopic, under an Irish cap, when I asked for help from strangers who spoke Slavic languages. Wary, moving ahead, I found a depot, watched an immense train churn, haloed in steam, and boarded, second class. I had no ticket, and my expired passport represented a drooping head with unfamiliar eyes. Unshaken, rows behind, the stranger waited, wielding camera and pen. Across the border I disembarked, but knew he would capture me, with soundless footsteps, even on black gravel. I tried to recall my crime. I know I am guilty, but never why. Lawless, I have ignored those signs: WRONG WAY ; GO BACK and NO WAY OUT , circles that tell me YOU ARE HERE . I gather it is the whispers that explode, the looks that make dogs whimper. When I bow in prayer I think of love; I know I’ve killed my friends, pelting them with a touch—and yet I’ve heard they are alive. Besides, that’s not the real offense. I would cross any path, or trek through swamps to find my crime. But even he, that bald, insistent man who follows me, unsleeping, cannot tell me what I’ve done.

The night mist leaves us yearning for a new location to things impossibly stationary, the way they’d once float houses made from dismantled ships, brass and timber, from Plymouth, Massachusetts, across the sound to White Horse Beach. You were only a boy. Years later, gazing out to the red buoys of the harbor, you sought those houses, each the location of your childhood’s end. Jon, I make this all sound too complex. Our view of time is stationary, a long prediction of remorse. We’re drinking in timber, camping above Tucson, Arizona. Below, the houses are vague points of light, describing a grief you’ve housed since watching those buildings careen on water, a boy too sullen for your father. So the aspens creak like timber in an aging sloop. The others sleep. You locate the figure of your son, small and stationary, but tell me he’ll die young, body unsound, a childhood diabetic. The bourbon makes you sound entranced—to think one day you’ll return to the house to find that you’ve outlived him, maybe the radio station playing some popular song. Outliving the boy, you’ll outlive yourself. Drunk, we’ve lost our location. I shine my flashlight to find the others. The timbre of your voice grows slack. Leaves and timber rustle in the promise of rain, in the sound of distant thunder that, like death, has no location. Below, relentless clouds will cover houses. The campfire sputters, then grows, buoyed by wind, our bodies the only things stationary. Because of death, our small, unstationary lives become narration—a child is lost in timber in a fable when night approaches. The boy can’t even see his hands. Only owl-cry, the sound of his heart. But soon the aspens part, the houses of his village appear, their location precise and consoling. He’s stationary, not a sound from below. Beyond the timber, floating houses. And there his papa’s lantern, a light the boy can locate.

Harmonious Powers with Nature work On sky, earth, river, lake, and sea: Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze All in one duteous task agree. Once did I see a slip of earth, By throbbing waves long undermined, Loosed from its hold; —how no one knew But all might see it float, obedient to the wind. Might see it, from the mossy shore Dissevered float upon the Lake, Float, with its crest of trees adorned On which the warbling birds their pastime take. Food, shelter, safety there they find There berries ripen, flowerets bloom; There insects live their lives — and die: A peopled world it is; in size a tiny room. And thus through many seasons’ space This little Island may survive But Nature, though we mark her not, Will take away — may cease to give. Perchance when you are wandering forth Upon some vacant sunny day Without an object, hope, or fear, Thither your eyes may turn — the Isle is passed away. Buried beneath the glittering Lake! Its place no longer to be found, Yet the lost fragments shall remain, To fertilize some other ground.

My body is powdery white and round I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond The hand that kneads me is hard and rough You can't destroy my true red heart

a bed is left open to a mirror a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed light fingers the house with its own acoustics one of them writes this down one has paper bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils bed of eyes and leaky pens much of the night the air touches arms arms extend themselves to air their torsos turning toward a roll of sound: thunder night of coon scat and vandalized headstones night of deep kisses and catamenia his face by this light: saurian hers: ash like the tissue of a hornets’ nest one scans the aisle of firs the faint blue line of them one looks out: sans serif “Didn’t I hear you tell them you were born on a train” what begins with a sough and ends with a groan groan in which the tongue’s true color is revealed the comb’s sough and the denim’s undeniable rub the chair’s stripped back and muddied rung color of stone soup and garden gloves color of meal and treacle and sphagnum hangers clinging to their coat a soft white bulb to its string the footprints inside us iterate the footprints outside the scratched words return to their sleeves the dresses of monday through friday swallow the long hips of weekends a face is studied like a key for the mystery of what it once opened “I didn’t mean to wake you angel brains” ink of eyes and veins and phonemes the ink completes the feeling a mirror silently facing a door door with no lock no lock the room he brings into you the room befalls you like the fir trees he trues her she nears him like the firs if one vanishes one stays if one stays the other will or will not vanish otherwise my beautiful green fly otherwise not a leaf stirs