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There is no salutation.     The harvesters with gunny sacks bend picking up jade stones. (Sure that Amor would appear in sleep.     Director.    Guide.) Secret borrowings fit into their hands. Cold on the tongue. White flecks on the water. These jade pebbles are true green when wet. On the seventh night, the branches parted. The other replied, How photographic.      Amor doesn’t appear on demand.   He’s more like a snake skin. If he fits, he lets you in or sheds your body against the rocks. I slept in a fort. My bed pushed up against the log enclosure.    At 3:00 his ankles pressed against each side of my head. When I woke crying for help he rose near the kitchen door dressed as a hunter. The other replied, Amor born like a cup trembles at the lip.   Superstitions fit into your hands. Thou has returned to thy house. The other replied, Torn loose from the eaves, the blood trembles at the lips. Nine fetters on thy feet Nine crossings of the street Nine suppers where they meet Nine words of loss repeat this and that Nine hunters cross the field Nine lovers yield their right of way Two came fighting out of the dark.

They think she lives alone on the edge of town in a two-room house where she moved when her husband died at thirty-five of a gunshot wound in the bed of another woman. The curandera and house have aged together to the rhythm of the desert. She wakes early, lights candles before her sacred statues, brews tea of yerbabuena. She moves down her porch steps, rubs cool morning sand into her hands, into her arms. Like a large black bird, she feeds on the desert, gathering herbs for her basket. Her days are slow, days of grinding dried snake into powder, of crushing wild bees to mix with white wine. And the townspeople come, hoping to be touched by her ointments, her hands, her prayers, her eyes. She listens to their stories, and she listens to the desert, always, to the desert. By sunset she is tired. The wind strokes the strands of long gray hair, the smell of drying plants drifts into her blood, the sun seeps into her bones. She dozes on her back porch. Rocking, rocking.

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come, were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two, the youngest assistant curator in the country. I had some good ideas in those days. Well, what we did was this. We had boxes precisely built to every size of canvas. We put the boxes in the basement and waited. When word came that the Germans were coming in, we got each painting put in the proper box and out of Leningrad in less than a week. They were stored somewhere in southern Russia. But what we did, you see, besides the boxes waiting in the basement, which was fine, a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art— but what we did was leave the frames hanging, so after the war it would be a simple thing to put the paintings back where they belonged. Nothing will seem surprised or sad again compared to those imperious, vacant frames. Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream— You know it lasted nine hundred days. Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie sometimes a foot deep on this very floor, but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell. Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you. Early one day, a dark December morning, we came on three young soldiers waiting outside, pacing and swinging their arms against the cold. They told us this: in three homes far from here all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad to see the Hermitage, as they supposed every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing. Now they had been sent to defend the city, a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe. I had to tell them there was nothing to see but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung. “Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.” And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger than all of us being here in the first place, inside such a building, strolling in snow. We led them around most of the major rooms, what they could take the time for, wall by wall. Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them part of what they would see if they saw the paintings. I told them how those colors would come together, described a brushstroke here, a dollop there, mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout and why this painter got the roses wrong. The next day a dozen waited for us, then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes. Each of us took a group in a different direction: Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse, Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer, Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper. We pointed to more details about the paintings, I venture to say, than if we had had them there, some unexpected use of line or light, balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces the same way we’d done it every morning before the war, but then we didn’t pay so much attention to what we talked about. People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings. But now the guide and the listeners paid attention to everything—the simple differences between the first and post-impressionists, romantic and heroic, shade and shadow. Maybe this was a way to forget the war a little while. Maybe more than that. Whatever it was, the people continued to come. It came to be called The Unseen Collection. Here. Here is the story I want to tell you. Slowly, blind people began to come. A few at first then more of them every morning, some led and some alone, some swaying a little. They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces, they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them, to see better what was being said. And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention. After the siege was lifted and the Germans left and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places, the blind never came again. Not like before. This seems strange, but what I think it was, they couldn’t see the paintings anymore. They could still have listened, but the lectures became a little matter-of-fact. What can I say? Confluences come when they will and they go away.

My father is a nod, a jilt. Bop. Insists that 90s music is the jams they will drop when I have children. Cancel the station with rap-crap, the cure for stiff-skin is the blunk of funk and lilt of lips that pickles like sound-curry.

