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We smuggle crates of Beaujolais through the squeaky pantry door. We steal cases of cigarettes, borrow the bulletproof Mercedes to race through the capital’s empty streets. It’s wonderful, the peace. No local can afford a car, except the police. The police stand beside their cars and wave. The police lack petrol for their cars. There’s a beer bottle shortage in the nation. There are no bars. Drunk driving is a hobby. Driving while high is an art. No one in the bad girls’ group is not in the back of the Mercedes, Vijay on Ashanti drum all the way to the beach. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are money. We are thirteen. We rent a hut roofed with palm fronds. We lie out on the sand with our bottles of French wine and our Hong Kong blondes and look up at the Atlantic Slave Coast midnight sky: shine all my diamonds shine ’cause they really diamonds.

A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate’s binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island’s still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right. Well, I had fifty-two miserable, small volcanoes I could climb with a few slithery strides— volcanoes dead as ash heaps. I used to sit on the edge of the highest one and count the others standing up, naked and leaden, with their heads blown off. I’d think that if they were the size I thought volcanoes should be, then I had become a giant; and if I had become a giant, I couldn’t bear to think what size the goats and turtles were, or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers —a glittering hexagon of rollers closing and closing in, but never quite, glittering and glittering, though the sky was mostly overcast. My island seemed to be a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s left-over clouds arrived and hung above the craters—their parched throats were hot to touch. Was that why it rained so much? And why sometimes the whole place hissed? The turtles lumbered by, high-domed, hissing like teakettles. (And I’d have given years, or taken a few, for any sort of kettle, of course.) The folds of lava, running out to sea, would hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove to be more turtles. The beaches were all lava, variegated, black, red, and white, and gray; the marbled colors made a fine display. And I had waterspouts. Oh, half a dozen at a time, far out, they’d come and go, advancing and retreating, their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches of scuffed-up white. Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, sacerdotal beings of glass ... I watched the water spiral up in them like smoke. Beautiful, yes, but not much company. I often gave way to self-pity. “Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there a moment when I actually chose this? I don’t remember, but there could have been.” What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway? With my legs dangling down familiarly over a crater’s edge, I told myself “Pity should begin at home.” So the more pity I felt, the more I felt at home. The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun rose from the sea, and there was one of it and one of me. The island had one kind of everything: one tree snail, a bright violet-blue with a thin shell, crept over everything, over the one variety of tree, a sooty, scrub affair. Snail shells lay under these in drifts and, at a distance, you’d swear that they were beds of irises. There was one kind of berry, a dark red. I tried it, one by one, and hours apart. Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects; and so I made home-brew. I’d drink the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff that went straight to my head and play my home-made flute (I think it had the weirdest scale on earth) and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats. Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all? I felt a deep affection for the smallest of my island industries. No, not exactly, since the smallest was a miserable philosophy. Because I didn’t know enough. Why didn’t I know enough of something? Greek drama or astronomy? The books I’d read were full of blanks; the poems—well, I tried reciting to my iris-beds, “They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss ...” The bliss of what? One of the first things that I did when I got back was look it up. The island smelled of goat and guano. The goats were white, so were the gulls, and both too tame, or else they thought I was a goat, too, or a gull. Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa ... shriek ...

