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for Doug Fieger (d. 2010), Berton Averre, Prescott Niles and Bruce Gary (d. 2006) The men don’t know growls Willie Dixon’s most famous tune, but the version I prefer—low fidelity cassette bootleg, howling tin sound with shredded paper drums—remains unreleased, recorded not by some venerable Mississippi blues curmudgeon whose name, artfully dropped here, would evoke afternoons porch-sitting with magnolia wine and box-string guitar, or might bestow upon me some sorely lacking hipster bonafides. That’s never going to happen, since I am talking here about a nearly unlistenable cover, the monophonic noise and mid-range screech of The Knack, live in Hollywood, before a packed house at the Troubador, July 1979. So what if I was twelve? I’d already gotten it, learned how to pluck out the gallop of My Sharona’ s bass, hoping someday I’d ace out Doug Fieger and be Sharona’s back door man myself, though I’d have been better off learning how to get in the front door first. Which was the vaguest country, women, or the blues? I did not know. I still might not. I only knew what I was learning: that a song could actually sound like sweat; that Ray Manzarek, gangly Ray best known as the piano-playing witness to greatness, had dropped by to sit in, and when he’d come down Wonderland Avenue it was a benediction, as if to say,Hey, these guys are all right, forgive them their sins of leather tie and Beatle boot. So I want to say thank you to whatever thought to tape that show, because it taught me that I wanted a forever girl like Sharona, who, as the 45-rpm picture sleeve promised, played the coolest records for her slumber-partying girlfriends, who all looked like the camisoled girls in the Runaways or the equally fated Go-Gos. But I am getting ahead of myself, since, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows how this story ends. I have everything The Knack ever recorded, including this version of Back Door Man, which tells me everything that was wrong with 1979, and later, everything wrong with me. How does the show end? Listen to the cassette, a moment in unsteady time, the Zapruder film of the skinny tie era. For the band, you know how it ends already: rehab, divorce, rehab, forgiveness, comeback tour, state fair nostalgia; immortal Sharona—her real name —sells real estate, million-dollar homes. That’s what those little girls do, they grow up, which reminds me My Sharona, that set-closing number, may be the saddest story I know.

But this is ambiguous and so I will clarify. Last night I dreamt of a lake on fire. A lovely woman tapered off into a fish. I wore an owl mask with the desire to avoid use of his sacred name, and then I came to those minced pronunciations, like gad and gar and ged and gog and goles and golly and gom and gosh jolly and gud and gum and adad and adod and bedad and begad and ecod and egad and gadzooks and garzoon. Because gar is only used by playwrights who put it chiefly in the mouths of foreigners. You said, Oh god, my god, good god, followed by a good wish, to that god of my ever-closing gaps, for I receive god only ghostly, that goodly god that guides the globe, that god of love, that god of war, that god that blesses the god-blessed and the god-forsaken and the god-damned. My god, my shame is on me, I said to the painterly painter, My god, my shame's inside me and must go forth my body, this beastbody, this dogsbody, this stony and bony bodykins that my god has plunged my soul into. Last night I hung from the vine, from the branch, from the noose, until the sun stopped and the moon stood still, until my nation took vengeance upon my enemies. Last night a piece of cake tumbled into our city and struck our walls until they fell. Then it rolled around and around until the entire city turned upside down. Meanwhile back at the lake, I lapped silver water until dirt came out of my wounds, until dirt came out of my mouth. Then I killed my lover, Montgomery, in a new scatological satire. Last night nature ran hastily into its din, enthusiastically into its prison, wallowing in the flood of its patterning and randomness. Bedlam elected himself umpire and stood quickly in the midst of it, arranging and disarranging the very laws of nature. The earth vessel itself he plunged into the green and uneven horizon, and all at once, we entered a whole new world. In the beginning, the heavens and earth rose. In the beginning, we gave birth to the tiniest of errors. In the beginning, we watch for the rest of eternity as it blossoms and it blooms.

The Butcher’s Apprentice, 1911–1914 by August Sander The high white collar and the bowler hat, The black coat of respectability, The starched cuff and the brandished cigarette Are what he has decided we will see, Though in the closet hangs an apron flecked With bits of  brain beside the rubber boots Stained brown from wading through the bloody slick That by the end of every workday coats The killing floor he stands on. He declines To illustrate as in a children’s book The work he does, although it will define Him every time the photograph he took Is shown and captioned for posterity — Even as his proud eyes and carriage say That what he is is not what he would be, In a just world where no one had to slay.

1 Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things, from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need. Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block, and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected, where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood. Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman? It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are. Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations— Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye. 2 But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain, aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards. Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance! Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling, we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher, who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.

My mother loves butter more than I do, more than anyone. She pulls chunks off the stick and eats it plain, explaining cream spun around into butter! Growing up we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles, butter melting in small pools in the hearts of Yorkshire puddings, butter better than gravy staining white rice yellow, butter glazing corn in slipping squares, butter the lava in white volcanoes of hominy grits, butter softening in a white bowl to be creamed with white sugar, butter disappearing into whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple, butter melted and curdy to pour over pancakes, butter licked off the plate with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture the good old days I am grinning greasy with my brother, having watched the tiger chase his tail and turn to butter. We are Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite historical revision, despite our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

I’ve never seen the land of milk and honey, but at the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed a cow fashioned of butter. It lived behind a window in an icy room, beneath klieg lights. I filed past as one files past a casket at a wake. It was that sad: a butter cow without a butter calf. Nearby I spied a butter motorcycle, motorcycle- sized, a mechanical afterthought I thought the cow might have liked to ride. You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it. But not if you’re a butter cow, not if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if not the land of milk and honey, the land of milk, and dwelled within it. It had a short life span, the butter cow. Before it died, I looked deep into its butter eyes. It saw my butter soul. I could have wept, or spread myself, for nobody, across dry toast.

