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Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand around on the sidewalks if we’re black or brown. Vanetta’s over the trestle, and that’s our town. The hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after your row the river, and the graveyard’s on the hill, cold in the springtime blow, the graveyard’s up on high, and the town is down below. Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house, thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn’t attend, died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end. When a man said I feel poorly, for any reason, any weakness or such, letting up when he couldn’t keep going barely, the Cap and company come and run him off the job surely. I’ve put them DOWN from the tunnel camps to the graveyard on the hill, tin-cans all about—it fixed them!— TUNNELITIS hold themselves up at the side of a tree, I can go right now to that cemetery. When the blast went off the boss would call out, Come, let’s go back, when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come, let’s go back, telling us hurry, hurry, into the falling rocks and muck. The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water, the camps and their groves were colored with the dust, we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust. Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves, it stayed and the rain couldn’t wash it away and it twinkled that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles. As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.

1. About the Dead Man and Rigor Mortis The dead man thinks his resolve has stiffened when the ground dries. Feeling the upward flow of moisture, the dead man thinks his resolve has stiffened. The dead man’s will, will be done. The dead man’s backbone stretches from rung to rung, from here to tomorrow, from a fabricated twinge to virtual agony. The dead man’s disks along his spine are like stepping-stones across a lake, the doctor told him “jelly doughnuts” when they ruptured, this is better. The dead man’s hernial groin is like a canvas bridge across a chasm, the doctor said “balloon” when they operated, this is better. The dead man’s toes are like sanded free forms and his heels are as smooth as the backs of new shoes, the doctor said “corns” when they ached, this is better. The dead man’s eyes are like tiny globes in water, continental geographies in microcosm, all the canyons are visible, now washed of random hairs that rooted, now free of the strangulated optics of retinal sense, this is better. All the dead man’s organs, his skin, muscles, tendons, arteries, veins, valves, networks, relays—the whole shebang hums like a quickly deserted hardware store. To the dead man, a head of cabbage is a forerunner of nutrients. The dead man’s garden foreshadows the day it is to be plowed under, agriculture being one of the ancient Roman methods for burying the Classics, the other was war. No one can argue with the dead man, he brooks no interference between the lightning and ground, his determination is legendary. 2. More About the Dead Man and Rigor Mortis You think it’s funny, the dead man being stiff? You think it’s an anatomically correct sexual joke? You think it’s easy, being petrified? You think it’s just one of those things, being turned to stone? Who do you think turns the dead man to stone anyway? Who do you think got the idea first? You think it’s got a future, this being dead? You think it’s in the cards, you think the thunder spoke? You think he thought he was dead, or thought he fancied he was dead, or imagined he could think himself dead, or really knew he was dead? You think he knew he knew? You think it was predetermined? You think when he stepped out of character he was different? What the hell, what do you think? You think it’s funny, the way the dead man is like lightning, going straight into the ground? You think it’s hilarious, comedy upstanding, crackers to make sense of?

1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life. Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life. Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research his makeup. He wants to study things outside himself if he can find them. Moving, the dead man makes the sound of bone on bone. He bends a knee that doesn’t wish to bend, he raises an arm that argues with a shoulder, he turns his head by throwing it wildly to the side. He envies the lobster the protective sleeves of its limbs. He believes the jellyfish has it easy, floating, letting everything pass through it. He would like to be a starfish, admired for its shape long after. Everything the dead man said, he now takes back. Not as a lively young man demonstrates sincerity or regret. A young dead man and an old dead man are two different things. A young dead man is oil, an old dead man is water. A young dead man is bread and butter, an old dead man is bread and water—it’s a difference in construction, also architecture. The dead man was there in the beginning: to the dead man, the sky is a crucible. In the dead man’s lifetime, the planet has changed from lava to ash to cement. But the dead man flops his feathers, he brings his wings up over his head and has them touch, he bends over with his beak to the floor, he folds and unfolds at the line where his armor creases. The dead man is open to change and has deep pockets. The dead man is the only one who will live forever. 2. More About the Beginnings of the Dead Man One day the dead man looked up into the crucible and saw the sun. The dead man in those days held the sky like a small globe, like a patchwork ball, like an ultramarine bowl. The dead man softened it, kneaded it, turned it and gave it volume. He thrust a hand deep into it and shaped it from the inside out. He blew into it and pulled it and stretched it until it became full- sized, a work of art created by a dead man. The excellence of it, the quality, its character, its fundamental nature, its raison d‘être, its “it” were all indebted to the dead man. The dead man is the flywheel of the spinning planet. The dead man thinks he can keep things the same by not moving. By not moving, the dead man maintains the status quo at the center of change. The dead man, by not moving, is an explorer: he follows his nose. When it’s not personal, not profound, he can make a new world anytime. The dead man is the future, was always the future, can never be the past. Like God, the dead man existed before the beginning, a time marked by galactic static. Now nothing remains of the first static that isn’t music, fashioned into melody by the accidents of interval. Now nothing more remains of silence that isn’t sound. The dead man has both feet in the past and his head in the clouds.

