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First, night opened out. Bodies took root from rotting salt and seawater into evidence of red life. Relentless waves pumped tidal air into a single heartbeat. In the pulp of shadow and space, water sucked our people from sleep. That’s how it all began. At least that’s all we can remember to tell. It began with water and heartbeat. In minutes we tunneled through corn woman’s navel into tinges of moist red men and women. Yawning, we collected our chins, knees, breasts, and sure-footed determination. A few thousand years before Moses parted the Red Sea, and the God with three heads was born in the Middle East, the Choctaw people danced our homeland infra red. Finally when the stranger’s arms reached to strangle the West, Grandmother eavesdropped on the three-faced deity who said that chaos was coming. When he puckered his lips and tried to kiss her she made it rain on him. “Maybe you’ve forgotten you were born of water and women,” she said, walking away laughing.

As a boy I bicycled the block w/a brown mop top falling into a tail bleached blond, gold-like under golden light, like colors of Noble Knights ’banging on corners, unconcerned w/the colors I bore—a shorty too small to war with, too brown to be down for the block. White Knights became brown Kings still showing black & gold on corners now crowned, the block a branch branded w/la corona graffitied on garage doors by the pawns. As a teen, I could’ve beamed the crown, walked in w/out the beat down custom, warred w/my cousin who claimed Two-Six, the set on the next block decked in black & beige. But I preferred games to gangs, books to crooks wearing hats crooked to the left or right fighting for a plot, a block to spot & mark w/blood of boys who knew no better way to grow up than throw up the crown & be down for whatever.

Long after I married you, I found myself in his city and heard him call my name. Each of us amazed, we headed to the café we used to haunt in our days together. We sat by a window across the paneled room from the table that had witnessed hours of our clipped voices and sharp silences. Instead of coffee, my old habit in those days, I ordered hot chocolate, your drink, dark and dense the way you take it, without the swirl of frothy cream I like. He told me of his troubled marriage, his two difficult daughters, their spiteful mother, how she’d tricked him and turned into someone he didn’t really know. I listened and listened, glad all over again to be rid of him, and sipped the thick, brown sweetness slowly as I could, licking my lips, making it last.

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot, Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off Before it has a chance to go two blocks, At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage Is on the corner facing west, and there, Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out. Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps— Five on a side, the old bubble-head style, Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low. One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes An E and O. And one is squat, without A head at all—more of a football type. Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards. He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46 He bucketed three hundred ninety points, A county record still. The ball loved Flick. I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty In one home game. His hands were like wild birds. He never learned a trade, he just sells gas, Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while, As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube, But most of us remember anyway. His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench. It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though. Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette. Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball, Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates. Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

Sometimes, at dawn, I think I hear the high sobbing cry of the muezzin hanging in the sky before it’s light but then, I drop off to sleep again.

Bartender, make it straight and make it two— One for the you in me and the me in you. Now let us put our heads together: one Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun. I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw. When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent. What I shall tell you now, as man is man, You’ll find in neither Bible nor Koran. It happened after my return from France At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance. We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then, The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again. But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn The Goddess Justice, like September Morn. Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof? I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head, As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said: “To make the world safe for Democracy, You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui? To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose That swung the Negro higher than a goose.” Bartender, who has dotted every i? Crossed every t? Put legs on every y? Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh Like a maniac on a broken phonograph. Bartender, make it straight and make it three— One for the Negro . . . one for you and me.

By the stream, where the ground is soft and gives, under the slightest pressure—even the fly would leave its footprint here and the paw of the shrew the crescent of its claws like the strokes of a chisel in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain leaves a crater to catch the first silver glint of sun when the clouds slide away from each other like two tired lovers, and the light returns, pale, though brightened by the last chapter of late autumn: copper, rusted oak, gold aspen, and the red pages of maple, the wind leafing through to the end the annals of beech, the slim volumes of birch, the elegant script of the ferns ... for the birds, it is all notations for a coda, for the otter an invitation to the river, and for the deer—a dream in which to disappear, light-footed on the still open book of earth, adding the marks of their passage, adding it all in, waiting only for the first thick flurry of snowflakes for cover, soft cover that carries no title, no name.

He slaughtered a six of Miller in thanks when his supposed schizophrenia turned out to be mere panic, fewer than half the syllables and “easily managed with the new medications.” Chanted that mantra when his piano teacher’s voice droned on like an undertow beneath Chopin hours after she herself had gone home to Queens and when stop signs seemed to say slightly more than stop, seemed in fact to convey highly specific messages to him and him alone suggesting he assume certain key responsibilities including twenty-four-hour telephone contact with his finacée “to make sure nothing bad happens to her” and the immediate emergency closure of the Holland Tunnel…Oh, come on, Doc! If this isn’t schizo what is? And after all it took so long to nose the rental car’s savage servility through New Jersey for Thanksgiving at her mother’s that by the time he arrived he can’t possibly have been the same person he had been when he left Brooklyn and is that not a kind of multiple person- ality? It took hours. And then it was awkward. Which could describe so many things. The gangly half-dismantled turkey splayed on its platter. Her stepfather's lecture on property taxes and tougher sentences. The seven-dollar jug of Chablis which would come up later while he held back her hair. Every good boy deserves fudge and he tried to be one and earn huge loamy slabs of it. He practiced his scales on the steering wheel as he breezed by stop sign after stop sign toward the tunnel, stopped to search for the exact change, then resumed rehearsal as she, deeply soused, snored wetly beside him smelling like something spilled on a rug. He keyed each étude over and over as though there would not be many more chances or changes which I typed first by accident but had the chance to change for which I am thankful. But what am I doing in here.

It is mid-October. The trees are in their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green, orange) outside the classroom where students take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if identifying lines from Blake or Keats was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words they never saw before. I am thinking of my parents, of the six decades they’ve been together, of the thirty thousand meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept under the same roof. I am wondering who could have fashioned the test that would have predicted this success? Who could have known?

Where can the dead hope to stash some part of themselves, if not in the living? And so when I had a daughter, I gave her your name. She does not use it. She goes by a silly, other thing she was called once in fun, and then often enough that it stuck. But oh her hideous pill- eyed toys — to them each, she has given her given name, and so it is you I hear her again and again calling to. It is your name she shrieks to the bale-head farmer, the woven goat, the cop made of buttons and rags. Your name, to the squat gray dog on wheels, tipping on its side as she drags it by a red string. That dog, always prone and pulled along, as though constantly being killed and paraded through town to make an example. What did it do — Whatever it did, don’t do it.