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How difficult it is to say goodbye to scourge. For years we were obsessed with you, your complex glycoproteins and your sly, haphazard reproduction, your restraint in your resistance, how you bathed so slight yet fierce in our most intimate secretions. We will remember you for generations; electron micrographs of you seem quaint already, in the moment of our victory. How difficult it is to claim one’s right to living honestly. The honesty you taught was nothing quite as true as death, but neither was it final. Yes, we vanquished you, with latex, protease inhibitors, a little common sense— what’s that, you say? That some remain at risk? How dare you try to threaten us again! Of course, you’d like to make outrageous claims that some behaviors haven’t changed, that some have not had access to the drugs that mask your presence in the body. Difficult it is, how very sad, to see you strain (no pun intended) at response—our quilts, our bravest poetry, our deaths with grace and dignity have put you in your place. This elegy itself renounces you, as from this consciousness you’ve been erased. The love for you was very strong, the hot pursuits so many of us reveled in— but what once felt like love was really not. I hardly know what I will find to hate as much as I have loved and hated what you brought to bear upon my verse, the weight of your oppression and the joys of truth. How difficult it is—to face the white of nothingness, of clarity. We win!

1 What’s The Word! she cries from her purchase on the iron finial of the front gate to my heart. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And this sparrow with a woman’s face roars in the burdened air — air crowded with voices, but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word, teeming with speech, but no word — this woman with the body of a bird is shrieking fierce buzzed volts in the swarming babble, What’s The Word! This evening is the year of my birth. The country has just gained its independence. Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines. Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come years of mass poverty, decades of starving children and racially-fueled mayhem. Word is armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is burning, looting, curfews, and shoot-to-kill orders. And word is more deadly days lie ahead. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, more families fleeing their homes, more refugees streaming toward every border. More horror is to come, that’s the word. More scapegoating is to come, that’s the word. More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, in the homes, violence in the churches, in the temples where they preach who to love and who to hate. How to get to heaven, and who to leave behind. How to don the fleece of the blameless and prosecute your neighbor. All against all is to come. That’s the word. Who hasn’t heard that! she spits. You call yourself a poet? You tame high finisher of paltry blots! You publish doubt and call it knowledge! You destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify your envy! You murder benevolence and virtue with condescension. You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination! Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect! You ape The Word made flesh with words made words to multiply more words and words about your words! And you ritualize these sterile pleasures, miming joy, delight, and generation! You celebrate cheap distractions! Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind, starvation of the heart, and mass maladies of the soul. You mock and mimic sincerity! You read and divine by irony! You snare the little ones! You pose stumbling blocks to the lame! You dig pits for the blind! You sell desolation! Your science is despair! What’s The Word! I can tell she’s up to no good, this feathered interval, monument to the nano, this deciding gram, my Geronimo. She’s out to overturn an empire, to usurp principalities and powers, just by swooping into the right assembly, perplexing a senate, baffling a parliament, or bewildering somebody’s crosshairs. Not worth a farthing, and without a cent, she would own the realm her shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. I tell her, I sang in a church choir during one war North American TV made famous. I fled a burning archipelago in the rain, on my mother’s back, in another war nobody televised. In the midst of wars worldwide, many in countries whose names I can’t pronounce, I tucked Christ’s promise and Adam’s disgrace together with my pajamas under my pillow each morning, unable to distinguish which was God’s first thought, and which God’s second. Therefore, I seek asylum in the final word, an exile from the first word, and a refugee of an illegible past. Who hasn’t witnessed the laws of merging and parting, blessing and killing! she says. Who isn’t subject to