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It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in schoolday morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at fifteen there’s so much left to believe in, that a girl with sunset in her eyes, with a kind smile, and a bright blue miniskirt softly shading her bare thighs     really could be The Goddess. Even the gloss on her lips sighed Kiss me    and you’ll never do homework again. Some Saturdays my ace, Terry, would say, “Guess who was buying Teaberry gum in the drugstore on Stenton?” And I could see the sweet epiphany still stunning his eyes and I knew that he knew that I knew he knew     I knew— especially once summer had come, and the sun stayed up till we had nothing else to do but wish and wonder about fine sistas in flimsy culottes and those hotpants! James Brown screamed about: Crystal Berry, Diane Ramsey, Kim Graves, and her. This was around 1970: Vietnam to the left of us, Black Muslims to the right, big afros all over my Philadelphia. We had no idea where we were, how much history had come before us—how much cruelty, how much more dying was on the way. For me and Terry, it was a time when everything said maybe, and maybe being blinded by the beauty of a tenth grader was proof that, for a little while, we were safe from the teeth that keep chewing up the world. I’d like to commend my parents    for keeping calm, for not quitting their jobs or grabbing guns    and for never letting up about the amazing “so many doors open to good students.” I wish I had kissed Delores Jepps. I wish I could have some small memory of her warm and spicy mouth to wrap these hungry words around. I would like to have danced with her, to have slow-cooked to a slow song in her sleek, toffee arms: her body balanced between the Temptations’ five voices and me—a boy anointed with puberty, a kid with a B average and a cool best friend. I don’t think I’ve ever understood how lonely I am, but I was closer to it at fifteen because I didn’t know anything: my heart so near the surface of my skin I could have moved it with my hand.

1 Delphine is snug in the corruptible quiet, her heart all lurgy. She is vigorous with postures and slackening her jaw. The vogue memory is how when she was ten she stuck her tongue out really far and her friend said, “That makes you a lemon.” Retrospectively, what she wanted was a perm and a dad that gave money for the arcade. 2 Delphine lies down in the corner and gets up and lies down again, etc. This is so she knows she’s lain down on every bit of the floor. 3 There’s no one to see, so makeup is taken very seriously. If she French kisses the window her hair starts to curl — it is all very boudoir. Delphine expected to be bored. What she needs to say aloud is smooch. 4 Delphine’s heart is more woolen than sure. She nipped off the fur buds from the pussy willow and strung them into a necklace — a means of clustering wants. In the faraway land, her old milk glass holds other people’s toothbrushes and curdling water. 5 Precision here is superfluous as cut flowers. On the seafront the shrubs are meek in the blossoming wind. Delphine has worked on her complexion. Bestowed with peaches, she’s personal limelight. 6 At night her cruelties sneak up the ladder of her throat. Its delphinedelphinedelphine on steamed-up mirrors, always in joined-up finger-writing. 7 Singing is only permitted in the dark. Delphine is judging her own obedience.Look at me being strict! But she has to remind herself of the rules, hourly. Deceit is its own discipline. 8 Today the shrubs are insolent, waiting for adults to prepare a new game. Delphine considers ceremonial magic, but how to practice without a little magic escaping? 9 Wish yourself into a lovely place, she thinks. Loveliness would include shrubs without such expressions! 10 Wisdom may well have been squandered on seafronts and lipstick.So many years afraid of waste is its own waste

