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Today my son realized someone’s smarter than him. Not me or his mom — he still thinks we know everything — one of the other kids, Nathan. Making fun of him at the computer terminal for screwing up at the math game. Other kids laughing at him. Second grade. I’m never gonna be as smart as him, he says. I’m never gonna be as smart as half my students if we’re talking IQs. He doesn’t want me to explain. He wants me to acknowledge that he’s dumb. He’s lying in bed and taking his glasses off and on, trying to get them perfectly clean for the morning. I’m looking around his dark room for a joke or some decent words to lay on him. His eyes are glassy with almost-tears. Second grade. The world wants to call on him. I take his hand in mine.

The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized. This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. I wonder does her boy talk Chinese? You ever seen that kind of black-headed? Blue shine all in it like a crow.

As some brave admiral, in former war Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still, Two rival fleets appearing from afar, Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill; From whence, with thoughts full of concern, he views The wise and daring conduct of the fight, Whilst each bold action to his mind renews His present glory and his past delight; From his fierce eyes flashes of fire he throws, As from black clouds when lightning breaks away; Transported, thinks himself amidst the foes, And absent, yet enjoys the bloody day; So, when my days of impotence approach, And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch On the dull shore of lazy temperance, My pains at least some respite shall afford While I behold the battles you maintain When fleets of glasses sail about the board, From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain. Nor let the sight of honorable scars, Which my too forward valor did procure, Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars: Past joys have more than paid what I endure. Should any youth (worth being drunk) prove nice, And from his fair inviter meanly shrink, ’Twill please the ghost of my departed vice If, at my counsel, he repent and drink. Or should some cold-complexioned sot forbid, With his dull morals, our bold night-alarms, I’ll fire his blood by telling what I did When I was strong and able to bear arms. I’ll tell of whores attacked, their lords at home; Bawds’ quarters beaten up, and fortress won; Windows demolished, watches overcome; And handsome ills by my contrivance done. Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot, When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’ enjoy, And the best kiss was the deciding lot Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy. With tales like these I will such thoughts inspire As to important mischief shall incline: I’ll make him long some ancient church to fire, And fear no lewdness he’s called to by wine. Thus, statesmanlike, I’ll saucily impose, And safe from action, valiantly advise; Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows, And being good for nothing else, be wise.

While clearing the west quarter for more cropland, the Cat quarried a porcelain doorknob oystered in earth, grained and crazed like an historic egg, with a screwless stem of rusted and pitted iron. I turn its cold white roundness with my palm and open the oak door fitted with oval glass, fretted with wood ivy, and call my frontier neighbor. Her voice comes distant but clear, scolding children in overalls and highbutton shoes. A bucket of fresh eggs and a clutch of rhubarb rest on her daisied oil-cloth. She knew I would knock someday, wanting in.

