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We can have our pick of seats. Though the movie's already moving, the theater's almost an empty shell. All we can see on our side of the room is one man and one woman— as neat, respectable, and distinct as the empty chairs that come between them. But distinctions do not surprise, fresh as we are from sullen street and subway where lonelinesses crowded about us like unquiet memories that may have loved us once or known our love. Here we are an accidental fellowship, sheltering from the city's obscure bereavements to face a screened, imaginary living, as if it were a destination we were moving toward. Leaning to our right and suspended before us is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette. Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds a reverie that moves through and beyond the shine of the silver screening. But we can see what she will never see— that she's the star of Hopper's scene. For the artist she's a play of light, and a play of light is all about her. Whether the future she is dreaming is the future she will have we have no way of knowing. Whatever it will prove to be it has already been. The usherette Hopper saw might now be seventy, hunched before a Hitachi in an old home or a home for the old. She might be dreaming now a New York movie, Fred Astaire dancing and kissing Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York City skylines, raising possibilities that time has served to lower. We are watching the usherette, and the subtle shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite- impassive face beneath the three red-shaded lamps and beside the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets that go on and on and on. But we are no safer here than she. Despite the semblance of luxury— gilt edges, red plush, and patterned carpet—this is no palace, and we do not reign here, except in dreams. This picture tells us much about various textures of lighted air, but at the center Hopper has placed a slab of darkness and an empty chair.

The boss is sitting at the desk the boss doesn’t look at her the boss is waiting for the black telephone to ring she also waits for a ring from the boss he is waiting for the files from her her blue dress like a reused file folder around her body her hands tight around the files the filing cabinet might eat her might take her hand off the boss might eat her the boss wants her but the boss wants money more just a little bit more the boss always seems to want the money a bit more the boss doesn’t hear there are taxis outside waiting for all the women down on the street across the street a boss prepares for bed another boss above him in apartment X rotates a Q-tip in his ear before sex despite instructions on the box we took my father out of the paper the living will the letters with their little capes will leave the paper who will take care of my children later who will take care of my father the will will take care of no one a piece of paper cannot take care of anyone I cannot take care of everyone on some nights I wake in a panic and can’t tell if I am dead or alive this year I dye my hair so I won’t have to die

While the man is away telling his wife about the red-corseted woman, the woman waits on the queen-sized bed. You'd expect her quiet in the fist of a copper statue. Half her face, a shade of golden meringue, the other half, the dark of cattails. Her mouth even— too straight, as if she doubted her made decision, the way women do. In her hands, a yellow letter creased, like her hunched back. Her dress limp on a green chair. In front, a man's satchel and briefcase. On a dresser, a hat with a ceylon feather. That is all the artist left us with, knowing we would turn the woman's stone into ours, a thirst for the self in everything—even in the sweet chinks of mandarin.

Father’s opinion of savages And dogs, a gay Bloomsbury epigram: ‘The brutes may possibly have souls,’ he says, ‘But reason, no. Nevertheless, I am Prepared not to extend this to my spouse And children.’ This demands a careful pity: Poor Father! Whooping and romping in their house, A holiday from ruin in the City. His wit falls flat, his tie just will not tie. The dog’s in chains, the reasonable books Grazed by his children as they learn to fly. He takes his dear wife’s arm (his hands grow hooks). Pirates and pudding! Come, such cruelty! His beard is branching like a burning tree.