Doubt not the artist and his age (though bald as the pilled head of garlic), married or divorced and even vying downstage, are both aware that God or Caesar is the handle to the camel’s hair. Ye weeping monkeys of the Critics’ Circus (colorless as malic acid in a Black Hamburg grape), what profit it to argue at the wake (a hurrah’s nest of food and wine with Auld Lang Syne to cheer the dead), if the artist wrought (contrary to what the black sanders said) for Ars’, the Cathedra’s, or the Agora’s sake? No critic a Gran Galeoto between the Art-lover and the work of art, the world-self of the make- believe becomes the swimming pool of a class, the balsam apple of the soul and by the soul and for the soul, or silvered Scarahaeus glass in which Necessity’s figuranti of innocence and guilt mirror themselves as they pass. If brass, in the name of Id or Sinai or Helicon, wakes up the trumpet, is it to blame? Although the moment’s mistone and the milieu’s groan sharp an unbearable ache in the f of the age’s bone, this pain is only the ghost of the pain the artist endures, endures, —like Everyman— alone. The artist is a zinnia no first frost blackens with a cloven hoof; an eyeglass —in the eye of a dusty wind— to study the crosses and tangles in warp and woof; an evergreen cherry parasitic upon a winter sun; a paltry thing with varicose veins when the twelve fatigues are done. Under the Lesbian rule of the seeress Nix, blood and black bile mix: in the second of a bestiary-goat’s caprice, Elan, the artist’s undivorceable spouse becomes a Delilah of Délice or a Xanthippe bereft of sonnets from the Portuguese. In Chronos Park the Ars-powered Ferris wheel revolves through golden age and dark as historied isms rise and fall and the purple of the doctor’s robe (ephemeral as the flesh color of the fame flower) is translated into the coffin’s pall. The St. John’s agony of the artist in his gethsemane without a St. John’s fire— the Vedic god of the snaky noose discovers; his far far cry, like the noise of block tin, crackles the sky: “Wayfaring man unneighbored by a wayfaring tree (though one may rue this bark of the Moreton Bay laurel), it is true a something trans- Brow or cis- Brow —or both— wills one to the wings of the eagle, or to the teats of the sow. Yet, no lip need sneer to the beard of an ape of God, ‘Thou thing of no bowels, thou!’ So, I say as the Sire who chastens and rewards, ‘Let thy blue eyes resist white stars of red desire.’” Like the shape of Africa, the raison d’étre of Art is a question mark: without the true flight of the bat, it is a hanker in the dark. Not as face answers face in water, but as windows answer each other, one viewer, lyrical as Hafiz in his cups, discovers a lark; his companion, flat as an open Gladstone bag, spies out an ark. The blow of a fist on the nape, this question came from a Dog, “What color can escape the fluky flues in the cosmic flux?” Perhaps the high-C answer lies in the wreck the sea sucks back into her bowels. Let the Say be said: “In Philae the color is blue; in Deir-el-Baheri, red; in Abydos, yellow— and these are by the ravens fed.” Art is not barrel copper easily separated from the matrix; it is not fresh tissues —for microscopic study— one may fix; unique as the white tiger’s pink paws and blue eyes, Art leaves her lover as a Komitas deciphering intricate Armenian neums, with a wild surmise. At once the ebony of his face became moodless—bare as the marked-off space between the feathered areas of a cock; then, his spoon-shape straightened. His glance as sharp as a lance- olate leaf, he said: “It matters not a tinker’s dam on the hither or thither side of the Acheron how many rivers you cross if you fail to cross the Rubicon!” Postscript: He was robbed and murdered in his flat, and the only witness was a Hamletian rat. But out of Black Bourgeoise came— for John Laugart— a bottle of Schiedam gin and Charon’s grin and infamy, the Siamese twin of fame.

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure stubbornness its batteries go dead. The bank robber leans on his horn in desperation while his partner snaps the rubber bands around the money. A band, you can hear it up the river, first like the new heart of the child on your lap, then like an old moon pulsing below your nails, or something softly moving through your arms and throat. Here, press here, not just drums. A clown is throwing caramels at the porch rails, balloons are exploding or sailing up the river. The lucky trees, to be able to stand that close. If we talk too much, we’ll surely miss it. And at the still center of summer it starts; cowboys ride out out of another life, old cars get up from the dead and dance like cripples hired out for a tent meeting. Up and down the sidewalk, the town sucks in its breath like a girl taking short gasps just above her trumpet, or a fire engine’s horn, heaving like a drowned man or a heat wave slapping against the water tower, this afternoon just like a parade. The sore-footed ponies are loaded down with flags and the library float says “Immortal Shakespeare,” says it with carnations and the hides of roses, says it with a jester and a princess wearing wings. And she stutters, but no one cares or can hear her. Except for the man on the unicycle who tips his top hat to the crowd, who swears he will follow her anywhere, who follows the mayor and the city council, who follows the tap dancing class and the Future Farmers, the Lions Club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars; who clasps a carnation between his teeth and sways back and forth like a broken clock. And then things begin again, a car follows the man on the unicycle and suddenly it’s just another car, a pair of dice dangling from the rearview mirror, a woman giving her breast to a child and another child carefully peeling a crayon, then slowly giving the peels to his grandmother, who opens the big brass clasps of her pocketbook and lets the bright curls drop slowly to the bottom like confetti or a boy’s first haircut. Like a first yellow leaf that fell when we weren’t looking. Because it’s summer. Like a smooth yellow pebble that is rubbing and rubbing in the new left boot of the drummer, that someone skimmed on the river exactly at three o’clock. Not out of anger or of boredom this time, but as if it could almost wear wings.