These roads will take you into your own country. Seasons and maps coming where this road comes into a landscape mirrored in these men. Past all your influences, your home river, constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood, parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes. What one word must never be said? Dead, and these men fight off our dying, cough in the theatres of the war. What two things shall never be seen? They : what we did.     Enemy : what we mean. This is a nation’s scene and halfway house. What three things can never be done? Forget.     Keep silent.     Stand alone. The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain. The facts of war forced into actual grace. Seasons and modern glory.     Told in the histories, how first ships came seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds lining the west horizon with their white shining halations; they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe— could not be used to transform; created coast— breathed-in America. See how they took the land, made after-life fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer base and blockade, pushed forests down in an implacable walk west where new clouds lay at the desirable body of sunset; taking the seaboard.     Replaced the isolation, dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater frontier of Europe, a moment, and another frontier held, this land was planted home-land that we know. Ridge of discovery, until we walk to windows, seeing America lie in a photograph of power, widened before our forehead, and still behind us falls another glory, London unshaken, the long French road to Spain, the old Mediterranean flashing new signals from the hero hills near Barcelona, monuments and powers, parent defenses. Before our face the broad and concrete west, green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river controlled and dammed; the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country sharp in the south, liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert, the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen fountain of life, the flourished land, people with watercourses to California and the colored sea; sums of frontiers and unmade boundaries of acts and poems, the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing, this fact and this disease. ______________ Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world carries its history in familiar eyes, planted in flesh it signifies its music in minds which turn to sleep and memory, in music knowing all the shimmering names, the spear, the castle, and the rose. But planted in our flesh these valleys stand, everywhere we begin to know the illness, are forced up, and our times confirm us all. In the museum life, centuries of ambition yielded at last a fertilizing image: the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove, on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist cross to her feet, a pointed human crown. This valley is given to us like a glory. To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face. All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet, and art to see after the change of heart; all the belligerents who know the world. You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners, you workers and hope of countries, first among powers; you who give peace and bodily repose, opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands physical peace, flooding old battlefields with general brilliance, who best love your lives; and you young, you who finishing the poem wish new perfection and begin to make; you men of fact, measure our times again. _____________ These are our strength, who strike against history. These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases; these carrying light for safety on their foreheads descended deeper for richer faults of ore, drilling their death. These touching radium and the luminous poison, carried their death on the lips and with their warning glow in their graves. These weaves and their eyes water and rust away, these stand at wheels until their brains corrode, these farm and starve, all these men cry their doom across the world, meeting avoidable death, fight against madness, find every war. Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers, fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid lines of defense. Defense is sight; widen the lens and see standing over the land myths of identity, new signals, processes: Alloys begin : certain dominant metals. Deliberate combines add new qualities, sums of new uses. Over the country, from islands of Maine fading, Cape Sable fading south into the orange detail of sunset, new processes, new signals, new possession. A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory deep in these powers. Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene, to photograph and to extend the voice, to speak this meaning. Voices to speak to us directly.     As we move. As we enrich, growing in larger motion, this word, this power. Down coasts of taken countries, mastery, discovery at one hand, and at the other frontiers and forests, fanatic cruel legend at our back and speeding ahead the red and open west, and this our region, desire, field, beginning.    Name and road, communication to these many men, as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

