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Even when they danced, Dad couldn't keep her in his arms. She'd spin off, leave him to fade back into the circle of others, clapping, hooting. Days when the pond would freeze, mothers took their children's hands and worried them around in slow circles. Mom raced in uncharitable loops past me and my brother like we weren't hers. Same way she didn't see my report card Fs as Fs. She'd take the matching color pen and glide the ballpoint so it looked like the B was always there. You could ask how she convinced the butcher his scale was wrong, how she'd roll her cart away with three-eighths of a pound of corned beef, paying for only a quarter – fat trimmed, the way dad liked, but she'd skim that question like she did all surfaces, even air. Now she's given her own memory the slip. Doctors say there's no reaching her.

of Azamor at the mouth of the Oum er Rbia River Province, Doukkala Dorantes’s slave, with Captain Castillo and myself Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca named in honor of Alhajahad grandson to the conqueror of Canaria, four far from a tribe, lost band of followers, at once master and slave, trader and healer lost, after shipwrecks, having starved, our thirst so great we drank salt as foretold by the Muslim woman from Hornachos We sought war and gold and souls among the barbarians, burned their villages, then separated, lost, but in the end escaped by the mercy en la pasión de nuestro redentor Jesucristo to tell the tale of the Seven Cities of Cíbola The hunger and thirst we endured the people always cured, whatever they had they gave us, warmed us by their fires, sheltered us People who mourned their dead children for a year, each morning before sunrise, the whole clan wept, noon and at daybreak, household didn’t eat for three months, so deep is their mourning for their children People of the bison, men naked, women and elders clothed in deerskin, the land parched, maizeless, they boiled their water with hot stones, we headed into the setting sun, following the maize road, surviving each day on a handful of deer fat, crossed the river, to the people who only ate polvos de paja,powders of grass, for four months of the year, they gave us flour and squash and frijoles and cotton mantles, we crossed the medranos, the people gave us beads and coral and emerald arrowheads We saw women in lengths of cotton, closed with ties in the front, half-sleeves of buckskin that touched the ground, and wearing shoes The people sought our blessings, thought we came from the sky, Estevanico speaking for us, as we passed through a great number of diverse languages, we knew six, but found a thousand differences We were fed on the hearts of deers, some feared and fled from us, the people having been chained by the ones who came before us, the ones we sought so feverishly to tell them No more killing No more chains, please Do no more harm, Holy Majesty, the wretched and disastrous end we suffered on account of our sins

Mount Olympus held nothing for them. No occasion of theirs could provoke Magniloquent debate. Nor act require That attic of gods to come swooping Onto the field, swaying the battle. Only the great booming of the ferry As it shouldered alongside the pier; Only the waitress counting their Saucers: it was this April morning That swung them by their heels. What was missing was the impersonal, The fated, a visionary marble address, The goddess skimming over blue water To whisper good news, or some stud, Swan, or bull brimming with light. Not a wingéd foot. Only Love, Recently decamped, hovered above The table, ready to be splendid. But their ten years’ war had ended.

How it must have been for them, when wind came to strike cottonwoods they called home down —silver bridges across a gun-smoke creek-bed, joining yellow meadow to meadow...how it must have been like the beginning of time, when the first one beat great wings (though so silent a field mouse would never even hear before talons sinking in...) and rose over the Blues to find this valley with others following. And their human eyes, forward-gazing in their round faces, they turned toward sound to catch it in feather discs, their hearing tuned beyond human imagining...and then they were gone, like mist dissipating in the lowlands, and an eye trained toward their going might, squinting, distinguish signs of intention written by pinions, stroking damp air in their westward rowing. And we told ourselves all water eventually finds the sea—our coming, their going—so synchronous; this was simply something we wanted, more than knowing, wholly to believe.