If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore. You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance. There are laws of   heaven and those of   place and those who see the sky in the water, angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your house after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are going by foot, bring a stick, a third leg, and honor the great disorder, the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds. Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there is a little water in things you take for granted, a little charity and squalor for the smallest forms of life. Voodoo was always mostly charity. People forget. If you shake a tablecloth outside at night, someone in your family dies. There are laws we make thinking it was us who made them. We are not us. We are a floodplain by the Mississippi that once poured slaves upriver to the fields. We are a hurricane in the making. We could use a magus who knows something about suffering, who knows a delta’s needs. We understand if   you want a widow to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes. He is not himself anyway and walks barefoot across a landscape that has no north. Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog, a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind, a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless, than you will ever be.

Like a wedding ring, or the bride’s green ribbon, you shelter me. No business but war. You remind me of a kind of heaven. A cairn of rocks casting shadows in the shape of a man. Thou art the table before me in the sight of my adversaries, thou dost anoint my head: oil and rain, thou art a ghost with a girl’s mouth, thou art not the making of my dreams—under water, under cliff, under this long suitcase of earth and bombs. More than any mortal could gather beneath the skirt of the sky. You are never eager, nor famished, nor pale with a craving for white clothes or my nocturnes. Let your lynx approach, even tiger, even its wild outline. You need no ferryman or the obolus of the dead. If I put a coin in my mouth I taste copper, not the corpse. They say that bodies fertilized the ground so well the trees grow bright and tall. The bones blur. We return alive.

When you’re cold—November, the streets icy and everyone you pass homeless, Goodwill coats and Hefty bags torn up to make ponchos— someone is always at the pay phone, hunched over the receiver spewing winter’s germs, swollen lipped, face chapped, making the last tired connection of the day. You keep walking to keep the cold at bay, too cold to wait for the bus, too depressing the thought of entering that blue light, the chilled eyes watching you decide which seat to take: the man with one leg, his crutches bumping the smudged window glass, the woman with her purse clutched to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head shorn, a swastika carved into the stubble, staring you down. So you walk into the cold you know: the wind, indifferent blade, familiar, the gold leaves heaped along the gutters. You have a home, a house with gas heat, a toilet that flushes. You have a credit card, cash. You could take a taxi if one would show up. You can feel it now: why people become Republicans:Get that dog off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled on the steps of the church.

This is a demon that can take a grown brain and squash it to sponge. There is no loving the state of a decrepit mind that encourages a decrepit body. Is he sleeping or just not there? States of awareness flicker inside a gauzy lens. We’ve seen this before—in a film, the man disappearing as he stands right there, his body stolid. Let’s say this man worked as an Assistant Principal and admired his own IQ. Let’s say this man had a brutish body but was not a brute. All of this becomes portraiture but there can be fractures of truth.  Looking at him you think:Am I in this film or is this a vapory memory?

When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears, Then was my heart broken, as was my verse; My breast was full of fears And disorder. My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, Did fly asunder: Each took his way; some would to pleasures go, Some to the wars and thunder Of alarms. “As good go anywhere,” they say, “As to benumb Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come! But no hearing.” O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue To cry to thee, And then not hear it crying! All day long My heart was in my knee, But no hearing. Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipped blossom, hung Discontented. O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time; That so thy favors granting my request, They and my mind may chime, And mend my rhyme.

He called it “his ranch,” yet each winter day found her beside him feeding hay to hungry cows. In summer heat you would find her in the hayfield— cutting, raking, baling, stacking. In between she kept the books, cooked, cleaned laundered, fed bum lambs. Garden rows straight, canned jars of food lined cellar walls. Then she died. I asked him how he would manage. “Just like I always have,” he said.