"Pheu pheu, ti prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna;" [[Alas, alas, why do you gaze at me with your eyes, my children.]]—Medea. Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years ? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, — And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows ; The young birds are chirping in the nest ; The young fawns are playing with the shadows ; The young flowers are blowing toward the west— But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly ! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free. Do you question the young children in the sorrow, Why their tears are falling so ? The old man may weep for his to-morrow Which is lost in Long Ago — The old tree is leafless in the forest — The old year is ending in the frost — The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest — The old hope is hardest to be lost : But the young, young children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, In our happy Fatherland ? They look up with their pale and sunken faces, And their looks are sad to see, For the man's grief abhorrent, draws and presses Down the cheeks of infancy — "Your old earth," they say, "is very dreary;" "Our young feet," they say, "are very weak !" Few paces have we taken, yet are weary— Our grave-rest is very far to seek ! Ask the old why they weep, and not the children, For the outside earth is cold — And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering, And the graves are for the old !" "True," say the children, "it may happen That we die before our time ! Little Alice died last year her grave is shapen Like a snowball, in the rime. We looked into the pit prepared to take her — Was no room for any work in the close clay : From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, Crying, 'Get up, little Alice ! it is day.' If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower, With your ear down, little Alice never cries ; Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her, For the smile has time for growing in her eyes ,— And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in The shroud, by the kirk-chime ! It is good when it happens," say the children, "That we die before our time !" Alas, the wretched children ! they are seeking Death in life, as best to have ! They are binding up their hearts away from breaking, With a cerement from the grave. Go out, children, from the mine and from the city — Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do — Pluck you handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through ! But they answer, " Are your cowslips of the meadows Like our weeds anear the mine ? Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows, From your pleasures fair and fine! "For oh," say the children, "we are weary, And we cannot run or leap — If we cared for any meadows, it were merely To drop down in them and sleep. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping — We fall upon our faces, trying to go ; And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, The reddest flower would look as pale as snow. For, all day, we drag our burden tiring, Through the coal-dark, underground — Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron In the factories, round and round. "For all day, the wheels are droning, turning, — Their wind comes in our faces, — Till our hearts turn, — our heads, with pulses burning, And the walls turn in their places Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling — Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall, — Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling — All are turning, all the day, and we with all ! — And all day, the iron wheels are droning ; And sometimes we could pray, 'O ye wheels,' (breaking out in a mad moaning) 'Stop ! be silent for to-day ! ' " Ay ! be silent ! Let them hear each other breathing For a moment, mouth to mouth — Let them touch each other's hands, in a fresh wreathing Of their tender human youth ! Let them feel that this cold metallic motion Is not all the life God fashions or reveals — Let them prove their inward souls against the notion That they live in you, or under you, O wheels ! — Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward, As if Fate in each were stark ; And the children's souls, which God is calling sunward, Spin on blindly in the dark. Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers, To look up to Him and pray — So the blessed One, who blesseth all the others, Will bless them another day. They answer, " Who is God that He should hear us, While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred ? When we sob aloud, the human creatures near us Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word ! And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding) Strangers speaking at the door : Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him, Hears our weeping any more ? " Two words, indeed, of praying we remember ; And at midnight's hour of harm, — 'Our Father,' looking upward in the chamber, We say softly for a charm. We know no other words, except 'Our Father,' And we think that, in some pause of angels' song, God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather, And hold both within His right hand which is strong. 'Our Father !' If He heard us, He would surely (For they call Him good and mild) Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely, 'Come and rest with me, my child.' "But, no !" say the children, weeping faster, " He is speechless as a stone ; And they tell us, of His image is the master Who commands us to work on. Go to ! " say the children,—"up in Heaven, Dark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find ! Do not mock us ; grief has made us unbelieving — We look up for God, but tears have made us blind." Do ye hear the children weeping and disproving, O my brothers, what ye preach ? For God's possible is taught by His world's loving — And the children doubt of each. And well may the children weep before you ; They are weary ere they run ; They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory Which is brighter than the sun : They know the grief of man, without its wisdom ; They sink in the despair, without its calm — Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, — Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, — Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly No dear remembrance keep,— Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly : Let them weep ! let them weep ! They look up, with their pale and sunken faces, And their look is dread to see, For they think you see their angels in their places, With eyes meant for Deity ;— "How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation, Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart, — Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ? Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants, And your purple shews your path ; But the child's sob curseth deeper in the silence Than the strong man in his wrath !"

We walked through some heartache in '62. Gary liked Teresa but Teresa asked Elizabeth to tell Peter that she really wanted to go out with him but Peter had been making out with Jane in the theater, celebrating their one month anniversary, so that was out, and even though Jane broke up with Pete, Peter kept asking Gail to talk with Jane which Gail wouldn't do because she'd told Brenda that she thought that Peter was cute but Brenda wasn't listening to a word, wrapped up in lonely teardrops shed for Greg. The waters of 8th grade were never still.

To my first love, I wept profusely. These tears confused the boy, and he would act. Generally, he took me out to eat. I grew fat, sobbing my way into some of the best restaurants in Richmond. My first husband ignored the initial shattering of tears. But if I went on grovelling, wailing long enough he’d collect me from the floor give me a bit more grocery money, wipe my eyes tell me it would be okay by and by. My second husband despised my tears. He’d seen women crawl and shake enough, said the vipers can enter a trance at will and let their best sobs heave ho to twist a man and bend him into shape. I trouble not this third man with my tears. Have in fact forgotten how to cry and in forgetting have grown steel eyes, a molten core like mad Vesuvius, am held in check by nothing but the weather and the whims of fate.