Her neon sign blared two Harlem blocks. In Aunt Grindle’s Elite Chitterling Shop the variegated dinoceras of a jukebox railed and wailed from everlasting to everlasting: Come back, Baby, come back—I need your gravy. Come back, Baby, come back—I’m weak and wavy. The talk of the town, I’m Skid Row bound— and I don’t mean maybe! (O scholars) this is the ambivalence of classical blues—and the coins came from the blue-devils’ pocket of Dipsy Muse. Across an alp of chitterlings, pungent as epigrams, Doctor Obi Nkomo the alter ego of the Harlem Gallery —as a news-waif hallooed, “The Desert Fox is dead!”— clicked his tongue —a residual habit from the veld— and —stout as a peasant in the Bread-and-Cheese War— said, “The lie of the artist is the only lie for which a mortal or a god should die.” Because nobody was a nobody to him, when from his thin charcoal lips irony escaped, it was malice toward none. The therapy of his slips by design into primitive objets d’art humanized the patrons of the Harlem Gallery as much as the masterworks he salvaged from the Lethe of the American Way in Black Manhattan. Mr. Guy Delaporte III cried out before the Regents, “Mr. Curator, what manner of man is this?” Unharassed by the ignis fatuus of a lost job, Doctor Nkomo clicked throatily and, with a chuckle whispered to me, “It’s not this buckle- head’s right or wrong if he does right or wrong.” Like a humming disk came the strophe of a rebel Bantu song. Hubris is an evil the Greeks (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus) boned and fleshed to wear the mask. Pride is the lust- sinewed wench the churchman speaks of first in the Table of Deadly Sins: Doctor Nkomo’s All hail to Man was a vane on the wing to winnow the grain in person, place and thing. Too many (perhaps) of the Regents’ corralled hours Doctor Nkomo and I left gored in bull rings of pros and cons: without a horse-opera god, the Ultra dons the matador’s black of the wherefore and the why, or hoists the white flag and lets the red cells in the marrow die. His idée fixe ebbed and flowed across the dinner table: “Absurd life shakes its ass’s ears in Cendrars’—not Nkomo’s—stable. If, anchored like hooks of a hag-fish to sea weeds and patient as a weaver in haute-lisse tapestry, a Rivera or a Picasso, with a camel-hair alchemy, paints in fresco-buono the seven panels of a man’s tridimensionality in variforms and varicolors— since virtue has no Kelvin scale, since a mother breeds no twins alike, since no man is an escape running wild from self-sown seeds— then, no man, judged by his biosocial identity in toto can be a Kiefekil or a Tartufe, an Iscariot or an Iago.” Is philosophy, then, a tittle’s snack? History, a peacock's almanac? He laughed down at me, a kidney without anchorage, and said: “You must see through the millstone, since you’re not like Julio Sigafoos and me— an ex-savage.” His ebony forefinger an assagai blade, he mused aloud as the box played in Harlem’s juke: “Curator of the Harlem Ghetto, what is a masterpiece? A virgin or a jade, the vis viva of an ape of God, to awaken one, to pleasure one— a way-of-life’s aubade.” Black as cypress lawn, the crag of a woman crabsidled in. The breath of a fraxinella in hot weather, her unlooked-for grin evaporated; then, like a well’s spew of mud and oil and raw gas, she blew her top. Dipsy Muse slumped like Uhlan when his feet failed to prop, his squeal the squeal of a peccary ax-poled in its pen. The stem and stern of the Elite Chitterling Shop pitched and ditched in the chatter and squawks, in the clatter and guffaws, as a Yarmouth yawl yaws when struck by a rogue-elephant sea. Scragged beyond the cavernous door, clamorous as a parrot against the rain, Dipsy Muse’s vanity scrabbled in vain like an anchor along the neck-gorge of a sea-floor. The jukebox railed and wailed: The black widow spider gets rid of her man, gets rid of her daddy as fast as she can. If you fool around, I know what I’ll do— like the black widow spider I’ll get rid of you. A giraffine fellow whose yellow skin mocked the netted pattern of a cantaloupe opened his rawhide pocketbook to sniff of dope a whiff, with a galley curse and an alley gag; then—laughing, choking, brimstoning his spouse, he caved in like Ben Franklin’s beggarly bag. Doctor Nkomo sighed: “The nicks and cuts under a stallion’s tail spur him to carry it higher; but the incised horsetail of a man drains the bones of his I-ness drier.” A black outsider with all his eggs but one in the White Man’s basket, he quaffed his beer, stretched his beanpole legs; then —a rubberneck Robin Hood in a morris dance— readied a hobby with another color for a ride beyond the Afrikaner’s stance. “O, Romeo,” he said, “O Casanova, prithee, what is chivalrous—what, barbaric? (Why gnaw