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Bernadette: O sweet delightful house why do so many things get lost in you? House: Maybe you just dream you lose them. B: How do you know what dreams are? H: I pride myself on knowing everything you know. B: Oh, so you know we’re getting you new windows? H: I have trouble with no & know. With knew & new too. Why do people do that? B: I don’t know; I don’t mean I don’t no. H: See, you make it hard for a house. Anyway I don’t usually speak. B: Do you write poetry? H: I dabble. I don’t know if it’s poetry or prose though. B: It’s prose — it’s shaped like you. H: What about my roof? B: That would be a concrete poem. H: Even the time the tree fell through it? B: That would be a different genre, perhaps conceptual art. H: I’d like to climb mountains. You can leave me whenever you want but I’m stuck with you. B: What was it like when people prayed in you? H: It was kind of creepy. I liked the Jewish people better — more love of life. People can do anything they want to me, I’d like to be more proactive. I’m just stuck here. Even a cult could move in. B: I’ve never been a therapist for a house. How was your childhood? Were you born? H: I was made of mostly local stuff. Don’t set me me on fire. I tremble every time you light that wood stove. B: There was no heat when we moved into you; there were also 24 doors. H: Don’t blame me, I didn’t do it. B: You didn’t do anything but be here like an immobile tree, but you provided shelter. Can houses tremble? Do you have a sex life? H: None of your business. The sex life of houses isn’t known to humans, nor will it ever be. B: You seem to have mastered grammar but not homonyms. H: I liked it when I was unoccupied, full of birds’ nests on the porch & ghosts inside, I felt fulfilled. B: How did you like the Hebrew books? H: They reminded me of my bat mitzvah. B: You never told me you were Jewish. H: I thought you’d never ask.

I’ve always felt as if I were in a cage. If I stick out an arm, I’m seen as wanting and taking. A leg: my violence is noted. When I mentioned the suffocation by my father, they made it autobiographical. The subtext of my work in iron has been ignored, lost in discussions of time, not space. What you’ll never understand about installations is that everyone else is always outside of them. I’m stuck inside. The move toward deliberate transience is the mark of a fool. If disappearing is inevitable, you must fight it. No one misses the prisoner. The bars are like a frame: you want in as much as I have always wanted out.

"I thought of you as a butterfly tonight," getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's. And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face. The jeroboam trees are dark tonight. Darker in the outage than the stars let the sky be. Partyers all. The abbot told you, "I do not have power, the archbishop does not have power, the pope does not have power. Only God has power." Then it is not a kind of violence to put a photo of the Pope in a luscious hacienda, imperilled by a minature pullbell. Someone admired the hostess's oils. "Yes, it was a surprise when they hired me to teach but they said, 'We can teach an artist to teach but we can't teach a teacher to be an artist.'" "How true," the guests murmured. This was not your mother though artists all say it "comes from somewhere else." When another guest compared the Catholic to the Episcopal service she said, "I think not." In a desert once I almost fell off a cliff. To calm me down a friend told a joke: "Descartes was sitting on a plane. The stewardess said, 'Coffee or tea?' 'I think not,' Descartes said, and vanished." It took a moment to sink in because I thought he said "The cart" as in "beverage cart." Confusion is the only way to get to eschatology from a sketchpad. I'm trying to redeem that abbot. Drawing in the outage. Once you suggest the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims, I start listening for them—the cries—under my own singing. Scholars resurrect books all the time just by quoting them. When Roman gods popped out of the soil, the Christians looked around wildly. Sculpt the mouth around "sculpture,"ulpt. They reburied them hurriedly, and the earth gulped. The statue of the Commendatore went down with Don Giovanni. Which shall I believe, the unrepentence of the sinkholed Don? Or the statue that converts Leontes by resurrecting his all-forgiving wife? Hermione who's peerless has a likeness; he who won't about-face is not "mocked by art" but brought posthaste to hell, his "shapely seat and heart". . . The moon slips out like a foreign coin from denim: a drachma, an as. Can we redeem it? Cities are places are conversion, you said. But I am citiless. "She ascended to the thrown," you wrote by mistake, of Elizabeth.

