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It's called a port, a harbor, haven, home, a city on the coast of my chest opened for a passage into my heart—which we say is where emotions live—and it's embedded, slipped into a shallow nest of flesh, a bump, a lump under the skin on the right so the narrow street can reach the marketplace of the aorta, receptive to any incoming ship, needle, boat, barge, unloading its spices, crates of dates, barrels of poisons, Etoposide phosphate, amethyst, amaranth, Cisplatin, amphorae of wine and olives. I carry it secretly under my skin because it is easier. I carry everything under my skin, so lightly I barely notice, watching from the ramparts the dangerous rocky anchorage below where goods and evils, bundled together and tied, arrive, waiting to be unloaded and poured out into a welcoming country.

Parc Georges-Brassens, Paris Most afternoons, I’d run laps through Parc Brassens where grows the second smallest vineyard I have ever seen, and where those silver, pruned-back stalks looked blunt, strung-out on wires, and mostly dead all winter. That was how I saw them. That’s all I expected. Even in the cold, I’d see a guy my age there, once a week, playing his guitar. He’d sit next to the bench where I’d be stretching. He rarely spoke— just to ask if I’d like a song— until the week before I left for good. I was sitting at the top of a hill about a hundred feet away from where if you stand tiptoe you can see the Eiffel Tower. He sat too close to me. We spoke of many things. Then he suggested we go at it right there, on the ground, under the sun. This is how one lives who knows that she will die: rolling in the arms of anyone when she can— rolling in the arms of a musician—aware that no one cares much what we do in little knolls behind reedy forsythia, in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle of living. And I would know now how he felt, and the ground against me, and whether he was rough or sweet. And what is possible would widen every hour. Oh, but me, I thought I was immortal.

In the lull, the afternoon sun warms the linseed field. The flowers are quiet, their bright subdued in the green while the mind wanders to the emerald mosque upon the hill, built around a flowing spring, the easy absolutions and ablutions in that mosque where the spring water has been let loose to meander over marble courtyards and inner chambers, across the geometric, green-tiled floor that cools the heels of the faithful.

No one can wish nothing. Even that death wish sophomores are nouveau-glib about reaches for a change of notice. “I’ll have you know,” it will say thirty years later to its son, “I was once widely recognized for the quality of my death wish.” That was before three years of navel-reading with a guru who reluctantly concluded some souls are bank tellers; perhaps more than one would think at the altitude of Intro. Psych., or turned on to a first raga, or joining Polyglots Anonymous. One trouble with this year’s avant-garde is that it has already taken it fifty years to be behind the avant-garde of the twenties with the Crash yet to come. And even free souls buy wives, fall in love with automobiles, and marry a mortgage. At fifty, semisustained by bourbon, you wonder what the kids see in that Galactic Twang they dance the Cosmic Konk to. You will have forgotten such energy, its illusion of violent freedoms. You must suffer memory to understanding in the blare of a music that tires you. There does come a death wish, but you will be trapped by your begetting, love what you have given, be left waiting in a noise for the word that must be whispered. No one can wish nothing. You can learn to wish for so little a word might turn you all the bent ways to love, its mercies practiced, its one day at a time begun and lived and slept on and begun.

What sacramental hurt that brings The terror of the truth of things Had changed thee? Secret be it yet. ’T was thine, upon a headland set, To view no isles of man’s delight, With lyric foam in rainbow flight, But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar, Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.

Where is my boy, my boy— In what far part of the world? The boy I loved best of all in the school?— I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart, Who made them all my children. Did I know my boy aright, Thinking of him as spirit aflame, Active, ever aspiring? Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed In many a watchful hour at night, Do you remember the letter I wrote you Of the beautiful love of Christ? And whether you ever took it or not, My boy, wherever you are, Work for your soul’s sake, That all the clay of you, all the dross of you, May yield to the fire of you, Till the fire is nothing but light! . . . Nothing but light!

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid bid Command, order, direct him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent concupiscent Sensual, desirous curds. Let the wenches wenches Girls dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. Let be be finale of seem. A possible literal paraphrase of this sentence might read “Let artifice and illusion give way to plain reality.” The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. In the context of death, an echo of Hamlet's comment to Claudius: “Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.” (Hamlet, act 4, scene 3) Take from the dresser of deal deal Cheap pine or fir wood , Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails fantails Birds with a fan-shaped tail once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Gertrude Stein. We could end there. But we won’t. Because we want to make meaning. Of something. to say something. Of value. In order that. It’s absolutely. The professor said. Wiggling his ears. In a satisfied way. And the students all said, Amen. That’s the way with critical acclaim. Absolutely. There are rooms. There are builders. There is a clock. There is a cake. There is a rope. There is a sounding to depths. But when she dies, what then? Who knew what it all meant? And when all the modernists are dead? The critics will babble and frenzy forever to find the nouns she never wrote between the crowded verbs and adverbs.

If you care about yourself at all, come to your own aid while there's still time. Marcus Aurelius 3.14 Citizen of Rome, you are the center of the universe. Problem is, circumference is—take a guess—me. “Some things are impatient to be born While others are impatient to die.” Don’t say I did not warn you. Next time they swear Shit happens, pop them square in the nose. This will not help anybody, but helping is The farthest thing from my imperial mind. If you keep your spirit blameless and pure People will drape you with laurels but No one will have sex with you in backseats Or marble mausoleums or anywhere else, A small price to pay for honor and respect Though not for me, being an emperor with no clothes. Just pretend today is the last day of your life And act accordingly—not that such strictures Apply to Yours Truly, sports fans. The forces of evil march on the fortress Of your self. I wish I could explain why. But what if evil did not exist and what if Your self was no fortress, see what I mean? Stoics get a bad name.Not in touch with feelings. Too rigid. Know-it-all cocksure mothers. So the Stoics retain PR firms, don’t tell a soul. If you really knew what was good for you, And you do, why do you care I’ll flail you alive? True, pissing off your emperor is a poor plan, Even one like me mounted bare-assed on a steed. Once upon a time, children…The story peters out. Circus revels and gladiatorial raves— Seen one, seem them all. Life is tiresome, When will it end and will we ever notice? I wish I knew. Really, I wish I cared. My pal, Marcus Aurelius, natters day and night: “Living is more like wrestling than dancing.” Guess he never saw me take Molly at the club. And he says we always have the option of Having no opinion. Right. Like he knows. OK, then, where did I put my pants?

I’m standing in field 17 of the long series, employing my scythe. Sometimes a conceptual dog bounds past me, though it’s never my conceptual dog. Occasionally future laureates gather for colloquium, though they’re rarely my future laureates. Thus, evening proceeds precisely the way the handbook describes it: as a proceeding: a runnel: shallow and babbling. Into it a stranger appears. He looks like my friend. I ask him, Are you my friend? Gravity telegraphs its heavy message through the lolling vines. The strangers says, I’ve sold all my clothes and am considering, for a career, perpetual suffering. The sun slides a tongue down the nape of the grain elevator. Lowing cattle. It’s the fourth of July. In Spain. I say, You are most vague and mysterious, friend. The dog paces. I set my scythe aside and tell him, I have employed this scythe mercilessly all my life and still everywhere these stalks extend. He says, Someone is always worse off than us even at our most pitiable. Yes, I say. I read it once in a magazine. And we laugh, let our enormous bellies jangle. It is good to laugh with my friend and let the scythe cool, I say. Yes, he says. Good.