one’s thoughts to the bone?) When a cavemen painted a rubric figure of his mate with a gritstone, Eros conquered Thanatos.” His eyes glistening dots of an ice plant, he said: “My Western friends —with deserts to be turned into green pastures— rent diving bells to get the bends, curfew morals, incubate tsetse flies, stage a barroom brawl of means and ends in a cul-de-sac. (Eagles dying of hunger with cocks in their claws!) That rebel jukebox! Hear the ghetto’s dark guffaws that defy Manhattan’s Bible Belt! Aeons separate my native veld and your peaks of philosophy: I made the trek, Curator, on Man’s vegetable ivory, in threescore years and ten.” A whale of a man, I thought,a true, but not a typical, mammal. He absorbs alien ideas as Urdu Arabic characters. In a sepulchral corner, I glimpsed a Scarlet Sister Mary on the make, her lips dark and juicy like a half-done T-bone steak. The giraffine fellow eyed us with a dog-ape look and outed his impatience in a sigh; a single-acting plunger cast the die, “Mister,who are you?” His catarrhal eye baited by Doctor Nkomo’s hair (the silvery gray patina of a Japanese alloy), he was but a squeaking Cleopatra boy when the reply came like the undershot of a Poncelet water wheel: “Obi Nkomo, my dear Watson; but that is nil, a water stair that meanders to no vessel. If you ask what am I, you dash on rocks the wisdom and the will of Solon and Solomon. Am I a bee drugged on the honey of sophistry? Am I a fish from a river Jordan, fated to die as soon as it reaches an Asphalt Sea?” Not a sound came from the yellow giraffine fellow— not a sound from the bowels of this Ixion bound to the everlasting revolving ghetto wheel. Nearer the ground than Townsend’s solitaire, Doctor Nkomo raked his hair … his brain … but he did not blink the cliff of ice. “What am I?What are you? Perhaps we are twin colors in a crystal. When I was a Zulu lad, I heard an old-wives’ tale for seven-foot-spear Chakas to be. In a barnyard near a buffalo trail a hunter discovered an eagle eating dung with chickens. He carried the feathered rex to a mountain top, although it raised the dickens. The hunter explained, ‘You're not a chicken, Aquila.’ He launched the ungainly bird into space. A fouled umbrella! In the wing lock of habit, it tumbled in disgrace … down … down … down a ghostified cock! “Out of the visaing face of the sun swooped the falcon baron clarioning the summons of an aeried race. Twice the barnyard eagle answered the Solar City wight; thrice he spiraled the simoom-blistered height— braked and banked and beaked upward, upward, into transfiguring light. Old Probabilities,what am I? Mister,what are you? An eagle or a chicken come home to roost? I wish I knew!” His character (in the Greek sense) phrased a nonplus—needed a metaphor’s translation. As an African prince, kings and chiefs peacocked themselves behind him; and he, himself tough-conscienced, had slain heathenism, the Giant Grim, without a backward cry. Scot and plot, caste and class, rifted right angles to the curving grain. The dream of Abraham’s bosom bottled long ago, he walked the Pork Barrel’s porphyry street with the man in the ears; and the glassy rivers of talk —Heraclitean, Fabian, Marxian— in the lights and shadows of the illuminating gas, bona fides, limned a figure and cast of Homo Aethiopicus who knew all riverine traffickers pass beyond the Seven Walls of Water—to join … the Last of the Greeks … of the Romans, the Last. Once in a while his apology shaped itself like the symbol Q in a skipper’s log. During the falconry in the chamber of the Regents, Mr. Delaporte III flew off at a tangent and off the handle. Doctor Nkomo’s Dandie Dinmount terrier epithet sprang across the tables. My gavel big-talked in slang. Like a turtle’s head, the session withdrew into its shell. The old Africanist bowed cavalierly and said: “I’ve called the gentleman a liar —it’s true— and I am sorry for it.” Wealth of the fettered, illth of the lettered, left his realism, like rock dust, unweathered: one who eyes the needle of the present to knit the future’s garb. In his own buttoned guise he seemed to speak to the man Friday in Everyman boned and lined and veined for the twelve great fatigues to the Promised Land: “The golden mean of the dark wayfarer’s way between black Scylla and white Charybdis, I have traveled; subdued ifs in the way; from vile-canaille balconies and nigger heavens, seen day beasts and night beasts of prey in the disemboweling pits of Europe and America, in the death-worming bowels of Asia and Africa; and, although a Dumb Ox (like young Aquinas), I have not forgot the rainbows and the olive leaves against the orient sky. “The basso profundo Gibbon of Putney —not the lyric tenor, Thomas of Celano— hymns the Dies Irae!”

