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Strapped to the bed of circumcision lies My son. This mutilation ties You to the fathers. They will never let You forget, or your flesh be enfranchised ever, Though you pray all your life long. They set you early on the rack, infect you with a fever Of remembering. In the marriage bed, When you are naked, there the sign is red. There is neither meeting nor mating but the past Cries that you've been waited for and wed already— I will not bless this mark upon your body. For you the hurricane is rising fast; I feel the horns of Moses in my head And Law wrenched again from the dead Hand of deity, and I descend out of the blast to you Mad with loneliness upon this bed. But I reserve also the rage That broke the Law upon you like a rain of stone That other time I saw you so could yearn. The Law is broken, baby. I will not ascend again.

That boy, the champion breath holder, Kenji Takezo, lost his title This year to Mack Stanton A retired truck driver New to the area. Held in the town swimming pool Thirty-five participants inhaled Deeply all at once Submerged the depth. The contest went on into twilight. One by one each person Came up sucking air. Kenji was the town favorite. We wanted him to win again. He trained so hard, It was the only real talent He had Other than surfing and making Trouble. When he surfaced Second to last Gulping the night Then vomiting water, We were disappointed. He was doing so well. He had his lucky twenty-pound brick Cradled in his lap. It kept him down. But that trucker Mack was too good. He read Comic books, aloud, underwater. We watched from the bleachers His laughter bursting above him. Kenji saw this too. He never had anybody Read to him Not even his mother, And he wanted to hear What was being read What his opponent found so funny.

Just as in the horror movies when someone discovers that the phone calls are coming from inside the house so too, I realized that our tender overlapping has been taking place only inside me. All that sweetness, the love and desire— it’s just been me dialing myself then following the ringing to another room to find no one on the line, well, sometimes a little breathing but more often than not, nothing. To think that all this time— which would include the boat rides, the airport embraces, and all the drinks— it’s been only me and the two telephones, the one on the wall in the kitchen and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs.

Grasping for straws is easier; You can see the straws. “This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,” Presses down upon me At fifteen pounds per square inch, A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean, Supporting the weight of condors That swim its churning currents. All I get is a thin stream of it, A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection. Water wouldn’t be so circumspect; Water would crash in like a drunken sailor, But air is prissy and genteel, Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity. The vast, circumambient atmosphere Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky. I inhale it anyway, Knowing that it will hurt In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs. July, 1988

I. TO THE FATES They cannot keep the peace or their hands off each other, breed not yet preach the old discredited creed. Love is charity conceived as a coin dropped in a beggar’s cup. Reason not the need. Gluttony is no nicer than greed or wrath, but lust is our categorical must. We have no choice but to breed. II. OLYMPIA Olympia lies on her couch with an insolent stare, her hand hiding her crotch, a flower in her hair. She splits the lot of us with a sneer: we are either breeders or queer. We will fight wars because of her. She will root us on. We will win. The face in the mirror is not brave, but we crave contact with her skin and the jewel in the mouth of her cave. She tempts like a sin and under her spell we fall into a deep enchanted sleep, and wake up ready to make the leap, ready to heed her call, only now we’re alone, on streets less friendly than wilderness, a platoon of ex-pals in Manhattan. Olympia tempts like a sin, but then sends us home to the wife, commands us to resume the life we had planned to give up in her honor: the life of a dutiful husband, a modest success in his profession, impressive in credentials, in mood depressive (but nothing that a pill won’t cure). You ask if he is happy? “Sure.” And Olympia lies on her couch, with her insolent stare, her hand hiding her crotch, a flower in her hair.

The lump on his neck that no collar could hide, and the charity of his presence there in the neighborhood each fall, door-to-door, standing in the swept porches, waiting for the housewives to answer. The ugly, pitiable treeman, reddish and leathery from the sun. His baseball cap pulled tight over his head, the visor stiff as a beaver’s tail. Year after year, the bowsaw with its wide teeth and the long-handled toppers were all that announced his trade. And standing on the porch he advised nothing, though he coughed and hacked, covering his mouth with his sap-blackened fist and waited for the infrequent yes that sent him up the trunk and into the solid lap of the branches, where he clipped and sawed the bony leafless rigging until the tree, all torso—lung and heart, ribs and hips and shoulders—, stood like a knotted goblet in the yard, a figure, as in allegory, of his own stunted self, rooted, alive. My mother tried hard to convince us we were all children of God and that the sick and maimed, the poor, were creatures born to special destinies so unique we could not understand. But who could understand pain’s redemptiveness and how it rarely seemed to translate into grace. The poor were always poor, the sick, sick—just as the treeman’s goiter did not respond to treatment, inscrutable, part of God’s plan, part of the unlovely element of love: the humbling, the pity, the scar of violence— a craving too frightening to name, or too tender, the way the treeman bundled the trimmings in twine and hauled them to the alley. And as if he counted it his real work, leaned against the fence and with his fingers picked the dogged sap from the blade and with a file sharpened the teeth.