the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh, the change of the guard, with and without blood, and their own dismembered history fed to the unvanquished flowers? Lift every clock’s face and see the counting angels reckoning, the killing angels busy at their anvils. Say what’s The Word, or die! It’s obvious she’s accounted for what the wind will take, what the moths must eat, the ants carry away, the Caesars keep. She’s a breathing remnant restored to springtime’s living cloth. She’s a pair of scissors trimming lament to allow for all I don’t know. And I can tell by the markings on her coat and her black eyes she knows which dreams to parse, which to heed, and which to bury. And look at those prehistoric feet. No doubt, she’s realized the secret to surviving her own tribe’s slaughter and dispersal. Pocket dictionary packed with signs in another language, blazing shard of the original emanation, Precambrian spark deposit, igneous jot of infinite magnitude, fiery iota, something about her precise little beak convinces me she grasps degree, and knows which i’ s to dot and which to leave large and alone. There are words, I say, and there is The Word. Every word is a fluctuating flame to a wick that dies. But The Word, The Word is a ruling sum and drastic mean, the standard that travels without moving. Words move, but The Word is fixed, the true blank. The Word is the voice of the lamp, and words are soot blackening the glass. The movements of words engender time and death. But The Word lives outside of time and death. Inside time, death rules. Life is death’s kingdom. We live at dying’s rate. Words are a sop for death. But The Word is the mother of thresholds, regulating life and death. The Word begets presences impossible to confirm, given the blinding action of time and the sea and the earth’s turning repose. And who is that supposed to feed? Whose thirst would that quench? she screeches, her voice materializing a greater body of innumerable birds arriving at dominion, increasing to overwhelm every mile of my heart, that bloody aerie branching and leafing, her feathers become all eyes and mouths, her voice coming now from everywhere, booming, When the Lover is ready, the Beloved will appear! Say what’s The Word or we both die! 2 I’ll call her my battle angel, this evangelion. Seraphic herald of the ninth echelon, pleromatic aeon demanding a founding gnosis, her voice electric tekhelet, Septuagint, a two-leaved door opening onto porches, chambers, and courts, her voice a Solomonic column of barley sugar. She’s why I’m crazy. She’s why I can’t sleep. She’s why I never sleep. She’s why I avoid people. She’s why I drill the eight limbs with the mud-step, why I walk the octagon of trigrams inscribed on Wudang, why I practice the Spiral Ox Jaw and the Tiger’s Mouth. She’s why I’m hard to live with and why I say, The bread that rises in a house that fails, The Word, father of zero and one, is our advocate. A shut eye we name Beginning, The Word sleeps, and all is darkness. An open eye we name The Treasure, The Word wakes and voices are heard among the sounds of water. The Word dreams, and worlds appear. And stars beyond and behind our eyes. And the moon with its hair tied up and its hair let down. Bound on every side, and wide open in the center, The Word hosts our breath, our span, the space of our dreaming and our thinking, our stillness and our moving. And the emerging present is one of its bodies. The fulcrum, the eye, the heart enthroned, the dove without person, homing, The Word is a hammer raining down its songs, a river pouring out of the mouth of the anvil. Twin and unlike, The Word is without peer. Black and white, it is a wheeling pair of coincident opposites turning on a point: Existence and Nonexistence hand in hand. Substance and Void begetting life and death. The Word is an open book, and its first and last pages are missing. It is a brother and sister telling each other the missing parts of one another’s stories. It is the lover and the beloved constantly changing places in the fire. And it is the wind in the treetops outside our window, a voice torn to pieces. Hear it? The wind without a house, she says. Time without a gate, she says. A memory of the ocean torments the trees, a homesickness, she says. The wind is leafing through both of our histories, looking for a happy ending. It is my hand moving over your body, I say, finding more and more to know. It is a circle of women reciting in the round the oldest stories of Death disguised as a traveler or overlooked familiar, friend we shunned for less faithful playmates. It is a house, and from inside come the voices of children taking turns reading to one another. It is their own story they read. But why do their voices seem uneasy? Does the moon, giant at the window, frighten them? Does death run amok through all the pages of the story? Do the pages turn by themselves? Are there strangers in the house? Is the house burning? Soldiers