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You call me to the bath, where by evening light before bed I rub the ointment into your maculate back. I place my hand between the wings of your scapulae, where you cannot reach, cannot see—the arc of your life revealed in its pattern of coffee-colored spots—and hover there awhile, remembering how we watched the lover read the manuscript painted on the skin of his beloved; how he pressed the words to his chest and face—and cried out. The arteries in my palm open, their warmth rising between us as I massage you, neither sexual nor umbilical, this connection—you trusting your back to me, and me with no deceit. Only salve, only unguent. Only balm.

I miss you like the moon misses the sun both go on and on for ages one after each other without never really meeting!

Moving forward or back? Which way am I? I wake grasping your nightgown. I am still there. In the haze of faces burning. Arch of spreading flame, black-haired girl in saddle shoes and plaid skirt, knee-deep in a yard of violets. Her father, in clogs, pounding a path home, balancing buckets of carp on a bamboo pole. Daughter, father, splash of carp, magenta rows, white light's flashbulb zing fades as I cling to silk's edge, slats of ribs a bridge I take to your belly's bulge. My pollen inside you, nubs of arms and legs, hands with fingers petaling. Vase of roses on the night stand. Your gold ring engraved with my initials. The father, feet from the gate, his daughter kneeling with shears, pruning flowerbeds. Sealed in sheets, I draw close to your body, place my ear against flesh, listen to the rhythmic thumping inside water.

i. My body a full echo                I dawdle down to the creek Ask the god of blood for Abundance     continuity My offering      the syrup of pressed beans   & A 7-winged tulip ii. Later the rains swell the creek with coffee            the storm        a beckoned sheet The immortal herself reaping the earth          the tongues cut out of the cows iii. I walk in                       as the wash      attempts its valiant swallow A cafeteria aid             wipes the cotton from the counter Her bald eyes              aurora with       seeds You brought that           didn’t you? iv. My bottom lip a pink venom     My desire a valley with legs       His steady fingers toying the tea            I look up to a straight line and bury it    Can’t downsize what hithers me Every now & then a troubled thirst opens my mouth for a song that does not come I feel it all until a fixed voice decides No      but wait      you’re the water

Two wind chimes, one brass and prone to anger, one with the throat of an angel, swing from my porch eave, sing with the storm. Last year I lived five months under that shrill choir, boxing your house, crowding books into crates, from some pages your own voice crying. Some days the chimes raged. Some days they hung still. They fretted when I dug up the lily I gave you in April, blooming, strangely, in fall. Together, they scolded me when I counted pennies you left in each can, cup, and drawer, when I rechecked the closets for remnants of you. The last day, the house empty, resonant with space, the two chimes had nothing to toll for. I walked out, took them down, carried our mute spirits home.

Eyes wide like an owl’s, an aspirin-pale face foretells in lamplight how it accumulates age. Somewhat masked, somewhat naked, there’s no way to know what others see when looking at it. All five of the body’s senses crowd on this small planet a weather of hair surrounds. My face is not a democracy—the eyes are tyrants and the ears are radical dissenters. In the conversations of eyebrows, mine are whispers. Like the window at night, the face reflects too, uncertain how to change when greeting itself (and is it not cruel when another’s face won’t reflect acknowledgment of you?). My mother, my father, and my brother are found in the blurring of feature and expression. Cynicism finds no purchase here; the same cannot be said for sadness (and look deeper—anger hides in the jaw). And while the nose quietly broods like an actor rehearsing his soliloquy, the empty page of the forehead, when I raise my brows, fills suddenly with questions.

And all this while I have been playing with toys A toy power station a toy automobile a house of blocks And all this while far off in other lands Thousands and thousands, millions and millions— You know—you see the pictures Women carrying their bony infants Men sobbing over graves Buildings sculpted by explosion Earth wasted bare and rotten— And all this while I have been shopping, I have Been let us say free And do they hate me for it Do they hate me

One hand slops suds on, one hustles them down like a blind. Brusque noon glare, filtered thus, loosens and glows. For five or six minutes he owns the place, dismal coffee bar, and us, its huddled underemployed. A blade, black line against the topmost glass, begins, slices off the outer lather, flings it away, works inward, corrals the frothy middle, and carves, with quick cuts, the stuff down, not looking for anything, beneath or inside. Homes to the last, cleans its edges, grooms it for the end, then shaves it off and flings it away. Which is splendid, and merciless. And all in the wrist. Then, he looks at us. We makers of filth, we splashers and spitters. We sitters and watchers. Who like to see him work. Who love it when he leaves and gives it back: our grim hideout, half spoiled by clarity.