1 I don’t understand this kindergarten assignment: “Draw Your Clan.” The three letters live in abstraction. A friend suggests mine looks like his, minus legs, and that day I believe my clan is a species of amputee Snipes, birds forced to fly the skies forever, and I wonder if we are meant to symbolize endurance or something beyond my five-year-old comprehension. 2 My mother explains we are not legless birds and if she had a more worldly vocabulary she would have suggested we were ambiguous, not quite a fish, more than a water snake, but she says we are among the few. The last Tuscarora Eel died out a generation ago, so we are left Onondaga Eels among the Tuscarora, voiceless as well as legless. 3 I find an encyclopedia photo, see jagged rows of razor teeth in a mouth perpetually grinning and when I show it to her, she says clans are a system to keep track of families, so we don’t inadvertently marry our relatives, and that we have no more affinity with eels than anyone else on the reservation has with their animals. 4 “If I threw you in the dike,” she says “you’d drown as fast as anyone else,” done with this lesson. I remember older cousins, swimming between my legs, and suddenly I am rising, their hands grabbing my knees as my balls collide with the backs of their necks, and they break the surface, toss me into deeper water, probably watching to make sure I surface, after they’ve had some amusement at my struggle. 5 In wet darkness, I imagine opening my eyes and mouth, taking water in, filling my lungs, discovering gills like Aquaman or Namor, the Sub-mariner. Knowing I had better odds of dying, face down, no voice to call out for help, I am never quite brave enough to try it, not daring enough, even, to open my eyes when my face breaks the stillness of river water contained. 6 But I flip on my back, ears below the surface, listen to mysteries, breathe shallowly at that level, and float, wondering what it would be like to glide the depths on fins, knowing if I were there, I would desire legs and lungs, and then I fill my chest to capacity, and dive, loving and begrudging the ache I find there, the throbbing of my chest begging for release, and I swim back up, eyes still closed, wondering how long it will take to find the surface again.

I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht The warl’ like an eemis stane Wags i’ the lift; An’ my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift. Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read The words cut oot i’ the stane Had the fug o’ fame An’ history’s hazelraw No’ yirdit thaim.

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now? I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing. When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    : a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy. :  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open: Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music, like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me. There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing. :  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now? When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental, fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin, and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept. I want now to be close to you.        I would link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days. :  I am not happy.          I will be open. I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems. There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate On what a tragedy his life was, really. :  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now? When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide, and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   : if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty, if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt. I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me. :  I will be open.          I think he never loved me: He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls: he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me. :  What are you now?          If we could touch one another, if these our separate entities could come to grips, clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday I stood in a crowded street that was live with people, and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone. Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.

for Henry Adams Effort for distraction grew Ferocious, grew Ferocious and paced, that was its exercise. Effort for distraction strained, Legged in the hour-like single stretch Its heels and sight to feel, so slit its eyes. Effort without effort or with Greatest possible effort always centered Back in the concentrated trough where lies The magnet to the filings, The saw tooth to the tongue, The turn of life to a returning life. By all the traction of mind and spin of spirit Having gained grasp gasped to bear it, Having got ground groaned, furious title holder. Paced and cried, so sore for a different direction, grew Ferocious, grew Unkind to strength that gave it strength to grow.

We are in the position of defining myth by the shape of its absence. -Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers The bluebird's cold mistimed egg fetched up from the one-legged box after the pair had left for points south & unknown (never, as it turned out, to return) I renested in the half-geode by the windowsill where it gleamed &, months becoming years, seemed about to last forever, grow more consistent with itself, holding its pure blue firmament up over what by now was nothing, till one January day, snow melting to a fast flood, I blew it softly onto my palm so I could hold its cerulean up against new sky, home against home, where it lay weightless & delicate as the Xmas ornament we'd just put away, but when I went to roll it gently back onto its bed, & leave it there, I saw a thread, a crack, another, watched it sink in slowly on itself, shard on shard collapsing from my touch & breath, relaxing into the shape of its absence

There is no radical shift of light or redwings calling areas of marsh their territories yet, nor plovers probing for copepods. Only a yellow front-end loader laying out a new berm on the beach, from tubes too heavy to be called hoses, its audience one man and his protesting dog. No frosted wedding cake on tour, no Cap’n Beauregard hailing us from the Texas deck, no Texas deck, just an unshaven crew launching zodiacs from the county dredge, its twin stacks staining itself and the air with smoke, as battered an emblem of hope as any other. So spring comes to Egg Island, squealing and unwilling. Sulfur and diesel, flywheel, gear and grind until one morning the equinox dawns and silences the whole shebang.