In the half-light, I am most at home, my shadow as company. When I feel hot, I push a button to make it stop. I mean this stain on my mind I can’t get out. How human I seem. Like modern man, I traffic in extinction. I have a gift. Like an animal, I sustain. A flock of birds when touched, I scatter. I won’t approach until the back is turned. My heart betrays. I confess: I am afraid. How selfish of me. When there’s no one here, I halve the distance between our bodies infinitesimally. In this long passageway, I pose against the wallpaper, dig my heels in, catch the light. In my vision, the back door opens on a garden that is always in bloom. The dogs are chained so they can’t attack like I know they want to. In the next yard over, honeybees swarm and their sound is huge.

Master Hirano came from Japan together with a priest from the Kegon sect and the two of them drank beer all night at the Avia Hotel next to Ben Gurion airport. The following day, when we came to take them to the Galilee, they had trouble getting up and barely checked out of their rooms on time. It was a wintry January morning, and near the village of Shefaram the priest from the Kegon sect asked us to stop and stood by the side of the road and urinated. On Friday the two of them (Master Hirano and the priest from the Kegon sect) went to the Bratslav Hasids’ synagogue in Safed. The worshippers swayed like trees in the wind. Master Hirano and the priest from the Kegon sect stood there, bald and wrapped in robes, behind the congregation, and the beadle whispered into our ears:Are they Jews? Are they Jews? When we left the synagogue Master Hirano said to the priest from the Kegon sect: There is no doubt that they understand what devotion (he said shujaku) is. The priest from the Kegon sect said: There is no doubt. They know what devotion is. On Jerusalem Street, by the monument of the mortar, commemorating the ’48 war, Master Hirano said: Prayer is a good thing. The priest from the Kegon sect said: There is no doubt. Prayer is a good thing. Master Hirano stood on one side of the mortar and the priest from the Kegon sect stood on the other and the moon rose, big and full, yellow like the fields painted by Van Gogh. * * * It’s possible to write only by means of non-writing. When things come from the opposite direction. My aunt Edith rises out of the ground and returns to her bed in the nursing home. Ursula, my stepmother, is walking backward. All sorts of wilted flowers bring their petals toward themselves. All we need is yogurt and a spoon. We’ll know what to do with the spoon. We’ll lead it toward the right place (which is to say, the yogurt) and from there toward the mouth. But the mouth can’t be fathomed. Likewise the word that stands for it (mouth) is strange in the extreme. Or take, for example, the hand that’s holding the spoon with its five tragic fingers. There’s no logic whatsoever in there being five. Like five widows who’ve gathered because their husbands have died, and they allow themselves this movement through the air in order to keep from losing their minds. There is no limit to the beauty of things that are sad. Like old clay vases or a wagon’s shaft in a junkyard. Every year the plum trees flower anew, and people whose names are Shtiasni or Dahaan open doors and close them. All these things fill the heart with great joy. The beauty of death and the violet colors accompanying it. Announcements that make nothing dawn on one, and the dawn itself rising from nowhere like a birthday present 365 days a year.

1 Scribe out of work At a loss for words Not his to begin with, The man life passed by Stands at the window Biding his time 2 Time and again And now once more I climb these stairs Unlock this door— No name where I live Alone in my lair With one bone to pick And no time to spare

And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve. The soul, like a trinket, is a she. I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night. I did not like the wool of  him. You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat. They can take you down for that. Did I forget to mention that when you’re dead You’re dead a long time. My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering. A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium. I long for one last Blue democracy, Which has broke my heart a while. How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful? I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondly On his mouth.

To a sister of an enemy of the author's who disapproved of 'The Playboy' Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, In her guts a galling give her. Let her live to earn her dinners In Mountjoy with seedy sinners: Lord, this judgment quickly bring, And I'm your servant, J. M. Synge.

Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. Black hair, small cold eyes, whom you loved. Cock-tease Katherine, chewer of souls. The door blew open and she blew in, a ghoul. Black air, small cold wind, taking everything. Fish-eater Katherine, whose nails dig blood. I’m going to call her pinch-cunt, pickle-lip, piss-dribble, shit-smear, goat’s-meat breath. I want to throw stones at her mother’s corpse, send her children to name-change foster homes. May the coat she is wearing burst into flames and boil the flesh blistering off her bones. May she be refused in both heaven and hell and wander the earth forever without rest— a hungry ghost clinging to the rocks and trees.