1 The lean hands of wagon men put out pointing fingers here, picked this crossway, put it on a map, set up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns, found a hitching place for the pony express, made a hitching place for the iron horse, the one-eyed horse with the fire-spit head, found a homelike spot and said, “Make a home,” saw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttling people, shunting cars, shaping the junk of the earth to a new city. The hands of men took hold and tugged And the breaths of men went into the junk And the junk stood up into skyscrapers and asked: Who am I? Am I a city? And if I am what is my name? And once while the time whistles blew and blew again The men answered: Long ago we gave you a name, Long ago we laughed and said: You? Your name is Chicago. Early the red men gave a name to the river, the place of the skunk, the river of the wild onion smell, Shee-caw-go. Out of the payday songs of steam shovels, Out of the wages of structural iron rivets, The living lighted skyscrapers tell it now as a name, Tell it across miles of sea blue water, gray blue land: I am Chicago, I am a name given out by the breaths of working men, laughing men, a child, a belonging. So between the Great Lakes, The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie, The living lighted skyscrapers stand, Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow, streamers of smoke and silver, parallelograms of night-gray watchmen, Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging. 6 The wheelbarrows grin, the shovels and the mortar hoist an exploit. The stone shanks of the Monadnock, the Transportation, the People’s Gas Building, stand up and scrape at the sky. The wheelbarrows sing, the bevels and the blueprints whisper. The library building named after Crerar, naked as a stock farm silo, light as a single eagle feather, stripped like an airplane propeller, takes a path up. Two cool new rivets says, “Maybe it is morning.” “God knows.” Put the city up; tear the city down; put it up again; let us find a city. Let us remember the little violet-eyed man who gave all, praying, “Dig and dream, dream and hammer, till your city comes.” Every day the people sleep and the city dies; every day the people shake loose, awake and build the city again. The city is a tool chest opened every day, a time clock punched every morning, a shop door, bunkers and overalls counting every day. The city is a balloon and a bubble plaything shot to the sky every evening, whistled in a ragtime jig down the sunset. The city is made, forgotten, and made again, trucks hauling it away haul it back steered by drivers whistling ragtime against the sunsets. Every day the people get up and carry the city, carry the bunkers and balloons of the city, lift it and put it down. “I will die as many times as you make me over again, says the city to the people, I am the woman, the home, the family, I get breakfast and pay the rent; I telephone the doctor, the milkman, the undertaker; I fix the streets for your first and your last ride— Come clean with me, come clean or dirty, I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers; I remember all you forget. I will die as many times as you make me over again.” Under the foundations, Over the roofs, The bevels and the blueprints talk it over. The wind of the lake shore waits and wanders. The heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles. The winkers of the morning stars count out cities And forget the numbers.

In fresh snow that fell on old snow I see wild roses in bloom, springtime, an orchard of apple and peach trees in bloom, lovers of different preferences walking naked in new snow, not shivering, no illusion, no delusion, no bluebells. Why should I live by reality that murders? I wear a coat of hope and desire. I follow fallen maple leaves abducted by the wind. I declare I am a Not Quite, almost a nonentity. I fought for that “almost.” I lift up and button my collar of hope. I simply refuse to leave the universe. I’m all the aunts in my father’s house and all my uncles too. I had fifty great-great-grand-grandmothers who got to Paradise, like Enoch, without dying. Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow with Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees to find those lost in the blizzard that God made for Himself because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth. With touch He can hear, taste, smell, see, and He has fourteen other senses there are no words for. Memory, He said, is a sense, not a power. Who am I to disagree with Him? There are some vegetarians among you, so I will tell you what He eats. It’s green, and cows and sheep eat it too. He picks His teeth. I think I heard Him say, “Gentlemen don’t void in swimming pools or the ocean. I like your dirty jokes, I prefer them in meter.” He told me to carry on. I thought “On” was a Norse god. He said, “No, it’s just a burden that gets heavier, the burden makes you stronger.” “Isn’t on the Japanese debt to ancestors?” I countered. He resents hearing the prayers and praise of sycophants. “How come you are speaking to me?” I asked. He speaks Silence, languages I call “Night” and “Day.” His politics? “Nations” to Him are “a form of masturbation.” Original blasphemy amuses Him, describes His coitus with living creatures, mothers, His self, a whale, a male praying mantis dying to mate. He likes to hear, “do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” Instead of a prayer rug, I stitch Him a pillow of false proverbs: “in the house of the hangman talk of rope.” I asked Him if I ever did anything he liked. “You planted eggplant too close to the cucumbers and they married. I blessed that wedding, sent roses by another name.” “How come you speak to me?” I asked. He said He was not speaking to me, “Consult Coleridge on the Imagination.” He waved, He did not say goodbye.