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Born again on a Monday under a broken zodiac. My father the woodman, a surgeon among snags, could read the living trail of blades rebounding in the field, the mopped-matte passage through the dew. He woke a brush pile with fire throwing shadows on the child, I was thrown over. Father, it was a pleasure to meet you on this luminous route between two lives. In this impromptu pool reaped from rain where mosquitos multiply. Though survival, I’m told, is impersonal and without teleological purpose. Malaria is just trying to maximize its own fitness as are the corporations who, for palm oil set the peatlands ablaze and drained the water table. Dense haze from the sea choked the light from day suffused our mountain in a numinous red corona. And as for the getting over there will be no ascension, no circumambulation, there is only going through. We must go through it.

On the express train to Vienna she writes in her diary notes about Rome and Naples. Ink marks like parthenogenetic aphids, pages like blood smears of homing pigeons. She is alone, gray, reconciled, a Leda long after the swan's departure, Odysseus retired at Lotophagitis. Back home, in Maryland, the notebook will be interred in the archetypal drawer, among the yellowed love letters, among the infant hair curls, among the dried adult flowers, near the cushion where the castrated cat dreams while Mahler's forever forever forever chokes in the green wallpaper. It is her message to imagined little sons; it is her membership in the club of Swifts, Goethes, Rimbauds, Horatiuses and deathwatch beetles. It is her monument outlasting bronze, five-dimensional reality, the last engraving of primeval man on reindeer bone, the last drop of the fluid soul before evaporation.

It appeared inside our classroom at a quarter after ten, it gobbled up the blackboard, three erasers and a pen. It gobbled teacher's apple and it bopped her with the core. “How dare you!” she responded. “You must leave us . . . there's the door.” The Creature didn't listen but described an arabesque as it gobbled all her pencils, seven notebooks and her desk. Teacher stated very calmly, “Sir! You simply cannot stay, I'll report you to the principal unless you go away!” But the thing continued eating, it ate paper, swallowed ink, as it gobbled up our homework I believe I saw it wink. Teacher finally lost her temper. “OUT!” she shouted at the creature. The creature hopped beside her and GLOPP . . . it gobbled teacher.

Creo que si ... I believe it will rain tomorrow ...

I suppose I shan’t go fishing Pa, for fear of finding We’re no fishers, Our folk, for all our bent For fish scraps and our Tolerance for muck dwellers and the like. This creek is like no other, Pa, Inky cold and familiar, Don’t drink from it, it Commands, don’t kneel, don’t stare down Or wash in it, don't pry your shoes from off Your battered stubs, not yet, no jay Flashes past and asks how you mean To ask a shit creek to provide. You exist. It would, too. It falls through These viney half-corrupted patches of nettled hickory and oak Into a muddy slough Into a culvert, splitting Around the treatment plant Then joining itself back in a ramrod concrete Channel beneath pavement; Then into the lake, sludge, great Lake. Do you follow? It’s taking you somewhere, it matters Not where, Pa, it’s a trip At your command, inaudible. It’s the postponed one We would have scheduled in these winding down days Together had we not been What we made of us. In the stagnant north woods. In the pale thick end-of-knowing daylight.

It begins in a cow lane with bees and white clover, courses along corn, rushes accelerando against rocks. It rises to a teetering pitch as I cross a shaky tree-bridge, syncopates a riff over the dissonance of trash—derelict icebox with a missing door, mohair loveseat sinking into thistle. It winds through green adder’s mouth, faint as the bells of Holsteins heading home. Blue shadows lengthen, but the undertow of a harmony pulls me on through raspy Joe-pye-weed and staccato-barbed fence. It hums in a culvert beneath cars, then empties into a river that flows oboe-deep past Indian dance ground, waterwheel and town, past the bleached stones in the churchyard, the darkening hill.

— We seen his mama she dry and scant By hook or by bent I guttle the rudimental stories. I’m all in-scoop suck and swallow by dint of birth. Of shape. — Were you hallow-nursed on riversource upon a time (or ‘the rocky breasts forever’) I was not. I learned to lie in want for succor-food; for forms; I lunged I gulped for what I got. Nowadays to need to come by what comes by here comes natural and needs no bait. Just steep dead-still as a blacksnake creek and wait.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows. He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell; Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell." On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see; It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee. And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow, And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe, He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess; And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request." Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan: "It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone. Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains; So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains." A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail; And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale. He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee; And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee. There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven, With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given; It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains, But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains." Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code. In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load. In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring, Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing. And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow; And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low; The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in; And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin. Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay; It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May." And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum; Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum." Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire; Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher; The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see; And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee. Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so; And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow. It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why; And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky. I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear; But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near; I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside. I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide. And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door. It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm— Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm." There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.

I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers. My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty. The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor, Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting it In plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two. The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter. So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing Governors and invaders to establish schools, courts, garrisons: Soldiers, clerks, officials, citizens with their household slaves. Years or decades or entire lives were spent out in the hinterlands— Which might be good places to retire on a government pension, Especially if in those work-years you had acquired a native wife. Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up but I do Feel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul, Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedge Widening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls. As I get it, the Roman colonizing and mixing, the intricate Imperial Processes of enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled With the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, they Needed to swap, blend and improvise languages—couples Especially needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess— Roman, barbarian—I find that Creole work more glorious than God. The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybody Interested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand. It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good to Milford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry. Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand, And he got the job as was his destiny—full-time, once he graduated. Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy, Dr. Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years. At the bank an Episcopalian named John Smock, whose family owned A piece of the bank, had played sports with Milford. He gave him a small Loan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lenses And selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, “almost a Professional.” Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing. Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat, I imagine, and made loans or change.Pinsky like “Tex” or “Brooklyn” Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place: Those names all signify someone who’s been away from home a while. Schiavone means “a Slav.”Milford is a variant on the names of poets— Milton, Herbert, Sidney—certain immigrants gave their offspring. Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.

Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk- silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six o'clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block, cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk, cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack of butter, blueberry jam that's almost black, instead of tannin seeping into the cracks of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects the slit of a cut I haven't the wit to fix with a surgeon's needle threaded with fine-gauge silk as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock. But no key threads the cylinder of a lock. Late afternoon light, transitory, licks the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks itself out beneath the wheel's revolving spoke. Taut thought's gone, with a blink of attention, slack, a vision of "death and distance in the mix" (she lost her words and how did she get them back when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck? The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics she translated to a syntax which connects intense and unfashionable politics with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex; then the short-circuit of the final stroke, the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke). What a gaze out the window interjects: on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks, tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk by a plump brown girl in a purple anorak. The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks rouged by the fluvial light of six o'clock.