with guns are at our door again. Sister, quick. Change into a penny. I’ll fold you in a handkerchief, put you in my pocket, and jump inside a sack of rice, one of the uncooked kernels. Men with knives are looking in our windows again. Brother, hurry. Turn yourself into one of our mother’s dolls sitting on the living room shelf. I’ll be the dust settling on your eyelids. The ones wearing wings are in the yard. The ones adorned with lightning are in the house. The ones decorated with stars are dividing our futures among them. Don’t answer when they call to us in the voice of Nanny. Don’t believe them when they promise sugar. Don’t come out until evening, or when you hear our mother weeping to herself. If only I could become the mirror in her purse, I’d never come back until the end of time. 3 The treetops buck and heave in the night wind. Like drunks at sea leaning too far over a rocking bulwark. Like a woman throwing her green and gold hair in time to a song only she can hear. And from inside that windswept bulk growing darker comes a frenzied uproar of what must be hundreds of hidden birds. All that noise of wind, leaves, and branches, all that uttering from unseen throats, and is there no word? All that shrieking, iterating, crying in the rustling leaves. All that screaming, shrilling, running din of squeaky wheels, radiant numbers of tongues, beaks, hubs, wings, spokes keening in centrifugal spinning, and not one word? Not any? Nor part? No bearing? One hunger, a fanned fire, roars in the voice of the sea. One light eats itself, unconsumed. The wind is taking the night apart, she says. The wind is dismantling the leaves, the branches, the minutes, our listening, and finding more and more moving pieces to index: our hands, our mouths, our voices, recurring stairs of an imperfect past, a rumored present, figures multiplying inside a mirror. Each, alone in his dream of the world, I say, is host and guest, a book and the one who reads it by the light of a vanished childhood. Don’t say that, she says. We see by the light of who we are. Look at us: you inside me inside you. We’ve lived inside each other from the beginning. And from before beginning. Before the world was ever found. Before the world was found, I say, I dwelled inside you, and you breathed all through me, in my body and its happiness, in my body and its loneliness. After I found the world, I had to go looking for you. Ever since the world, I only lose you and find you. Lose you. And find you. The body of the beloved is the lover’s true homeland, she says. I can hear you, but I can’t hear me, I say, your voice a burning gown of song and time, and me with my ghosts, me with my mockingbird. Don’t say that, she says. What is my mind, I wonder, but the reflected light of your voice, O, burning one, O, seeing voice, O, speaking eye that renders us now legible, now indecipherable, now strangers traveling under assumed names. Don’t say that, she says. Look. A single page of the wind copied by hand is the volume of despair the smallest living wing displaces. And your voice will be your cup each day my wings shelter your dear, momentary earth. My mind is several minds, I say, each abiding differently: in your eyes, in the smell of your hair, in your voice moving over me, in my voice moving over you. She says, Don’t look at your hands. Watch the shadows they make. I say, Moving over you, my voice crosses out of forbidden chambers of the Emperor of China, through chronicles of exile and death in a foreign country, to touch the ground I touch in me when I speak to you. She says, A new mind makes the world new. True words are a little blue. And being human makes the saddest music in the world. She says, Postpone all morning bells. The ore lies awake inside the rock, a dream of origin waiting to be rescued. I say, The glare of your nakedness confounds me, a distraction from the darker incandescence of your being. Inside you is the safest place to be. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And of all the things on my mind this evening, words weigh the least, Death weighs the most, and your voice’s body beneath my voice’s moving hand is a green agent of freedom and law, best friend to my earth and my ache. Of all the things keeping me from sleep, words weigh too much, yet not enough. Time weighs nothing at all, but I can’t bear it. And your body, burdened by minutes and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song. One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee, your body is the Lord’s pure geometry. Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies, and the mouth of the falls. And of all the things we’re dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest, surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.

If we change as she is changing, if she changes as we change (If she changes, I am changing) Who is changing, as I bend down to what the sky has sent us? (Is she changing, or the same?)

Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone, Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone: Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower, Stars fulfilled the desire of the darkling world as with music: the star-bright air Made the face of the sea, if aught may make the face of the sea, more fair. Whence came change? Was the sweet night weary of rest? What anguish awoke in the dark? Sudden, sublime, the strong storm spake: we heard the thunders as hounds that bark. Lovelier if aught may be lovelier than stars, we saw the lightnings exalt the sky, Living and lustrous and rapturous as love that is born but to quicken and lighten and die. Heaven's own heart at its highest of delight found utterance in music and semblance in fire: Thunder on thunder exulted, rejoicing to live and to satiate the night's desire. And the night was alive and anhungered of life as a tiger from toils cast free: And a rapture of rage made joyous the spirit and strength of the soul of the sea. All the weight of the wind bore down on it, freighted with death for fraught: And the keen waves kindled and quickened as things transfigured or things distraught. And madness fell on them laughing and leaping; and madness came on the wind: And the might and the light and the darkness of storm were as storm in the heart of Ind. Such glory, such terror, such passion, as lighten and harrow the far fierce East, Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night was an altar with death for priest. The channel that sunders England from shores where never was man born free Was clothed with the likeness and thrilled with the strength and the wrath of a tropic sea. As a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears till it swerves from a backward fall, The strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck was upright as a sheer cliff's wall. Stern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse, a recoil, a breath, And she sprang as the life in a god made man would spring at the throat of death. Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy, Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy. For the central crest of the night was cloud that thundered and flamed, sublime As the splendour and song of the soul everlasting that quickens the pulse of time. The glory beholden of man in a vision, the music of light overheard, The rapture and radiance of battle, the life that abides in the fire of a word, In the midmost heaven enkindled, was manifest far on the face of the sea, And the rage in the roar of the voice of the waters was heard but when heaven breathed free. Far eastward, clear of the covering of cloud, the sky laughed out into light From the rims of the storm to the sea's dark edge with flames that were flowerlike and white. The leaping and luminous blossoms of live sheet lightning that laugh as they fade From the cloud's black base to the black wave's brim rejoiced in the light they made. Far westward, throned in a silent sky, where life was in lustrous tune, Shone, sweeter and surer than morning or evening, the steadfast smile of the moon. The limitless heaven that enshrined them was lovelier than dreams may behold, and deep As life or as death, revealed and transfigured, may shine on the soul through sleep. All glories of toil and of triumph and passion and pride that it yearns to know Bore witness there to the soul of its likeness and kinship, above and below. The joys of the lightnings, the songs of the thunders, the strong sea's labour and rage, Were tokens and signs of the war that is life and is joy for the soul to wage. No thought strikes deeper or higher than the heights and the depths that the night made bare, Illimitable, infinite, awful and joyful, alive in the summit of air— Air stilled and thrilled by the tempest that thundered between its reign and the sea's, Rebellious, rapturous, and transient as faith or as terror that bows men's knees. No love sees loftier and fairer the form of its godlike vision in dreams Than the world shone then, when the sky and the sea were as love for a breath's length seems— One utterly, mingled and mastering and mastered and laughing with love that subsides As the glad mad night sank panting and satiate with storm, and released the tides. In the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship hung hovering, assailed and withheld As a soul born royal, if life or if death be against it, is thwarted and quelled. As the glories of myriads of glowworms in lustrous grass on a boundless lawn Were the glories of flames phosphoric that made of the water a light like dawn. A thousand Phosphors, a thousand Hespers, awoke in the churning sea, And the swift soft hiss of them living and dying was clear as a tune could be; As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep, Audible alway alive in the storm, too fleet for a dream to keep: Too fleet, too sweet for a dream to recover and thought to remember awake: Light subtler and swifter than lightning, that whispers and laughs in the live storm's wake, In the wild bright wake of the storm, in the dense loud heart of the labouring hour, A harvest of stars by the storm's hand reaped, each fair as a star-shaped flower. And sudden and soft as the passing of sleep is the passing of tempest seemed When the light and the sound of it sank, and the glory was gone as a dream half dreamed. The glory, the terror, the passion that made of the midnight a miracle, died, Not slain at a stroke, nor in gradual reluctance abated of power and of pride; With strong swift subsidence, awful as power that is wearied of power upon earth, As a God that were wearied of power upon heaven, and were fain of a new God's birth, The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell: And the sea and the sky put off them the rapture and radiance of heaven and of hell. The waters, heaving and hungering at heart, made way, and were wellnigh fain, For the ship that had fought them, and wrestled, and revelled in labour, to cease from her pain. And an end was made of it: only remembrance endures of the glad loud strife; And the sense that a rapture so royal may come not again in the passage of life.

