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Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? Before a face suddenly numinous, her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss? It’s documented torrents are unloosed by such events as recently produced not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us, one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. My eyes and groin are permanently swollen, I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless —and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast, sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

For Nelly Sachs It wasn't the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air? Numerous as the sand, they did not become sand, but came to naught instead. They've been forgotten in droves. Often, and hand in hand, like minutes. More than us, but without memorials. Not registered, not cipherable from dust, but vanished— their names, spoons, and footsoles. They don't make us sorry. Nobody can remember them: Were they born, did they flee, have they died? They were not missed. The world is airtight yet held together by what it does not house, by the vanished. They are everywhere. Without the absent ones, there would be nothing. Without the fugitives, nothing is firm. Without the forgotten, nothing for certain. The vanished are just. That's how we'll fade, too. * * * Für Nelly Sachs Nicht die Erde hat sie verschluckt. War es die Luft? Wie der Sand sind sie zahireich, doch nicht zu Sand sind sie geworden, sondern zu nichte. In Scharen sind sie vergessen. Häufig und Hand in Hand, wie die Minuten. Mehr als wir, doch ohne Andenken. Nicht verzeichnet, nicht abzulesen im Staub, sondern verschwunden sind ihre Namen, Löffel und Sohlen. Sie reuen uns nicht. Es kann sich niemand auf sie besinnen: Sind sie geboren, geflohen, gestorben? Vermißt sind sie nicht worden. Lückenlos ist die Welt, doch zusammengehalten von dem was sie nicht behaust, von den Verschwundenen. Sie sind überall. Ohne die Abwesenden wäre nichts da. Ohne die Flüchtigen wäre nichts fest. Ohne die Vergessenen nichts gewiß. Die Verschwundenen sind gerecht. So verschallen wir auch.

The jellyfish float in the bay shallows like schools of clouds, a dozen identical — is it right to call them creatures, these elaborate sacks of nothing? All they seem is shape, and shifting, and though a whole troop of undulant cousins go about their business within a single wave's span, every one does something unlike: this one a balloon open on both ends but swollen to its full expanse, this one a breathing heart, this a pulsing flower. This one a rolled condom, or a plastic purse swallowing itself, that one a Tiffany shade, this a troubled parasol. This submarine opera's all subterfuge and disguise, its plot a fabulous tangle of hiding and recognition: nothing but trope, nothing but something forming itself into figures then refiguring, sheer ectoplasm recognizable only as the stuff of metaphor. What can words do but link what we know to what we don't, and so form a shape? Which shrinks or swells, configures or collapses, blooms even as it is described into some unlikely marine chiffon: a gown for Isadora? Nothing but style. What binds one shape to another also sets them apart — but what's lovelier than the shapeshifting transparence of like and as: clear, undulant words? We look at alien grace, unfettered by any determined form, and we say: balloon, flower, heart, condom, opera, lampshade, parasol, ballet. Hear how the mouth, so full of longing for the world, changes its shape?

My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it Under a flowing moon until he knew it; Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs, And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs. “Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.” Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim About their buried idol, drowned so cold He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold. A country like the dark side of the moon, A cider-apple country, harsh and boon, A country savage as a chestnut-rind, A land of hungry sorcerers. Your mind? —Your mind is water through an April night, A cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white, A lavender as fragrant as your words, A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds, Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth, Flutters and beats about those lovely things. You are the soul, enchanted with its wings, The single voice that raises up the dead To shake the pride of angels. I have said.