In the valley of your art history book, the corpses stack in the back of a cart drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles show its considerable weight. He does this often. His velvet nostrils flare to indicate the stench. It’s the smell you catch after class while descending a urine-soaked subway stair on a summer night in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive: the odor of dead flowers, fear multiplied a thousand times. The train door’s hiss seals you inside with a frail boy swaying from a silver hoop. He coughs in your direction, his eyes are burn holes in his face. Back in the fourteenth-century print lying in your lap, a hand white as an orchid has sprouted from the pyramid of flesh. It claws the smoky air. Were it not for that, the cart might carry green cordwood (the human body knobby and unplaned). Wrap your fingers around your neck and feel the stony glands. Count the holes in your belt loop for lost weight. In the black unfurling glass, study the hard planes of your face. Compare it to the prom picture in your wallet, the orchid pinned to your chest like a spider. Think of the flames at your high school bonfire licking the black sky, ashes rising, innumerable stars. The fingers that wove with your fingers have somehow turned to bone. The subway shudders between dark and light. The ox plods across the page. Think of everyone you ever loved: the boy who gets off at your stop is a faint ideogram for each. Offer him your hand. Help him climb the stair.

1914 The phantoms flit before our dazzled eyes, Glory and honour, wrath and righteousness, The agèd phantoms in their bloodstained dress, Vultures that fill the world with ravenous cries, Swarming about the rock where, chained apart, In age-long pain Prometheus finds no rest From the divine flame burning in his breast, And vultures tearing at a human heart. Not yet the blessed hours on golden wings Bring to the crucified their sure relief, Deeper and deeper grows the ancient grief, Blackest of all intolerable things. Eternal Rebel, sad, and old, and blind, Bound with a chain enslaved by every one Of the dark gods who hide the summer sun, Yet art thou still the saviour of mankind. Free soul of fire, break down their chains and bars, Drive out those unclean phantoms of the brain, Till every living thing be friends again, And our lost earth true comrade to the stars.

The god of war assured King Arsounas, “Do not be fooled by words. No life is taken. Know that no one was ever born, nor does anyone die.” In the violent mini-eternity of the warrior, combat is conducted according to a ritual formal as song: no one is ever born, no one can ever die. The left-handed rockabilly guitarist whose left arm was severed by an RPG round at Dak To has come back to life in a part of my body that died long before we started to patrol this part of the river of eternal woe. His life is mine though I never lived it. The violent backwash of the rotors is crimsoned by a fine aerosol spray of blood while a loudspeaker amplifies the goddess’ excited laughter.

in the beginning there was no end the ground we walked on was a memory our shadows false stories our clothing space without time darkness was the color of angels and the stars did not weep 2.25.98

We’re out past the end game where things get fuzzy, less thingy, though in past times we practiced precision concrete as a slot machine. But to be precise you need to stop a moment which turns out to be impracticable and besides speed is of the essence. Don’t worry. “Of” can take care of itself and it’s fine to say “essence” now that it’s understood to mean ether, a kind of filler made either of inattention or absorption somewhere near the Planck length