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when you drop your mate at the dock or your children at school. Don’t be cool. Don’t be coy. Or if you do, don’t assume it’s okay to act that way. For today may be your last chance at joy before it flashes away like a tin toy in one of those shooting galleries in midways: those ducks that seem to paddle a stream that’s not a stream but a rotating axle, toothed for disappearance & reappearance, a spit without point or flame, along which randomly clucks the whole game.

A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it. Worry 1. A dog’s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this. It achieved nothing, all his worrying. Things worked out or they didn’t work out and now here he was, an old man, an old man who each year of his life bit or shook doubt as if to injure if not to kill, an old man with a good-looking son who resembles his deceased mother. It is uncanny how she rests there, as plain as day, in their boy's face. Worry 8. Cause mental distress or agitation to (a person, oneself); make anxious and ill at ease. 9. Give way to anxiety, unease, or disquietude: allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulties or troubles. He waits for his father’s death. His father has been taken off the ventilator and clearly will not be able to breathe for himself much longer. Earlier in the day the nurse mentioned something about an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain waves in the cerebral hemispheres, the parts of the brain that deal with speech and memory. But his brain stem is damaged; it seems now the test will not be necessary. The son expects an almost silent, hollow gasp to come from the old man’s open mouth. Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind. The release is jerky and convulsive. There is never the rasp or the choke the son expects, though one meaning of worry is to be choked on, to choke on.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle. This water bottle? That's right. Open it and drink from it. / At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes. Take off my shoes? Yes. Both Please. / At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever. A fever? Really? Yes. Really. / My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don’t like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in. I choose the independent film channel and HBO. Neither have news programs as far as I can tell. This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices. Instead of the news, HBO has The Sopranos. This week the indie channel is playing and replaying Spaghetti Westerns. Always someone gets shot or pierced through the heart with an arrow, and just before he dies he says, I am not going to make it. Where? Not going to make it where? On some level, maybe, the phrase simply means not going to make it into the next day, hour, minute, or perhaps the next second. Occasionally, you can imagine, it means he is not going to make it to Carson City or Texas or somewhere else out west or to Mexico if he is on the run. On another level always implicit is the sense that it means he is not going to make it to his own death. Perhaps in the back of all our minds is the life expectancy for our generation. Perhaps this expectation lingers there alongside the hours of sleep one should get or the number of times one is meant to chew food—eight hours, twenty chews, and seventy-six years. We are all heading there and not to have that birthday is not to have made it.

The heat out there this evening is contained heat like things keep applicable boxes at the ready then subsume their diverging constituent parts long ambivalent talks into midnight, all those glowy Sophia Coppola movies, Prosecco the sexiest records I know. I don’t feel how I know anymore to be more than something seeking my appalling lack of cinematic knowledge, fictive innocence & something like the break-down of those little boxes little tombs put their hands up in front of my mouth there’s a tacitly humiliating eulogy to drown out couldn’t feel much more stupid about feeling stupid over feeling stupid, living. Let me go & watch something moving several images some of them symbolize humility broken postures bloodshot eyes, intimately talking through this publicly I am not developing at all but just the same. So hot outside in the evening heat locking hazy jonquils & sunflowers dead for two weeks, ridiculously mournful as I’ll try & dimly think of the last real shock. I remember disgust perhaps & something like alarm (the phone going off in the middle of the night) pervasive disappointment &, for sure, horror, but shock?, as if the heat were seceding from the frames of its containment thought & feeling & establishing some wonderama ratios & beanpole features quick to surge beyond the human model. I know I do the heat out there this evening will & maybe I should be the one I know who has to stop. If I have to heal myself completely every time before I start I shouldn’t be. I think about the god of demurrment in the world or I think about it later having fallen to its love spell — the heat keeps me shut up at the table in the evening at the laptop arranging each letter with the same affectless love it’s nothing moving Avery born & Vivian to come December Kermit the Frog sings the Ave Maria while the white flag is endlessly lowered & raised through the whole master/slave dialectic forever. Don’t let me be wistful. Let me be the actual heat, forgiven its severity & leaving for the year. Mercy is just like the children’s zoo it’s real weird to think about anything now, think how fucking hard a fucking beach read used to be sewn into its spine delicious words from start to finish I could just lay there & die it’s so goddamn nice in this sigh vitrine real 9/11 kind of midnight Friday midnight, lamely shifting in my chair, the fan that stops the love that moves the world that stops goes out on gold weeks other weeks it just sits in the back. It collects statically. I hate that.

Don’t let that horse eat that violin cried Chagall’s mother But he kept right on painting And became famous And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse and rode away waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings attached

We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me that she screams underwater when she swims— that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool where she does laps every other day. Buttering her toast, not as if she had been concealing anything, not as if I should consider myself personally the cause of her screaming, nor as if we should perform an act of therapy right that minute on the kitchen table, —casually, she told me, and I could see her turn her square face up to take a gulp of oxygen, then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious. For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently, politely keeping the big secret that it is not all fun to be ripped by the crooked beak of something called psychology, to be dipped down again and again into time; that the truest, most intimate pleasure you can sometimes find is the wet kiss of your own pain. There goes Kath, at one pm , to swim her twenty-two laps back and forth in the community pool; —what discipline she has! Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages, that will never be read by anyone.

it’s iron, the bottle crouched on its white pedestal, long beak spout and wide open handle you could see starry sky through. Everybody was doing that new stitch, it had spread far west, oh yes, said Mrs. ______ at Knit & Purl, but how many hats can one person wear? I’d like to be more useful—say apprentice to a bung fitter, or make chipped ice, to hit something (not live) on the head, directly, I’ve not yet seen the Rock Wren though I saw a photo of one inserting pebbles in the airflow pipe of a mine, therein to lay its eggs.

Don't worry if your job is small, And your rewards are few. Remember that the mighty oak, Was once a nut like you.

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.