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In memory D.K., Scrovegni Chapel, Padua “Even Duccio can’t match Giotto’s stage management of great tragedy”: Transgendered Professor Y. in leather miniskirt paces before the screen, wood pointer scraping saint faces, slapping hunched women of the Lamentation. Blue-gold tumult of the chapel walls. After-lunch lecture hall heat. You’re in that class with me. We go on from there—not long. You do The Waste Land in different voices—Come in under the shadow of this red rock

I am writing now in preconceptions Those of sex and ropes Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the imagination And the imagination does have flesh to destroy And the flesh has imagination to sever The mouth is just a body filled with imagination Can you imagine its contents The dripping into a bucket And its acts The ellipses and chaining apart The feather The observer The imagination, bare, has nothing to confirm it There's just the singing of the birds The sounds of the natural scream A strange example The imagination wishes to be embraced by freedom It is laid bare in order to be desired But the imagination must keep track of the flesh responding—its increments of awareness—a slow progression It must be beautiful and it can't be free -for John Zorn, after his “Elegy”

What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things.

In sun the sunburned skin sloughs off the sunburned shoulder. Most folks believe this is the body’s slow mend. Most folks believe in the good yolk of the soul. I believe in autopsy lingo of natural causes should be replaced with of long-term exposure to the dim, unwavering radiation of the morning star. The evening they burn your body, I step into the garden and arrange a crooked line of birdbaths to skip stones across until a bell tower tolls its eight arguments against daylight and the skyline illuminates, ragged and unmended like a poem turned on its side. The evening they burn your body, I believe I’ll step into the living room and be greeted by you or by someone who could play you in a movie. The curtains are an aurora of earthly proportion. You don’t exist. A flash igniting the paned glass is the silent lightning outrunning its noise. You’re on fire.

I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall.  The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off.  The river fell, the grasses fell. The backs of six drowned cattle rose to the surface ice—nothing moved. But a wind touched my ankles when the snow began. You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight.  What power there was was over.  But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling— and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.

Linoleum and half a dozen eggs In 1960 Many towered Ilium A brand name and a shopping list too Memory distinguishes all things from Only nothing I was born and grew Rooms stacked up into houses A few trees (maples) welted in their seasons Wildly like sea birds in crude oil What amazes Me now amazed me always but never Often eyesight is prophetic instantly Seeing broken eggs on the linoleum In the kitchen 1960 I saw a broken lifetime further On as I see now my happy sister

Though beauty be the mark of praise, And yours of whom I sing be such As not the world can praise too much, Yet ’tis your virtue now I raise. A virtue, like allay, so gone Throughout your form, as, though that move And draw and conquer all men’s love, This sùbjects you to love of one. Wherein you triumph yet; because ’Tis of yourself, and that you use The noblest freedom, not to choose Against or faith or honor’s laws. But who should less expect from you, In whom alone Love lives again? By whom he is restored to men, And kept, and bred, and brought up true. His falling temples you have reared, The withered garlands ta’en away; His altars kept from the decay That envy wished, and nature feared; And on them burn so chaste a flame, With so much loyalties’ expense, As Love, t’ acquit such excellence, Is gone himself into your name. And you are he; the deity To whom all lovers are designed That would their better objects find; Among which faithful troop am I. Who, as an offspring at your shrine, Have sung this hymn, and here entreat One spark of your diviner heat To light upon a love of mine. Which, if it kindle not, but scant Appear, and that to shortest view, Yet give me leave t’ adore in you What I in her am grieved to want.