Grateful for their tour of the pharmacy, the first-grade class has drawn these pictures, each self-portrait taped to the window-glass, faces wide to the street, round and available, with parallel lines for hair. I like this one best: Brian, whose attenuated name fills a quarter of the frame, stretched beside impossible legs descending from the ball of his torso, two long arms springing from that same central sphere. He breathes here, on his page. It isn’t craft that makes this figure come alive; Brian draws just balls and lines, in wobbly crayon strokes. Why do some marks seem to thrill with life, possess a portion of the nervous energy in their maker’s hand? That big curve of a smile reaches nearly to the rim of his face; he holds a towering ice cream, brown spheres teetering on their cone, a soda fountain gift half the length of him —as if it were the flag of his own country held high by the unadorned black line of his arm. Such naked support for so much delight! Artless boy, he’s found a system of beauty: he shows us pleasure and what pleasure resists. The ice cream is delicious. He’s frail beside his relentless standard.

O come, soft rest of cares! come, Night! Come, naked Virtue’s only tire, The reapèd harvest of the light Bound up in sheaves of sacred fire, Love calls to war: Sighs his alarms, Lips his swords are, The fields his arms. Come, Night, and lay thy velvet hand On glorious Day’s outfacing face; And all thy crownèd flames command For torches to our nuptial grace. Love calls to war: Sighs his alarms, Lips his swords are, The field his arms.

We were application — aerial shapes investigating their causes as they unfolded their wandering life — possessed of temper, parents, talent, fancy — in books in which characters redeem being from the hands of infidels. I feel soaring pleasure. When I was thirteen I opened my father — title page of my book —to explain exploded powers warmed by a glance. To penetrate the ocean behind the elements and give names — fidelity — from a stream of fire reduced to electricity — over the malignity of an alarming bed — the brightness of a familiar eye commences connection: These are the faces cooped up in one place, and his sweetest voice hiding how the blood circulates, and my peculiar trembled body, the seat of beauty. At the end of two years every object inherited human feelings. I paused and brain exemplified generation. His child pursuing these reflections. My pale cheek and tremendous secrets of fingers. Winter, spring passed — watch the blossom — it breathed hard —convulsive muscles of pearly whiteness — with his watery eyes disturbed by the first kiss traversing my bedchamber. His eyes held up the curtain of the bed. I remained listening, unfinished. My food its white steeple drenched by the rain. We ascended into my room, putting my hands before my eyes —tingle — save me and save me — anticipated with such nervous joy I became capable of shooting forth from the trees — it was a divine spring — that night drawing me out I felt the sensations of others. When shown the body they saw permission — I believe in innocence notwithstanding temptation — whom you loved was a creature who’d fill the air with birds serving you — feelings worked up by events — to wean us fro our future prospects towards a tenderness of fainting limbs, a type of me. I was encompassed by a bodily cloud. I remained rushing at the window. They congregated around me, the unstained pinnacle. I arrived at the same lulling sounds: the giver of oblivion. The ascent is solemn, curling in wreaths — I sat upon the glittering peaks — swelled with sunlight over your narrow beds. I beheld the figure of a man at some distance. As he approached a mist came over my eyes. You are community. Instinctively lying down I covered myself with little winged animals, light from my eyes. Spreading my cloak I covered the ground. One part was open. It was a paradise filled with milk. Uttering a few sounds the young man had been filled up. I awoke into my voice by his means — sun on the red leaves — mounted high in the heavens using gesticulations and a gush of tears. Feelings of kindness and gentleness overcame me. Fringed by deep lashes, I contemplated my companyion…

She appears to be recognized as herself and not herself, new because endlessly recycled, not what she was but not what she will be—see? Not married and not not married, the processional’s a ritual meant to extend a magical present, until the head of this pin is the size of a rented hall and all of us angels stepping out on the long blank train of her on-going gown. To go in single and come married out is easy enough, what matters is to enlarge the interstitial, to live as long as we can in the not exactly no longer and the not quite not yet also. Where organ music drowns the ill-digested vows and the empty stomach growls. Hesitant. The BND goes down slow as a pill we can’t really swallow, stuck chunk in a stalled gulp between yesterday and tomorrow, at one and the same time belated and punctual. It’s the system itself we’ve come to see (open the plug of that rubber-edged rose window), not me and not you, but we: the marriage of church and state made visible, audible, available. Here Dearly Beloved’s an embarrassing gurgle, and the costly gown so much densely crumpled bathroom tissue backing up one overworked way in and out of the usual world. From the mouth to points South, scrawl that in soap on the vehicle? From “will you?” to “why don’t you ever?” on the march to “irreconcilable.” Hey—whoa! Away with you hand-wringing nay sayers: be here now now now now…. Cheeks are flushed and eyes overflow as we grasp her new handle, here to hear the I do as a couple of hard blows: that flesh-blunted sound of bone on bone dislodging as cough a caught morsel not thoroughly chewed. Back out, back up, quagmire, circle: proposed solutions involve the usual budget expansions, extended tours of duty, and additional troops.