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be: “All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters. “That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening.... “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).” So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!” And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.” Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

The nominalist in me invents A life devoid of precedents. The realist takes a different view: He claims that all I feel and do Billions of others felt and did In history’s Pre-me period. Arguing thus, both voices speak A partial truth. I am unique, Yet the unceasing self-distress Of desire buffets me no less Than it has other sons of man Who’ve come and gone since time began. The meaning, then, of this dispute? My life’s a nominal/real pursuit, Which leaves identity clear and blurred, In which what happens has occurred Often and never—which is to say, Never to me, or quite this way.

It was the hornbill that spoke it. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new How does the darkness hide? In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new The sun is no bigger than a crab. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new Hot soup is devoured from the edges. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new The blood sign is red; burning like fire. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new It has no name; silence is its name. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything. The world is old, the world is new.

We are circling, glad of the battle: we joy in the smell of the smoke. Fight on in the hell of the trenches: we publish your names with a croak! Ye will lie in dim heaps when the sunset blows cold on the reddening sand; Yet fight, for the dead will have wages—a death-clutch of dust in the hand. Ye have given us banquet, O kings, and still do we clamor for more: Vast, vast is our hunger, as vast as the sea-hunger gnawing the shore. ’Tis well ye are swift with your signals— the blaze of the banners, the blare Of the bugles, the boom of battalions, the cannon-breath hot on the air. It is for our hunger ye hurry, it is for our feast ye are met: Be sure we will never forget you, O servants that never forget! For we are the Spirits of Battle, the peerage of greed we defend: Our lineage rose from the Night, and we go without fellow or friend. We were ere our servant Sesostris spread over the Asian lands The smoke of the blood of the peoples, and scattered their bones to the sands. We circled in revel for ages above the Assyrian stream, While Babylon builded her beauty, and faded to dust and to dream. We scattered our laughter on nations— and Troy was a word and a waste, The glory of Carthage was ruined, the grandeur of Rome was effaced! And we blazoned the name of Timour, as he harried his herd of kings, And the host of his hordes wound on, a dragon with undulant rings. And we slid down the wind upon France, when the steps of the earthquake passed, When the Bastile bloomed into flame, and the heavens went by on the blast. We hung over Austerlitz, cheering the armies with jubilant cries: We scented three kings at the carnage, and croaked our applause from the skies. O kings, ye have catered to vultures— have chosen to feed us, forsooth, The joy of the world and her glory, the hope of the world and her youth. O kings, ye are diligent lackeys: we laurel your names with our praise, For ye are the staff of our comfort, for ye are the strength of our days. Then spur on the host in the trenches to give up the sky at a stroke: We tell all the winds of their glory: we publish their fame with a croak!