All power is saved, having no end.     Rises in the green season, in the sudden season the white the budded and the lost. Water celebrates, yielding continually sheeted and fast in its overfall slips down the rock, evades the pillars building its colonnades, repairs in stream and standing wave retains its seaward green broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white. White brilliant function of the land’s disease. Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under concrete arches and the channeled hills, turns in the gorge toward its release; kinetic and controlled, the sluice urging the hollow, the thunder, the major climax energy total and open watercourse praising the spillway, fiery glaze, crackle of light, cleanest velocity flooding, the moulded force. I open out a way over the water I form a path between the Combatants: Grant that I sail down like a living bird, power over the fields and Pool of Fire. Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world. Diverted water, the fern and fuming white ascend in mist of continuous diffusion. Rivers are turning inside their mountains, streams line the stone, rest at the overflow lake and in lanes of pliant color lie. Blessing of this innumerable silver, printed in silver, images of stone walk on a screen of falling water in film-silver in continual change recurring colored, plunging with the wave. Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers. The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west, the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed. Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset, the caretaker’s house and the steep abutment, hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under the moist and fragile galleries of stone, mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall, the quick light fall, years of white cities fall, flood that this valley built falls slipping down the green turn in the river’s green. Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky. How many feet of whirlpools? What is a year in terms of falling water? Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities. Continuity: Σ Q = 0 Equations for falling water. The streaming motion. The balance-sheet of energy that flows passing along its infinite barrier. It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide, runs through electric wires; it comes, warning the night, running among these rigid hills, a single force to waken our eyes. They poured the concrete and the columns stood, laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel, a dam for monument was what they hammered home. Blasted, and stocks went up; insured the base, and limousines wrote their own graphs upon roadbed and lifeline. Their hands touched mastery: wait for defense, solid across the world. Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.” Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine gun racke- teers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had the information on them. Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come within my knowledge. Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stockholder had better take this question up in a private conference. The dam is safe. A scene of power. The dam is the father of the tunnel. This is the valley’s work, the white, the shining. Stock and Dividend in                                                                 Net Closing High  Low            Dollars                   Open   High   Low    Last   Chge. Bid    Ask    Sales 111   61 ¼  Union Carbide (3.20)...67 ¼   69 ½  67 ¼  69 ½   +3     69 ¼  69 ½ 3 ,400 The dam is used when the tunnel is used. The men and the water are never idle, have definitions. This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours, surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest, willing to run forever to find its peace in equal seas in currents of still glass. Effects of friction : to fight and pass again, learning its power, conquering boundaries, able to rise blind in revolts of tide, broken and sacrificed to flow resumed. Collecting eternally power. Spender of power, torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments, million, its power can rest and rise forever, wait and be flexible. Be born again. Nothing is lost, even among the wars, imperfect flow, confusion of force. It will rise. These are the phases of its face. It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden. It changes. It does not die.

You never wrote the small green book like the poems of Edward Thomas. It was a book I dreamed. But watching the green report of your heart on the monitor it came to me as I stood like one of the doctors in my cap and gown, home, where you've lived like a bachelor at the far end of the house, there is a green diary: the book of the deer, the bear and the elk, with snapshots of Julian and Bob and Harry, old hunting friends dead as the game strung up on poles or drooped across fenders. I think you are the only one left. And still you fight to stay, breathing the scorched air of the burn ward, the sweet stink of your own charred flesh. Stepfather, don't go. Seventy-three years is not the end of the book, the letters you never wrote, because even before you blistered your hands the act of writing pained you. It took four shots to bring it down. Your father never praised you. Rising from dinner that night he beckoned toward the woodshed where the skinned deer hung draped in burlap. Then he whipped you with a belt. "Don't ever bring home meat shot up like that! One bullet is enough." I saw you kill a running buck at three hundred yards with one shot. It's a brutal art that fathers pass to sons. When the propane tank ignited you took the flaming cylinder in your arms like a lover and fought it out the door. Now you dream each night of the trailer burning. My mother screams and beats the fire out of her hair. She was not burned like you— twice, and three times, for your care. Now the deer are safe from us, I have one photograph to add to our book: a doe running through a field. My best shot. Somewhere in the grass behind her a fawn is hiding. You can't see it, but it's there waiting for its mother to draw us away. Later, she'll return and the two of them will be saved. Stepfather, Father, be like the fawn.

