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Squinting through eye-slits in our balaclavas, we lurch across Washington Square Park hunched against the wind, two hooded figures caught in the monochrome, carrying sacks of fruit, as we’ve done for years. The frosted, starch- stiff sycamores make a lean Christmas tree seem to bulk larger, tilted under the arch and still lit in three colors. Once in January, we found a feather here and stuffed the quill in twigs to recall that jay. The musical fountain is here, its water gone, a limestone circle now. Though rap succeeds the bluegrass strains we’ve played in it, new praise evokes old sounds. White branches mimic visions of past storms; some say they’ve heard ghosts moan above this ground, once a potter’s field. No two stones are the same, of course: the drums, the tawny pears we hold, are old masks for new things. Still, in a world where fretted houses with façades are leveled for condominiums, not much has altered here. At least it’s faithful to imagined views. And, after all, we know the sycamore will screen the sky in a receding wind. Now, trekking home through grit that’s mounting higher, faces upturned to test the whirling snow, in new masks, we whistle to make breath-clouds form and disappear, and form again, and O, my love, there’s sun in the crook of your arm.

Rotting in the wet gray air the railroad depot stands deserted under still green trees. In the fields cold begins an end. There were other too-long-postponed departures. They left, finally, because of well water gone rank, the smell of fungus, the chill of rain in chimneys. The spot is abandoned even in memory. They knew, locking doors upon empty houses, to leave without regret is to lose title to one home forever.

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.” I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong? I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel with the other. And then something like braids will stand out, on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious. We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house, talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean. I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

This is the place it happened. It was here. You might not know it was unless you knew. All day the cars blow past and disappear. This is the place it happened. It was here. Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear. Look at the highway marker, still askew. This is the place it happened. It was here. You might not know it was unless you knew.

a woman moves through dog rose and juniper bushes, a pussy clean and folded between her legs, breasts like the tips of her festive shoes shine silently in her heavy armoire. one blackbird, one cow, one horse. the sea beats against the wall of the waterless. she walks to a phone booth that waits a fair distance from all three villages. it’s a game she could have heard on the radio: a question, a number, an answer, a prize. her pussy reaches up and turns on the light in her womb.

the porcelain cup is similar to my skull. when i grasp the cup firmly with my hand an arm out of nowhere sprouts on my arm like a graft and the hand on that arm raises the porcelain cup high and hurls it to the wooden floor. since that arm is safeguarding the porcelain cup the thing that is broken into pieces then is my skull that is similar to the porcelain cup. even if my arm had moved before the graft-arm slid into my arm like a snake the white paper that warded off flood would have ripped. yet my arm continues to safeguard the porcelain cup. Translated from the Korean

Was it because at last I cleaned the window that he threw himself against the glass? I thought, poor crow— he doesn't know the evergreens and blue sky are behind him. I turned back to my page but whumpp — the bird attacked the glass again. His long claws scuffled at the pane and I yelled "Crow! Go away!" Again his body slapped the glass, again and then again, and then at last he caught my eye— oh, prophet, terrified.

So beautiful but often unseen a maid of nature the street cleaner that’s everywhere never thanked never liked always ignored so elegant in a way no one sees but without it we would be in trash up to our knees with the heart of a lion the mind of a fox the color of the night sky a crow the unpaid workman that helps in every way each and every day

The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them— all the exciting detail of the chase and the escape, the error the flash of genius— all to no end save beauty the eternal— So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful for this to be warned against saluted and defied— It is alive, venomous it smiles grimly its words cut— The flashy female with her mother, gets it— The Jew gets it straight— it is deadly, terrifying— It is the Inquisition, the Revolution It is beauty itself that lives day by day in them idly— This is the power of their faces It is summer, it is the solstice the crowd is cheering, the crowd is laughing in detail permanently, seriously without thought

15 September 1963, Birmingham Later he will say he did not do it, he was home at breakfast, just ask the wife, say they heard some radio preacher doing love thy neighbor while birds filled up the yard. Later, he will say he did not do it then tell how he didn't, lean in close to say if he would have done it it wouldn't have been alone, he would have had a driver and a man out west to phone in threats to draw the cops away. They'd ease through empty streets to plant their package then glide away, their route thick with friends, a thousand ways to disappear. • The DA will lean, will see his would have dashboard-lit, driving Dynamite Hill, headlights, radio dead. Would have in the shotgun seat, sticks sweating in his grip, shadow steering through the city's sleep. Will see them driving, out before the paperboys, ready to throw when the dark is right. See him Christmas, few years back, outside the preacher's house, thin fuse of cigarette, newspaper spread on the bus protests. See flash, shock push him from the dark, burn his shadow where anyone could see. Something dark in the lenses of the bottle trees. • The photographer spots him eyeing the bombed-out church, minutes after, a face he's seen before, flash on the shards of phone-booths and broken windows he'll follow through the horrid and the horrified while the cops arrive, the state patrol arrives with bayonets instead of hoses, bayonets instead of dogs, while congregants arrive between firemen and plainclothes Klansmen and the children, the children arrive and depart, and there, the smirk he'll follow through uniforms and Sunday black, into the park, then lose him as it fills. • Will stand in the blur of what arrives and wonder where he could have gone. Whether he'd cut toward the depot, through the railyards to wind back home, or north through the nervous blocks, or circle back for another view, maybe shadowed in a doorway, japing in a storefront window, listening at a sandwich stand while everyone is talking, his work on every tongue. Maybe he could drift through the crush of lookers in cigarette smoke, in the breath of many lungs, common, innocuous, a cloud about to disappear. • Will stand imagining him split at each intersection, now four of him working the city's riot, one with a bomb in his Sunday Herald, one with a gun hung out the window racing to a segregation rally, one with a bullhorn and a speech for the news if they want it right, and one just waiting for some midnight's cool when he can stand beneath the vacant windows and search for that fire in the face of Christ before driving out past the mills. On the ridge he'll see Vulcan's torch is red, but not for them. Shadows reel from the furnace sheds, birds exploding, blown from molten light. • The mayor says all of us are victims, innocent victims. The lawyer kills his radio. When folks ask later who did it, the lawyer says I'll tell you who. Who is everyone who talks of niggers. Who is everyone who slurs to his neighbors and his sons. Everyone who jokes about niggers and everyone who laughs at the jokes. Everyone who's quiet, who lets it happen. Now his voice flaps in the rafters of the meeting hall, and everyone is quiet. I'll tell you who did it, he says. We all did. • The photographer keeps his beat, past the crater in the church foundation, through the park, into the midday rush, just where he lost him. In the darkroom, he kept arriving, his face framed between elbows, caught in the thrall, or his crewcut, his smile cropped by arms. Now his haircut, half-rolled sleeve, cigarette lip, his eye pass by a dozen times, and more. He could be anyone, could be everyone wandering the storefronts, spying behind his News. The photographer follows each one, cocked and ready to shoot, but his lens can't catch them all so he just stands, tracing their paths, he just stands, lost in the crowd he becomes.