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We reconstruct lives in the intensive care unit, pieced together in a buffet dinner: two widows with cancerous breasts in their balled hands; a 30-year-old man in a three-month coma from a Buick and a brick wall; a woman who bleeds off and on from her gullet; a prominent socialite, our own nurse, shrieking for twins, “her bump gone”; the gallery of veterans, succored, awake, without valves, some lungs gone. Splicing the meats with fluids seasoned on the dressing room table, she sings “the bump gone” refrain in this 69-degree oven, unstuffing her twin yolks carved from the breast, the dark meat wrapped in tinfoil and clean newspaper; the half black registered nurse hums her six years in an orphanage, her adopted white family, breaded and primed in a posse, rising in clan for their dinner. We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door light meters: race and sex spooled and rungs in a hobby; we take our bundle and go home.

Where Claribel low-lieth The breezes pause and die, Letting the rose-leaves fall: But the solemn oak-tree sigheth, Thick-leaved, ambrosial, With an ancient melody Of an inward agony, Where Claribel low-lieth. At eve the beetle boometh Athwart the thicket lone: At noon the wild bee hummeth About the moss'd headstone: At midnight the moon cometh, And looketh down alone. Her song the lintwhite swelleth, The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth, The callow throstle lispeth, The slumbrous wave outwelleth, The babbling runnel crispeth, The hollow grot replieth Where Claribel low-lieth.

Her cart like a dugout canoe. Had been an oak trunk. Cut young.      Fire-scoured. What was bark what was heartwood :P u r e   C h a r - H o l e Adze-hacked and gouged. Ever after (never not) wheeling hollow there behind her. Up the hill toward Bennett Yard; down through Eight-Mile, the Narrows. C o m e s   C l a r y   b y   h e r e   n o w Body bent past bent.      Intent upon horizon and carry. Her null eye long since gone isinglassy, opal. —The potent (brimming, fluent) one looks brown. C o u r s e s   C l a r y   s u r e   a s   b a y o u   t h r o u g h   h e r e  n o w Bearing (and borne ahead by) hull and hold behind her. Plies the dark. Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee. C r o s s e s   C l a r y   b l e s s   h e r   b a r r o w   u p   t h e r e   n o w Pausing and voweling there—   the place where the girl fell. (                  ) Afterwhile passing. Comes her cart like a whole-note held.

It's just me throwing myself at you, romance as usual, us times us, not lust but moxibustion, a substance burning close to the body as possible withut risk of immolation. Nearness without contact causes numbness. Analgesia. Pins and needles. As the snugness of the surgeon's glove causes hand fatigue. At least this procedure requires no swag or goody bags, stuff bestowed upon the stars at their luxe functions. There's no dress code, though leg irons are always appropriate. And if anyone says what the hell are you wearing in Esperanto —Kion diable vi portas? — tell them anguish is the universal language. Stars turn to trainwrecks and my heart goes out admirers gush. Ground to a velvet! But never mind the downside, mon semblable, mon crush. Love is just the retaliation of light. It is so profligate, you know, so rich with rush.

Already his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn't even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had driven up into the mountains to "take the waters," as our parents put it. Our parents' instructions were simple: they would be in one room, our sister in another, my brother and I in yet another. Down the dark hallways as dark as tunnels, down through the strong smell of minerals and seawater, the attendants led us to our rooms. What was that smell? Sulfur? Aluminum? There was the smell of salt, but it was not the salt of the earth, not the sea itself. The old man told us not to sit in the water for more than fifteen minutes at a time, to drink lots of cold water, to scrub the salts into our skin, to take care of each other. And then, he left us. We took off our clothes, did it without thinking. "You get in first," is all he said, his voice sounding more like my father's, his voice having changed almost a year ago. His body had changed, too. Sitting in the pool, my thoughts began to swim in the vapors, the steam, I felt nauseated. I wanted not to look at him. I wanted to look at the tile: blue and blue-white with the depiction of a terrible vine twisting and creeping around the tops of the walls. When he got out and lay on the tile next to the pool, his abdomen was already sculpted, and the thin trail . . . He knew I watched him, and he loved the admiration. When I finally got out, my head dizzy, my heart racing from the heat, I lay myself down next to him. He scrubbed my back with a rough sponge, pulled me against his chest as he scrubbed behind my ears and under my arms. There, in the steam, I was cleaner than I would ever be again.