His handkerchief, a pin or coin he’d touched, a button from his shirt, a feather caught on his coattail — such tokens would fetch a price ... Men came to shake his hand, or rub their warts upon his famous skin; young mothers held babies for him to bless with luck or wisdom — could he ward off the pox? — while others pressed bribes for the questions they would have him ask. One woman, facing down a blush, gave him a scrap of cloth, and asked that he get blood on it: she would return next day to pay him if he would care to nominate a fee ... ? Blood of a witch! Can you believe such a thing? I think you may be worldly after all. Boy that I was, I can only guess at what he must have made of me; and he, tricked out in a high-crowned hat, Geneva cape, staff, spurs, and bucket-top boots — he might have been a landed squire or country magistrate ... You think us credulous? Of course you do. So young, so quick to judge! Friend, these were days of comets in the air, various auguries, marvellous tempests, sights on the sea — that we might have a witch nesting among us was not the strangest news we heard. Proceedings would begin at dawn, he said. Next day we found ourselves at the chapel house uncertain who had summoned whom. It fell to me (though why is more than I can say: I had not then addressed a congregation) to tell how, ever since her husband’s death, Old Bess had shunned society; how week on week her vacant place in church would be remarked; how she had made a stranger of herself so long that when she turned to her next neighbour, begging a bowl of curds, she was denied; how she cursed him for this; and how his child sickened and died soon afterwards. I took my seat light-headed among murmurs of approval, part of the crowd once more, strange to myself for all my eloquence, and some three-and-ninety witnesses rose to give their evidence ... But then: “Ask not what mercy justice can afford until, as civil law requires, you hear the witch condemned out of her own mouth.” So: officers must be sent to search her home — he called it ten to one that they would find trinkets such as beads or crucifixes or other trumpery; meantime she must be stripped and should the devil’s marks be found about her (sure enough, two bitch’s teats hung down between her secrets and the fundament) then she must be kept from sleep and meat and watched most constantly. Old Bess confessed at first light on the third day. He seized on me to write her testimony: On First of May, Year of Our Lord Sixteen Forty-Five, Elizabeth Bell confessed she kept Familiars including, but not restricted to, a Greyhound called Vinegar Tom, a Ferret by the name of Littleman, a Shrew called Peck-in-the-Crown, and also a most verminous Mouse called News; and having summoned up and suckled them she sent her Imps to spread the Dropsy, and to kill Richard Tayler’s Horse and Michael Edwards’s Swine. And freely she confessed to having met all hugger-mugger with divers adjacent Witches in other Towns (we took their names)

The accumulation of reefs piling up one over the others like thoughts of the sky increasing as the head rises unto horizons of wet December days perforated with idle motions of gulls . . . and our feelings. I’ve been wondering about what you mean, standing in the spray of shadows before an ocean abandoned for winter, silent as a barque of blond hair. and the way the clouds are bending, the way they “react” to your position, where your hands close over your breasts like an eyelid approving the opening of “an evening’s light.” parasites attach themselves to the moss covering your feet, blind Cubans tossing pearls across the jetty, and the sound of blood fixes our eyes on the red waves. it is a shark! and our love is that rusted bottle . . . pointing north, the direction which we turn, conjuring up our silver knives and spoons and erasing messages in the sand, where you wrote “freezing in the arctic of our dreams,” and I said “yes” delaying the cold medium for a time while you continued to “cultivate our possessions” as the moon probably “continued” to cradle. tan below the slant of all those wasted trees while the scent carried us back to where we were: dancing like the children of great diplomats with our lean bodies draped in bedsheets and leather flags while the orchestra made sounds which we thought was the sky, but was only a series of words, dying in the thick falsetto of mist. for what can anyone create from all these things: the fancied tilt of stars, sordid doves burning in the hollow brick oven, oceans which generalize tears, it is known to us in immediate gestures, like candle drippings on a silk floor. what are we going to do with anything? besides pick it up gently and lay it on the breath of still another morning, mornings which are always remaining behind for one thing or another shivering in our faces of pride and blooming attitude. in the draught of winter air my horse is screaming you are welcoming the new day with your hair leaning against the sand, feet dive like otters in the frost and the sudden blue seems to abandon as you leap. O to make everything summer! soldiers move along lines like wet motions in the violent shade’s reappearance. but what if your shadow no longer extends to my sleeping? and your youth dissolves in my hand like a tongue, as the squandered oceans and skies will dissolve into a single plane (so I’ll move along that plane)                unnoticed and gray as a drift of skulls over the cool Atlantic where I am standing now, defining you in perhaps, the only word I can. as other words are appearing, so cunningly, on the lips of the many strips of light. like naked bodies stretched out along the only beach that remained, brown and perfect below the descending of tides.