I suppose so. I was living in an attic in Philadelphia It became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer looking for work . . . which was a god damned lie; I was a writer looking for a little time and a little food and some attic rent. a couple days later when I finally came home from somewhere the landlady said, there was somebody looking for you. and I said, there must be some mistake. she said, no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write a history book. oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s rent—I mean, on the cuff— so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the hot pigeons suffer and fuck on my hot roof. I turned the radio on real loud drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book interesting but true. but the bastard never came back, and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang going West and they gave us cans of food but no openers and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of railroad cars a hundred years old with dust the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like candlewick and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in Texas all green with nice-looking houses in the distance I found a park slept all night and then they found me and put me in a cell and they asked me about murders and robberies. they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books to prove their efficiency but I wasn’t that tired and they drove me to the next big town fifty-seven miles away the big one kicked me in the ass and they drove off. but I lucked it: two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being dismantled. later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War! and they all came to her house— all the cowboys, all the cowboys: fat, dull and covered with dust. and we all shook hands. I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said oh, you’re a writer, eh? and I said: well, some think so. and some still think so . . . others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet. two weeks later they ran me out of town.

Can't swim; uses credit cards and pills to combat intolerable feelings of inadequacy; Won't admit his dread of boredom, chief impulse behind               numerous marital infidelities; Looks fat in jeans, mouths clichés with confidence,               breaks mother's plates in fights; Buys when the market is too high, and panics during               the inevitable descent; Still, Pop can always tell the subtle difference               between Pepsi and Coke, Has defined the darkness of red at dawn, memorized               the splash of poppies along Deserted railway tracks, and opposed the war in Vietnam               months before the students, Years before the politicians and press; give him               a minute with a road map And he will solve the mystery of bloodshot eyes;               transport him to mountaintop And watch him calculate the heaviness and height               of the local heavens; Needs no prompting to give money to his kids; speaks               French fluently, and tourist German; Sings Schubert in the shower; plays pinball in Paris;               knows the new maid steals, and forgives her.

Gravel path stirred by the rain fallen hard through the sweetgum trees, path that leads to the bend where the trail splits open in air: Everything is lighted evenly. It is a queer hour. The difference between light and shadow is the jealousy turn in the eye. The sun is all in the bottle cap that glints in the silt like a djinn’s brass hilt, in the way some lea  is frozen unto the air, some warm leaf heavywet here, and in how, just there: The strangeness strangely passes. And evening mounts. I can’t get the life out of my head. There is no glamour on this path but if I return I will find it in the thought of how I looked for some. I stoop to look at the veins that sweep like Latin roots in the satin of things, dream: The difference between something and nothing, which is nothing. The gravel lies on itself like dust lies on water. No, no, there are no mothers here. I bend to see it all, the little stones cast-wise. Things chase themselves away from the mode of things. I find a quartz, milked clear: I could not hear its accent if it sang, no matter how far off it formed. What dead hand I should feel if I lifted it.

There was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence, as if this shedding of syllables could somehow fuse them to the sky. There were the men who had been shepherds so long they walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness. Some prized the pilgrimage, wrapping themselves in new white linen to ride buses across miles of vacant sand. When they arrived at Mecca they would circle the holy places, on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return, their lean faces housing mystery. While for certain cousins and grandmothers the pilgrimage occurred daily, lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes. These were the ones present at births, humming quietly to perspiring mothers. The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses, forgetting how easily children soil clothes. There were those who didn’t care about praying. The young ones. The ones who had been to America. They told the old ones, you are wasting your time. Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones. They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig, the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone. And occasionally there would be one who did none of this, the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool, who beat everyone at dominoes, insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats, and was famous for his laugh.

a sense of his thirty-third year takes his elbow * any kind of he says sniff must be allowed to mature * an accident leaves him and finally the swallows * by way of curiosity he is no hand by no means to depict a woman * often he knows a crowded room * just out of his mother he falls between the pursuit and a case he’d sooner forget * he has a female muscle camouflaged for impact * streets enough to welcome snow * he knowingly succumbs to the brown sitzbaths * his wife touches a foretaste so vivid that the sheen of timber upsets * in going this sort of persistence * difficulties of a heavy body placed in alternating gestures

This film, like many others, claims we’ll enjoy life now that we’ve come through difficulties, dangers so incredibly condensed that they must be over. If the hardship was undergone by others, we identified with them and, if the danger was survived by simpler life forms, they’re included in this moment when the credits roll and we don’t know when to stand