It was the year we decided not to get divorced. The poem said something like clouds moving quickly across the sun while the rest of us talked about faith and how my personal level of intensity in faking it is one way to measure the depth of the drop I’d have to make before I could turn over in bed toward a window open to the night and spotty rain dotting leaves with light caught from porch lamps and know that what I’d imagined to be time drained of sound was the purest sound, one person turning away from another into a cone formed by his turning. We sat on the porch while the kids napped and watched light rise and fall through clouds moving quickly across the sun like distractions from a vital and complex truth that requires too many pages of exegesis for people with days like ours, time’s version of an optical illusion, both too long and too short for anything like actual thinking. I remember one of the many unsolicited pieces of advice we got when Elmer was coming along—don’t make any major decisions until he’s one, you’ll be too tired to get it right. So naturally we changed jobs and moved across the country. I can’t even remember who gave us that advice. They’re probably out of our lives now. And what’s in them, these six and something years out of your forty and my almost that we’ve been spinning through together, watching our obligations mount around sensations that folded out of us from zones of our beings we hadn’t seen before, like a third arm you’d somehow failed to notice, an us both alien and uncannily us, children, a marriage, an unexpected love— these things have taken over, brushed aside whatever was there before like an anxious developer. This force is of our own making but comically has no regard for us, like that arm is a whole body, two bodies, tugging us along wherever they feel like going, the most dangerous places they can find. I was writing that line on my phone while following fifteen-month-old Harlan doing his duck walk down a wheelchair ramp. He leaned way over the side of it to look at some smooth rocks on the ground and, as I got to the word “dangerous,” toppled down into them. So much for art, some might say, but not me, I just learned how many people have put videos online with the words “spectacular sunset” in their titles, there’s one after another. I’d made one myself, a video I mean, because the sun had ducked behind an unmoving cloud at the horizon, and I knew from the internet how long it would take the sun to reappear in the gap between the bottom edge of the cloud and the top edge of the earth, a sun-sized gap dotted with its own minor cloud variants there to complicate the image, a sun moving slowly behind clouds, and I felt a low note being struck within, something I’ve learned is not sadness but gratitude in unknowing, a feeling that is hard but porous, that dissipates like short rain steaming off its first idea of the ground. Dark pink reformatting the blue, dark pink lights of our forever car, dark pink of hippies, dark pink life tassels, dark pink “to fly,” as you put it, “by the night of our pants.” I don’t know where the night goes, but I know we’ll be awake, and why, this long year of nights when people standing right next to us broke in half and spilled everywhere just because they paid attention. We don’t have an exact date for when we got engaged, there was no moment, no single question but instead weeks of them while an idea changed from something we could do into something we would, it was gestational, like this year has been, a year I hope is over. I’m glad you’re turning forty. I wish I were, too. I need a number for what we’ve come through, our second engagement, longer than the first, permanent, in fact, the questions of questions and the answer we give— give, deny, and give again.

Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Where where I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did, and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake, by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can, sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag say everything there is about my feelings toward you and the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing about that town and this one is that they both burned down once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe, I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards, twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love: squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again: it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.

June Jordan, 1936-2002 I. The city where I knew you was swift. A lover cabbed to Brooklyn (broke, but so what) after the night shift in a Second Avenue diner. The lover was a Quaker, a poet, an anti-war activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four. Wet snow fell on the access road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was neither lover, slept uptown. But the arteries, streetlights, headlines, phonelines, feminine plural links ran silver through the night city as dawn and the yellow cab passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for that day’s last or first coffee. The city where I knew you was rich in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc debates, demos, parades and picnics. There were walks I liked to take. I was on good terms with two rivers. You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words lighting the page, good neighbor on your homely street in Park Slope, whose Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers, dyke vegetarians, young gifted everyone, claimed some changes —at least a new food co-op. In the laundromat, ordinary women talked revolution. We knew we wouldn’t live forever but it seemed as if we could. The city where I knew you was yours and mine by birthright: Harlem, the Bronx. Separately we left it and came separately back. There’s no afterlife for dialogue, divergences we never teased apart to weave back together. Death slams down in the midst of all your unfinished conversations. Whom do I address when I address you, larger than life as you always were, not alive now? Words are not you, poems are not you, ashes on the Pacific tide, you least of all. I talk to my- self to keep the line open. The city where I knew you is gone. Pink icing roses spelled out PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake. The bookshop’s a sushi bar now, and PASSION is long out of print. We have a Republican mayor. Threats keep citizens in line: anthrax; suicide attacks. A scar festers where towers once were; dissent festers unexpressed. You are dead of a woman’s disease. Who gets to choose what battle takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends mourn you, with no time to mourn. II. You, who stood alone in the tall bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning with free-flying words, knew the power, terror in words, in flying; knew the high of solitude while the early light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint pen, yellow foolscap. You, who stood alone in your courage, never hesitant to underline the connections (between rape, exclusion and occupation...) and separations were alone and were not alone when morning blotted the last spark of you out, around you voices you no longer had voice to answer, eyes you were blind to. All your loves were singular: you scorned labels. Claimed black;woman, and for the rest eluded limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out self-definition. Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems alive on paper, in the present tense of a thousand students’ active gaze at printed pages and blank ones which you gave permission to blacken into outrage and passion. You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra, Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric, were a black American, born in Harlem, citizen soldier If you had to die—and I don’t admit it— who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man / we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you a few prime villains in the capitol, who are also mortal? June, you should be living, the states are bleeding. Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned dissident discourse. Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes still in progress now, as Jenin, Rammallah dominate, then disappear from the headlines. Palestine: your war. “To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi. “Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.” Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we infer, despairing. Top each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs, Palestinians, immigrants, its women. From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish, Kavanaugh, Shahid (who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir, cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”), Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor, and you, June Jordan.