The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts is understandable. The divorced father does not cook confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner. The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability kids approve of melted cheese on pizza years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations. So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid's friend out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad. Before the dad has finished his second slice, the kids are playing a video game or being Ace Ventura or blowing spitballs through straws, making this hail that can't quite be cleaned up. There are four slices left and the divorced father doesn't want them wasted, there has been enough waste already; he sits there in his windbreaker finishing the pizza. It's good except the crust is actually not so great— after the second slice the crust is basically a chore— so you leave it. You move on to the next loaded slice. Finally there you are amid rims of crust. All this is understandable. There's no dark conspiracy. Meanwhile the kids are having a pretty good time which is the whole point. So the entire evening makes clear sense. Now the divorced father gathers the sauce-stained napkins for the trash and dumps them and dumps the rims of crust which are not corpses on a battlefield. Understandability fills the pizza shop so thoroughly there's no room for anything else. Now he's at the door summoning the kids and they follow, of course they do, he's a dad.

‘Dockery was junior to you, Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’ Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight We used to stand before that desk, to give ‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’? I try the door of where I used to live: Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide. A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored. Canal and clouds and colleges subside Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord, Anyone up today must have been born In ’43, when I was twenty-one. If he was younger, did he get this son At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose I fell asleep, waking at the fumes And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed, And ate an awful pie, and walked along The platform to its end to see the ranged Joining and parting lines reflect a strong Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife, No house or land still seemed quite natural. Only a numbness registered the shock Of finding out how much had gone of life, How widely from the others. Dockery, now: Only nineteen, he must have taken stock Of what he wanted, and been capable Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how Convinced he was he should be added to! Why did he think adding meant increase? To me it was dilution. Where do these Innate assumptions come from? Not from what We think truest, or most want to do: Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style Our lives bring with them: habit for a while, Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got And how we got it; looked back on, they rear Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying For Dockery a son, for me nothing, Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage. Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.

The dog trots freely in the street and sees reality and the things he sees are bigger than himself and the things he sees are his reality Drunks in doorways Moons on trees The dog trots freely thru the street and the things he sees are smaller than himself Fish on newsprint Ants in holes Chickens in Chinatown windows their heads a block away The dog trots freely in the street and the things he smells smell something like himself The dog trots freely in the street past puddles and babies cats and cigars poolrooms and policemen He doesn’t hate cops He merely has no use for them and he goes past them and past the dead cows hung up whole in front of the San Francisco Meat Market He would rather eat a tender cow than a tough policeman though either might do And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory and past Coit’s Tower and past Congressman Doyle He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle although what he hears is very discouraging very depressing very absurd to a sad young dog like himself to a serious dog like himself But he has his own free world to live in His own fleas to eat He will not be muzzled Congressman Doyle is just another fire hydrant to him The dog trots freely in the street and has his own dog’s life to live and to think about and to reflect upon touching and tasting and testing everything investigating everything without benefit of perjury a real realist with a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with a real live barking democratic dog engaged in real free enterprise with something to say about ontology something to say about reality and how to see it and how to hear it with his head cocked sideways at streetcorners as if he is just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records listening for His Master’s Voice and looking like a living questionmark into the great gramaphone of puzzling existence with its wondrous hollow horn which always seems just about to spout forth some Victorious answer to everything

After my father’s cremation, my sisters and I agreed to bury him privately when the ground thawed. One will plant a flowering tree, one see to the stone and its cutting, one call the grave digger and the town clerk. It’ll be just us, the daughters, presiding over ashes that could be any mammal’s, or those of any love dispersible by wind. Let’s bury the secret violence to his dogs, Pompey and Tara, Juba and Molly, their ashes already gone to this ground. And his “escapades,” as Mom called them. Here withers that branch of the tree. Let’s bury the ring inscribed In perpetuum ave atque vale(translated “Hail and farewell” by my father, “Hello, and good-bye forever” by Mom, a token dating back to the First Separation) and a tennis ball for canine shades. Your dad is with his dogs now, said more than one person at the funeral. It’ll be just us, the three inheritors, on a raw windy day in Death’s kingdom, lifting our eyes from the hole to the mountains hazed with spring, saying,In perpetuum ave atque vale, minor god of our father. Let’s each of us drop a few dog biscuits into his grave.