THEL'S MOTTO Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole: Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? I The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks. All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air. To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day: Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard: And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew. O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water? Why fade these children of the spring? born but to smile & fall. Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud. Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water. Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face, Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head, And gentle sleep the sleep of death. and gentle hear the voice Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time. The Lilly of the valley breathing in the humble grass Answer'd the lovely maid and said: I am a watry weed, And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales; So weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head. Yet I am visited from heaven and he that smiles on all. Walks in the valley. and each morn over me spreads his hand Saying, rejoice thou humble grass, thou new-born lilly flower, Thou gentle maid of silent valleys. and of modest brooks; For thou shalt be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna: Till summers heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs To flourish in eternal vales: then why should Thel complain, Why should the mistress of the vales of Har, utter a sigh. She ceasd & smild in tears, then sat down in her silver shrine. Thel answered. O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley. Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o'ertired. Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells thy milky garments, He crops thy flowers. while thou sittest smiling in his face, Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints. Thy wine doth purify the golden honey, thy perfume, Which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs, Revives the milked cow, & tames the fire-breathing steed. But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun: I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?" "Queen of the vales," the Lily answered, "ask the tender cloud, And it shall tell thee why it glitters in the morning sky, And why it scatters its bright beauty thro' the humid air. Descend, O little cloud, & hover before the eyes of Thel." The Cloud descended, and the Lily bowd her modest head, And went to mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass. II "O little Cloud," the virgin said, "I charge thee tell to me, Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away: Then we shall seek thee but not find; ah, Thel is like to Thee. I pass away, yet I complain, and no one hears my voice." The Cloud then shew'd his golden head & his bright form emerg'd, Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel. "O virgin, know'st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs Where Luvah doth renew his horses? Look'st thou on my youth, And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more, Nothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away, It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy: Unseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers, And court the fair eyed dew, to take me to her shining tent: The weeping virgin trembling kneels before the risen sun, Till we arise link'd in a golden band, and never part, But walk united, bearing food to all our tender flowers." "Dost thou O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee; For I walk through the vales of Har and smell the sweetest flowers, But I feed not the little flowers; I hear the warbling birds, But I feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food; But Thel delights in these no more, because I fade away, And all shall say, 'Without a use this shining woman liv'd, Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms?'" The Cloud reclind upon his airy throne and answer'd thus: "Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies, How great thy use, how great thy blessing! Every thing that lives Lives not alone, nor for itself; fear not, and I will call The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice. Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen." The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lily's leaf, And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale. III Then Thel astonish'd view'd the Worm upon its dewy bed. "Art thou a Worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm? I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lily's leaf; Ah, weep not, little voice, thou can'st not speak, but thou can'st weep. Is this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked, weeping, And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother's smiles." The Clod of Clay heard the Worm's voice, & raisd her pitying head; She bow'd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd In milky fondness; then on Thel she fix'd her humble eyes. "O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves; Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed; My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark, But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head, And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast, And says: 'Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.' But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know; I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love." The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil, And said: "Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep. That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot That, wilful, bruis'd its helpless form; but that he cherish'd it With milk and oil I never knew; and therefore did I weep, And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away, And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot." "Queen of the vales," the matron Clay answered, "I heard thy sighs, And all thy moans flew o'er my roof, but I have call'd them down. Wilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? 'tis given thee to enter And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet." IV The eternal gates' terrific porter lifted the northern bar: Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown. She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists: A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen. She wanderd in the land of clouds thro' valleys dark, listning Dolours & lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave, She stood in silence, listning to the voices of the ground, Till to her own grave plot she came, & there she sat down, And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit: "Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile? Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn, Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie? Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show'ring fruits and coined gold? Why a Tongue impress'd with honey from every wind? Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in? Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, and affright? Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy? Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?" The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har.

A history of some sort, one that made us, a war and what the war had meant, or since meaning eludes war, what it did to the look of the trees and the sides of the buildings, most of which survived, only to be torn down later to widen the street or put up a new office complex. There it was on the shelf. I was there only a moment, but still, I wanted to know what happened to the man in the photograph wearing a flat cap standing outside the important building cheering. He was there. He was part of that moment, one of the first into the streets when the turn of events came, the declaration or pronouncement, words that would change the look of everything he smiled on, words that may have cost him his life. Here it is in a book I found on a shelf. The person who lives here bought it at a library stock reduction sale. No one had read it. It looked interesting thirty years ago. It was practically new, the back uncracked. But the person did what those before her had, put it up on a shelf and never found a way back to it. The history sits there, unread, unbelievable, somebody else's. Even I have only looked at the pictures, at the man smiling between the cold pages. Maybe ending the world as he knew it was ok. Maybe it was the only way. Maybe the world has to come to an end in the first place to be the world. And the man? He has to smile, though he knows so little of what's coming, even looking right at it. As we do, who still haven't read the book.

Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once widely regarded as the leading novelist of her generation, and who wrote this perverse, short, lyrical novel, her second, during the flailing failings of her marriage to my hero Robert Lowell—kills Molly, her child-alter ego, a girl too unloved and unloving to survive puberty, too pure and awful—like Stafford, who died pickled and childish three decades later after winning the Pulitzer with her devastating, hurtfully compassionate Collected Stories—for this or any other world, especially the necessarily allegorical one of fiction. I am broken now, hopeless; hope is proved by this book to be a contrivance. I have just read the last pages in which Molly’s brother, Ralph—who, to live, cannot love either, has no spare love—shoots her, aiming for the wild mountain lion whose stuffed corpse was to be the triumph of his new manhood. I don’t hate Ralph—how can I, a boy, mistaken, like me? And can I hate Molly, who so needed Ralph and everyone, still young enough to savor the bittersweet of her anger? What about Stafford, who hurt herself, all our selves, with this ending, her classic tragedy, writing, decades later,Poor old Molly! I loved her dearly and I hope she rests in peace. Fuck insight and analysis: my heart is shot. Why did she have to die? Why does anyone? Why do you, do I? Because of what Ralph was feeling just before he accidentally slaughtered the future? This book must have ravaged the already sleepless poet Gregory Orr, who shot his brother, too, and suffers that endless error in poetry and prose. And because Molly refused everything, she stood between Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he changed. Confused? Read the book. In novels people die because of what they feel. In life, people die when their bodies conk out, exhausted machines that living expends. And what happens when people feel their feelings in life? Nothing? Anything? Brenda, dear Brenda, my love, nothing happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid. A small breeze born in the heart gently bends a blade of grass and no one hears a word. No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked on Facebook. Stafford died, her legacy gently dispatched into the low air. O, life is terrible, literature ridiculous. Stafford’s prose, teeming and rich as loam, could take Famous Franzen’s for a walk, feed it biscuits. But who cares? Who remembers? O, to have been Jean Stafford, in the past I idealize, when the world was less self-conscious, less precise. I could be dead already, warmish beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful are the faded, the once-greats whose afterlives slipped out a hole in posterity's pocket: they are loved poignantly by a needy few. O, to be kept cozy in the bosoms of those desperate and proud, forgotten for all the good I do. Love is sunlight streaming unevenly through the canopy of leaves overhead. We can only grow in the brighter patches below, fading where light is thin. Molly, we are with you, nowhere and gone. Mostly we are forgotten, too.

It was a forlorn eve, my descent wintry. In that foreign midnight, I sounded the chanceries of doubt as day drove up in an ordinary yellow cab. To my astonishment, I seemed to be blindfolded but the clock —talk     talk— continuing called me, a voice ever stranger in complaint. With my staff I came to the first step, sanguine indeed, and dressed in a well-cut Western suit —quite the best I saw on anybody during my whole stay in that unstable regime. There were people in plots bowing to creation. Please I protested, I had not come to stay, You will go in said Nobody, all will be quiet. I looked down and could see thousands crowding into the grounds —my     my— and climbed into the burial site. Within the twisted rows of graves, the teeth of under, some spoke of hatred and some of hope. Blind, they wept on command, in wheelchairs, on crutches, waving stumps. It was rather haunting— the gates of shadows, the path unlit, and ahead, also dark, an abandoned fortress. Carried along by the crowd, our way lit by flashlights through dim corridors, I said Citizens, no     no. Ahead, a door opened. I recognized the old council sitting round a table, some in religious collars, the atmosphere a court. Chairing the proceeding, a tall, bearded figure uttered a few words in German, for my benefit. He had lived for a time and remarked that I needed to be dealt with. Listening quietly, I tried to avoid any show of emotion. This clearly displeased him. He seemed to expect me to present my own commentary. I said in reply the following, shaken and uneasy, the slim thread of truth but little help . . .