A stick of carrot is equal to a gillyflower. A gillyflower is equal to a drum of gasoline. A drum of gasoline is equal to a stick of carrot. “For the sake of my offspring, I think I’ll marry an outsider.” Tamerlane has been sighted in Northern Italy. Jesus has broken out in Inner Mongolia. They like to kiss outside and piss inside. We like to kiss inside and piss outside. A mosquito has a mouth but no asshole. After three drops of blood, he falls asleep. He only gets up to bite another mosquito. He sucks and he sucks. Inside this balloon are ten thousand mosquitoes. In my left fist is a fossil of the first butterfly. In my right fist is a theory of why blood trickles down men’s legs. A man gains a drop of blood per day from eating. Each night, he gets up to slash himself Across the face and wrist. He must be bitten by ten thousand mosquitoes. He sucks and he sucks. Where would all that blood go otherwise? Once a month, a woman drops a teacup on the floor, A fine teacup with bones inside it. Vietnamese and Germans now speak the same language. Prussians and Bavarians cannot understand each other.

After one moment when I bowed my head And the whole world turned over and came upright, And I came out where the old road shone white. I walked the ways and heard what all men said, Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed, Being not unlovable but strange and light; Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite But softly, as men smile about the dead The sages have a hundred maps to give That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree, They rattle reason out through many a sieve That stores the sand and lets the gold go free: And all these things are less than dust to me Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented a huge error in the evolution of my family affairs. Riven with a savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two minders—one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with arms—I armed myself with myself and threw off the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not.    And I did not.

A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut. Perhaps this is my mesh of hours, my muscular ache, my guardian sash, twist of rope carved around an old maple trunk, my rod of power red with anticipatory friction at the edge of an emerging set of planetary rings. Stained ochre by the air I pitch forward, a vanilla-scented pear that floats or falls. In the rattan chair on the front porch by the blistered boards of the front door a figure of tar watches. Cool dust sparkles and settles. Shadows have made me visible. An empty wagon flares on the hillside.

1. Consider the tragic fortitude of mannikins, the courage it takes under casual poses to do nothing interminably each day. To face unflinching (through sunlit glass that bars them from it) the rushing surf of life within reach where they must stand marooned on their islands’ plastic turf, and not to cry out: more heroic than those Romans the lava rain stunned to statues—misshaped by the panic that twisted their limbs, glazed with their pain in black rock—friezes of agony. You would never know, from the relaxed swivel of this woman’s wrist as she completes a backhand with her racket, that she will never take another swing, or from her smile that she has stood balanced here on one foot all summer like one of Dante’s damned, and not cracked. 2. ‘Cracked’ is my father’s word for ‘crazy,’ as in ‘You’d have to be cracked to pay that much for a pair of shoes.’ He’s not crazy, but he forgets, and today as we pay out his visit’s hours strolling on Bloor, he thinks up the same questions again minutes after he’s nodded and smiled at answers to them. Looking for things to look at and not think, I focus on another grove of mummers: headless, their necks poke out like worms from the smartly turned-over collars of turtlenecks and jackets. You can tell they’ve also lost their arms from the way the sleeves plummet slackly off their shoulders—although they, ashamed to show the mutilation, act cool and tuck the cuffs into their pockets. I look at my father—hands trembling, head crazed like china with minute cracks through which years exit invisibly— and must remind myself his show is kinder, the long-running comedy where he’s played every part, from fresh-faced mooning lover to child-duped parent to doddering senex: still free now (while heart and limbs play their duet) to do a walk-on, ad lib, bow out. He sweats a little in the sunshine. Summer stock, lacking the tragic poise that freezes these actors in their scene, we move on towards a shadier place.

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs? Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.

coolie naam dharaiya ham tej pakare jaisan chhuri kate hamke Guyana mein aike