Some days her main job seems to be to welcome back the Red Admiral as it lights on a leaf of the yellow forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean over to take in how it folds & opens its wings. Then, too, there is the common Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her entirely uncommon in how it moves about the boundaries of this clearing we made so many years ago. If she leaves the compost bucket unwashed to rescue a single tattered wing from under the winter jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle & then spends a whole afternoon at our round oak table surrounded by field guides & tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular mark is one of the great cat's eyes of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is simply practicing her true vocation learning the story behind the blue beads of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades of the Spring Azure, moving through this life letting her sweet, light attention land on one luminous thing after another.

Into my stomach an explosion of stars where I rely on myself, my government name, bony letters of fingers that tunnel your bisected heart, skyward with dark. Parasites bed my inner lining— Am I not the rubberized universe? I am its buffer and get to name things for what they are, who they serve—what order. A plural centipede burrows outbound, crawls the spine of my hand, tells my pencil to move along, give out lead. Months of illness do that to a puppet, gnaw at her strings, place moths on her neighbors, blend them with gypsies who live the treetops uprooted. Dare the deliberately happy to butterfly the gnarled roots of life— That we pass too many pounds of flesh uncut. Too much genius hermitted in stereo. The round tables forgetting their bird seed. Clovers push luck to surround these hollow legs. Why no windows on the sides of houses? Why no flames beneath stones that burn? Why do all minutes lead the blue carp and black eel now? We’ll be passing through heaven in a split pea shell, emptied of light, hard as effusive green ore the blood corrupts daily, within and without.

A real one wouldn't need one, but the one Nathan draws surely does: four oblongs the size and color of popsicles, green apple, toasted coconut and grape, flanked, two per side, by billowing valentine hearts, in a frame of Scotch tape. Alive, it could stay off the floor, for a few unaerodynamic minutes; thrown as a paper airplane, for one or two more. Very sensibly, therefore, our son gave it something, not to keep it apart from the ground forever, but rather to make safe its descent. When we ask that imagination discover the limits of the real world only slowly, maybe this is what we meant.

Like all great rivers The Elbe is familiar at first sight. The barges spic & span as the front parlors Of model homes in Saxony — The steam paddle-wheelers & other vessels, No less impeccable — all run With a near soporific efficiency. You lean out & the land starts up: The parcels of pastures & castles Bearing with them trees & cows & cattle-grids the crowned heads of daisies Little knots of   human habitations, Cigarette factory & garrisons Floodplains, sheet pilings Run All run, As if   by an engine, Some cement breaker from under the river torn turfs all Bob up & down, Brown like bears in bear gardens The cupolas, cavaliers Their ruinous sandstone reflections alongside. Whether this is the famous effect Of   the Balcony of   Europe Cork coasters chasing gilt coronets Maps loosely adrift on a map So many teacups clicking, Large balconies colliding Breaking up into smaller ones Valley & vineyards Mines, bridges, sugar-beet fields, villas, Museum corridors A Procession of   Princes Chimera of   Chinese porcelain palaces Cargoes of   homeland & meadows, Other Municipalities, the beer & beer mats, Coal, forestry, History atop Geography atop History Flags roll unroll — coalesce Black — red — yellow Yellow Black Red Runs White Sunk trains with passengers Trains sunk April ’45 Bergen-Belsen Run   Elbe   Run I pulled away. I have come this day to the bank of the Elbe To write a few postcards In a tearoom. On the steps up From street level to the Old Albertinum Museum some way from the tearoom A man too is minding his business On his lap a glass case For keyboard 2 rows of colored sand in test tubes Raspberry /burnt sienna /turquoise /Prussian blue /lavender /ochre Or neutral — just sand. Into a beer bottle he tips a little color & before you know Our man has tossed one up in the air like a baby & caught it roundly by the heels too, Le voilà, not one grain escapes It is shockproof, waterproof, A world like a Swiss watch, & time-proof — You count three camels It looks like 4, — any number could have been packed in the bottle Which, when turned slowly in the palm An orderly procession, : Camels against a horizon of   low sun An irradiated sky, Palm tree, undulating dunes A strata of deep watermelon subsiding to honey halva The silhouette of a tent, hint of A sandstorm in the air. Grit under eyelids & should you prefer From the array of   bottles you could take home one with A full sun, an Egyptian sun-disk & you have his word, — no fear, each hermetically sealed, Will travel. As if   to say not all the grains Are sand, our man also works With rice. He’s a jeweler. He will encrypt On a grain of rice a word, Enclosed in a colored phial of water again hermetically For all time Like the camels. A jewel, he said, The word a ruby, an emerald Of   water Should you forget, here his English broke off But you understand Yes, there is closure. As I watched, a lady at my elbow Like one at a séance, asked For the name “Christine,” her grand daughter, she said. & he, our scribe, answered he was from Iran, — not that anyone inquired. Iranian, then — Hence the camels Though here in Dresden He had looked Mexican A second before. I looked again & saw that he could be from anywhere, It depends on where you stand. This man has for good or ill the face of the world, Which he bears sadly With some mirth. I pulled away. Another moment I would have To come up with a name, a word, Another world. I was happy with my purchase of camels On the Elbe. Back home it holds Dresden & the Elbe for me in a bottle. It runs for so long as anyone would care to look, Not a drop more. I would have liked to write a card to the bottler Addressing sands sands of the world thereof My migrant, errant friend I wish you all the grains whatever you had set out for, & always Sands enough to take you, just where you stand Waiting for your No. 28 sunsets, No. 20, The watermelon sunrise & no end of camels.