Her small body shines with water and light. Giggling, she squeals “daddy,” splashes until his pants darken. Five more minutes, he thinks, stepping out quickly, pouring himself a drink, not expecting to return to find her slipped under, her tiny face staring up through the undulating surface. Before he can move, or drop his scotch, she raises her dripping head, her mouth a perfect O. The sound of her gulped breath takes the wind out of him. Her face, pale and awed, understands the other side of water and air. His wife didn’t see, doesn’t know. Her feet pulse and fade in the upstairs joists. His daughter cries, slips from him, not giggling. She wants out. He tries to keep her in the tub, in the light. He’s on his knees.

In her hand the knife, brisk, brilliant as moon-claw, shaves the flesh. It grazes the white belly just over the heart. Underneath, the coiled fingers are cradling a soft flesh as if it were the jowls of the aged man propped for a while on the bench in the park. The head is not severed, the eyes not out. Blue, they appear to flash odd ways where a tree makes a live shadow. Mostly the eyes are dead. Nothing is in them except the intense blue of sky the tree allows. There is no conspiring of nerves, no least event recalled by a limb’s high arching, or even a girl’s ascension from a forgotten distance of water. But there is something as she lifts the meat. It is enough to draw down her gaze. Now her arm rises against yellow hair fallen white in a childish face. She is still as a leaf barely clinging. I come to her like a cat in the stunned grass and touch her to see the startled, upthrusted gleam of her face. At brow and each cheek like gathered beads of mist scales leap with the sun, and are dead. No word passes between us, but something electric as a flash of steel makes her cry out just once. Squatting at the yard’s edge, she sings beyond any thought. Her knife flies as lethal as love and cuts quickly in like a hurried kiss.

The day had finally come when everything there seemed misplaced or out of place as an ex's box of things. The unused beside the irreplaceable, the easy- to-assemble uncomplicated now by disuse. Some hand of randomness leaving behind its lampshades stained like ancient maps, its ladders still climbing upward, and enough old tools to restart a world. Every drawer filled with the other half of things. Everything care embraced, and held once as new, left too ragged for another winter to wear. Its ring of keys dangling by a nail for rooms left long ago. And whatever I said I'd never forget found, just as it seemed completely forgot—all its letters beginning with Dear....

Come my little Robert near— Fie! what filthy hands are here! Who that e'er could understand The rare structure of a hand, With its branching fingers fine, Work itself of hands divine, Strong, yet delicately knit, For ten thousand uses fit, Overlaid with so clear skin You may see the blood within, And the curious palm, disposed In such lines, some have supposed You may read the fortunes there By the figures that appear— Who this hand would chuse to cover With a crust of dirt all over, Till it look'd in hue and shape Like the fore-foot of an Ape? Man or boy that works or plays In the fields or the highways May, without offence or hurt, From the soil contract a dirt, Which the next clear spring or river Washes out and out for ever— But to cherish stains impure, Soil deliberate to endure, On the skin to fix a stain Till it works into the grain, Argues a degenerate mind, Sordid, slothful, ill inclin'd, Wanting in that self-respect Which does virtue best protect. All-endearing Cleanliness, Virtue next to Godliness, Easiest, cheapest, needful'st duty, To the body health and beauty, Who that's human would refuse it, When a little water does it?

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. Moon-fingers lay down their same routine On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls. I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed. I want to be entered and picked clean. And the wind says “What?” to me. And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me. And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark. And the gears notch and the engines wheel.