In Tamalpais is a big crystal. An acquaintance told me the story. A Miwok was giving his grandfather’s medicine bag to the Kroeber Museum in Berkeley. He said this man took him over the mountain Tamalpais, at a certain time in the year. I believe it was about the time of the Winter Solstice, because then the tides are really low. They stopped and gathered a certain plant on the way over the mountain. On their way to the Bolinas Beach clam patch, where there is a big rock way out there. Go out to the rock. Take out of the medicine bag the crystal that matches the crystal in Tamalpais. And if your heart is not true if your heart is not true when you tap the rock in the clam patch a little piece of it will fly off and strike you in the heart and strike you dead. And that’s the first story I ever heard about Bolinas.

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all And the air is emptied to an uplifting gassiness That turns lungs to winter waterwings, buoying, and the bright white night Freezes in sight a lapse of waves, balsamic, salty, unexpected: Hours after swimming, sitting thinking biting at a hangnail And the taste of the—to your eyes—invisible crystals irradiates the world “The sea is salt” “And so am I” “Don’t bite your nails” and the metal flavor of a nail—are these brads?— Taken with a slight spitting motion from between teeth and whanged into place (Boards and sawdust) and the nail set is ridged with cold Permanently as marble, always degrees cooler than the rooms of air it lies in Felt as you lay your cheek upon the counter on which sits a blue-banded cup A counter of condensed wintry exhalations glittering infinitesimally A promise, late on a broiling day in late September, of the cold kiss Of marble sheets to one who goes barefoot quickly in the snow and early Only so far as the ash can—bang, dump—and back and slams the door: Too cold to get up though at the edges of the blinds the sky Shows blue as flames that break on a red sea in which black coals float: Pebbles in a pocket embed the seam with grains of sand Which, as they will, have found their way into a pattern between foot and bedfoot “A place for everything and everything in its place” how wasteful, how wrong It seems when snow in fat, hand-stuffed flakes falls slow and steady in the sea “Now you see it, now you don’t” the waves growl as they grind ashore and roll out At your feet (in boots) a Christmas tree naked of needles Still wound with swags of tarnishing tinsel, faintly alarming as the thought Of damp electricity or sluggish lightning and for your health desiring pains The wind awards: Chapped Lips: on which to rub Time’s latest acquisition Tinned, dowel shaped and inappropriately flavored sheep wool fat A greasy sense-eclipsing fog “I can’t see Without my glasses” “You certainly can’t see with them all steamed up Like that. Pull over, park and wipe them off.” The thunder of a summer’s day Rolls down the shimmering blacktop and mowed grass juice thickens the air Like “Stir until it coats the spoon, remove from heat, let cool and chill” Like this, graying up for more snow, maybe, in which a small flock Of—sparrows?—small, anyway, dust-kitty-colored birds fly up On a dotted diagonal and there, ah, is the answer: Starlings, bullies of birdland, lousing up The pecking order, respecters of no rights (what bird is) unloved (oh?) Not so likeable as some: that’s temperate enough and the temperature Drops to rise to snowability of a softness even in its scent of roses Made of untinted butter frosting: Happy Name Day, Blue Jay, staggering On slow-up wings into the shrunk into itself from cold forsythia snarl And above these thoughts there waves another tangle but one parched with heat And not with cold although the heat is on because of cold settled all About as though, swimming under water, in clearly fishy water, you Inhaled and found one could and live and also found you altogether Did not like it, January, laid out on a bed of ice, disgorging February, shaped like a flounder, and March with her steel head pocketbook, And April, goofy and under-dressed and with a loud laugh, and May Who will of course be voted Miss Best Liked (she expects it), And June, with a toothpaste smile, fresh from her flea bath, and gross July, Flexing itself, and steamy August, with thighs and eyes to match, and September Diving into blue October, dour November, and deadly dull December which now And then with a surprised blank look produces from its hand the ace of trumps Or sets within the ice white hairline of a new moon the gibbous rest: Global, blue, Columbian, a blue dull definite and thin as the first day Of February when, in the steamed and freezing capital cash built Without a plan to be its own best monument its skyline set in stacks Like poker chips (signed “Autodidact”), at the crux of a view there crosses A flatcar-trailer piled with five of the cheaper sort of yachts, tarpaulined, Plus one youth in purple pants, a maid in her uniform and an “It’s not real Anything” Cossack hat and coat, a bus one-quarter full of strangers and The other familiar fixings of lengthening short days: “He’s outgrown them Before you can turn around” and see behind you the landscape of the past Where beached boats bask and terraced cliffs are hung with oranges Among dark star-gleaming leaves, and, descending the dizzying rough stairs Littered with goat turd beads—such packaging—you—he—she— One—someone—stops to break off a bit of myrtle and recite all the lines Of Goethe that come back, and those in French, “Connais-tu... ?” the air Fills with chalk dust from banged erasers, behind the February dunes Ice boats speed and among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream Where kids in kapok ice-skate and play at Secret City as the sun Sets before dinner, the snow on fields turns pink and under the hatched ice The water slides darkly and over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun In a chemical yellow greener than sulphur a flash of petroleum by-product Unbelievable, unwanted and as lovely as though someone you knew all your life Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes: the sky Flows with impersonal passion and loosening jet trails (eyes tearing from the cold) And on the beach, between foam frozen in a thick scalloped edging so like Weird cheek-mottling pillowcase embroidery, on the water-darkened sand the waves Keep free of frost, a gull strangles on a length of nylon fishline and the dog Trots proudly off, tail held high, to bury a future dinner among cut grass on a dune: The ice boats furl their sails and all pile into cars and go off to the super market Its inviting foods and cleansers sold under tunes with sealed in memory-flavor “Hot House Rhubarb” “White Rock Girl” “Citrus Futures” “Cheap Bitter Beans” and In its parking lot vast as the kiss to which is made the most complete surrender In a setting of leaves, backs of stores, a house on a rise admired for being Somewhat older than some others (prettier, too?) a man in a white apron embraces a car Briefly in the cold with his eyes as one might hug oneself for warmth for love —What a paint job, smooth as an eggplant; what a meaty chest, smooth as an eggplant —Is it too much to ask your car to understand you? the converse isn’t and the sky Maps out new roads so that, driving at right angles to the wind, clouds in ranks Contrive in diminishing perspective a part of a picture postcard of a painting Over oak scrub where a filling station has: gas, a locked toilet (to keep dirt in) A busted soda pop machine, no maps and “I couldn’t tell you thet” so The sky empties itself to a color, there, where yesterday’s puddle Offers its hospitality to people-trash and nature-trash in tans and silvers And black grit like that in corners of a room in this or that cheap dump Where the ceiling light burns night and day and we stare at or into each Other’s eyes in hope the other reads there what he reads: snow, wind Lifted; black water, slashed with white; and that which is, which is beyond Happiness or love or mixed with them or more than they or less, unchanging change, “Look,” the ocean said (it was tumbled, like our sheets), “look in my eyes”