All male Quincys are now dead, excepting one. John Wheelwright, “Gestures to the Dead” 1 Vast oblong space dwindled to one solitary rock. On it I saw a heap of hay impressed with the form of a man. Beleaguered Captain Stork with his cane on some quixotic skirmish. Deserters arrived from Fort Necessity All hope was gone. Howe carrying a white flag of truce went toward the water. 2 An Apostle in white stood on a pavement of scarlet Around him stretched in deep sleep lay the dark forms of warriors. He was turned away gazing on a wide waste. His cry of alarm astonished everyone. 3 A Council of War in battle array after some siege. I ran to them shouting as I ran “Victory!” Night closed in weedy with flies. The Moon slid between moaning pines and tangled vines. 4 Neutrals collected bones or journeyed behind on foot shouting at invisible doors to open. There were guards who approached stealthy as linxes Always fresh footprints in the forest We closed a chasm then trod the ground firm I carried your name like a huge shield. 5 Because dreams were oracles agile as wild-cats we leapt on a raft of ice. Children began a wail of despair we carried them on our shoulders. A wave thrust our raft of ice against a northern shore. An Indian trail led through wood and thicket Light broke on the forest The hostile town was close at hand. We screamed our war-cry and rushed in. 6 It was Him Power of the Clouds Judge of the Dead The sheep on his right The goats on his left And all the angels. But from the book backward on their knees crawled neolithic adventurers known only to themselves. They blazed with artifice no pin, or kernel, or grain too small to pick up. A baby with a broken face lay on the leaves Hannibal—a rough looking man rushed by with a bundle of sticks. “Ah, this is fortunate,” cried Forebear and helped himself to me. 7 God is an animal figure Clearly headless. He bewitches his quarry with ambiguous wounds The wolf or poor ass had only stolen straw. O sullen Silence Nail two sticks together and tell resurrection stories. 8 There on the deck, child in her arms was the girl I had been before She waved then threw her child to me and jumped But she missed the edge and swirled away. I left you in a group of grownup children and went in search wandered sandhills snowy nights calling “Mother, Father” A Dauphin sat down to dine on dust alone in his field of wheat One war-whoop toppled a State. I thought we were in the right country but the mountains were gone. We saw five or six people coming toward us who were savages. Alhough my pen was leaky as a sieve I scribbled “Arm, Arm!” “Ear.” Barked the Moon. We paddled with hands, planks, and a pencil “Listen—The people surrender” I don’t remember the rest but it was beautiful. We were led ashore by Captain Snow “I’ll meet you soon—” he said and vanished in the fog. 9 We cooked trout and perch on forked sticks. Fire crackled in the forest stillness Fire forms stood out against the gloom Ancient trunks with wens and deformities Moss bearded ancients—and thin saplings The strong, the weak, the old, the young— Now and then some sleeper would get up Warm her hands at the fire and listen to the whisper of a leaf or the footfall of an animal I kept my gun-match burning when it rained— 10 Holding hands with my skin I walked the wintry strand. “Tickle yourself with my stroke” ticked the wiseacre clock. The river sang— “Pelucid dark and deep my waters— come and cross me alone.” The final ruins ahead revealed two figures timidly engraved on one another. 11 I built a house that faced the east I never ventured west for fear of murder. Eternity dawned. Solitary watcher of what rose and set I saw only a Golgotha of corpses. 12 Experience teaches the savage revenge an enemy always takes on forerunners who follow. You were a little army of unarmed children— A newborn infant sat in the hollow of my pillow. 13 The house was a model of harmony. Children coiled like hedgehogs or lay on their backs. A doll uttered mysterious oracles “Put on the kettle.” “Get up and go home.” The clock was alive I asked what it ate. “A Cross large enough to crucify us all.” and so on. Blankets congealed into icicles We practiced trips, falls, dives into snowdrifts. With a snowshoe for a shovel I opened the clock and we searched for peace in its deep and private present. Outside, the world swarmed with sorcerers.

Our annual prairie Chanukah party— latkes, kugel, cherry blintzes. Friends arrive from nearby towns and dance the twist to “Chanukah Lights Tonight,” spin like a dreidel to a klezmer hit. The candles flicker in the window. Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows. If you squint, the neighbors’ Christmas lights look like the Omaha skyline. The smell of oil is in the air. We drift off to childhood where we spent our gelt on baseball cards and matinees, cream sodas and potato knishes. No delis in our neighborhood, only the wind howling over the crushed corn stalks. Inside, we try to sweep the darkness out, waiting for the Messiah to knock, wanting to know if he can join the party.