No surprise. Bills to pay, pain to obliterate, a favor to a friend desperate for more time before facing facts, or a reason less beholden to One-day-at-a-time or I-don’t-know-why or There-is-no-why- I-just-like-getting-high or Then-Jesus-spoke-to-me blather. Nothing’s enough, not even the moments when her voice — any voice, my voice — vanishes into the Voice the hymn wrenches from the throats of the spiritual paupers up there swaying in black satin. The God of the Garden is the God of Chemistry, too, a single sniff in a lifetime proof enough — nothing can slough errands or heartbreak so fast into the metaphysical ditch where all of it belongs. Weren’t we made for better than the Fall, if Fall this is? We all see what the Flood keeps doing. A little while dry, please, a little while with no chattering chimp between the ears & the Wizard once more in Oz. This is my mind, not hers. She’s a story I heard. I’m a story I can’t stop hearing. A plastic tarp in a monsoon may be her future. A plush ride home to havoc. A vision that delivers her from want, deserving or not.

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill and spreads his red-gold wings, I wake, thinking it is the sun and call Juanita, hearing her answer, but only in my mind. I know she is already outside, breaking the cane off at ground level, using only her big hands. I get the machete and walk among the cane, until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt. Juanita, dead in the morning like this. I raise the machete— what I take from the earth, I give back— and cut off her feet. I lift the body and carry it to the wagon, where I load the cane to sell in the village. Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake, tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane; it is grief. If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can never get enough.

Such conundrums of English. I blame my ex-wife. She rearranged my dictionary, or re- taught an old story: in this book, if you look for alimony, it follows acrimony (nothing between). However, contrition still borders contrivance (if it can be seen). Untruth in her troth sallowed the language, sullied a certain conjugation: how she lied as she lay with me. Apparently her monogamy was too close to monotony. Alas, after parting with that particular lass, I remain a student examining all our words’ gradation: how anniversary now precedes annihilation.