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All day I have been thinking about the color of his cauterized skin, the burned young man lying flat on his back on the rehab slab in Wiesbaden, and think, finally, that it is the color of rhubarb, that drab maroon and green, but seared on, blasted into a mottled, speckled, crystallized sheen. Rhubarb, meaning a fight or disagreement, the ump getting into it with a player, their faces turning red, sputtering, blustering, kicking dirt on each other, until finally someone gets vulgar, says something about the other one’s mother. Rhubarb, from the ancient word for the Volga River, its watery line of demarcation, and the barbarians who lived beyond it, the real ones, Vandals, Visigoths, Huns, not the ones we see now as buffoons in commercials, battle-axing, caterwauling the civilized world for the right credit card, for Capital One, asking us what’s in our wallets. CNN says the rehab here is good, so the film crew has come in. They thank him for his service. They tell him he’s a credit to his country, to all of us, all our brave young women and men. They ask if he has any hobbies, if he can tell us what he’d most want to do that he used to enjoy doing. He says he’d like to walk again. I hate everyone, all of us who have sent him into flames. I hate the film crew, hate CNN , the rehab facility, every tube that goes in and out of him, every monitor that beeps, even the morphine feed that drips and seeps. They ask him if it is frustrating and he weeps.

After Piranesi The faded remains of ancient advertising — captives on parade in native costume. Now the whangam, that imaginary animal led by Wharfinger, keeper of the wharf. And you, my puce, sitting between the paws of the mechanical lion, his brittle heart of glass. The regiments of holiday shoppers, in formations two-by-two, are borne along the sliding pavements between displays into the Pavilion of the Encrusted Compass. O hub of panopticon, each moment on display, from the central monitor there is no escape. This is all accomplished, even the symphonic wrecking of the antique locomotive, in silence. I have misplaced my whipcat and whinstone. I try to recall something that I know. A westing is a space of distance westward. Wheep: the sound of steel drawn from a sheath. What was the name of the Babylonian sidekick of Sir Thomas More’s lead warren? Time for the steam-driven, slow reckoning, for the chains and block and tackle dangling from the eternally unfinished dome, the chrome- plated waterfall and the ascension into the arcades, the arcades and their broken promises.

Supervises over the teatable our voluble hostess The passing round of titterings and toasties. Her glass-eyed friends, confidence's make-and-breaks, Give each in series gobbets of another's cakes. Dough drips into their tight triangular shoes. Their mouths give vent to evil-smelling news Keep their minds pure, make mental products crisper, With speaking eyeball rolls and the not too improper whisper. Fawn-eyed, the daughter, a gossip apprentice, Festoons gilt malice on her unmalicious twenties. Holiday smarmed the manureminded ephebus Sees in every skirt lubricity's rebus. Sex is their unknown god, with neither purity nor pox, To whom they genuflect whenever they enjoy their shocks. A little of everything, is the note they strike, The only limitation, what they think they do not like. Always they suffer inexpressible injustices, Making their own beds, these amateur Procrusteses, But expect their maids to lie in them. The middle classes Must have some defence against the vulgar masses. They have no use for idle gossips that scarify: But in their own leisure get together to verify Rumours of rationalists, use of contraceptives, Probable bastards, hope of their proving defectives (Details being perquisites of good detectives). This of course for the parish's sake. These long nose weevils Seek knowledge of others', as expression of their own, evils: And naught escapes being twisted and messed, Their own souls included, on matters of interest. Ignorant, superficial, malignant, self-deceived, Ashamed to bear, but proud to be bereaved, Devoted to truth's medals, but dismayed to see its flesh— Babies are born to them in prams and crêches. Lip-honouring peace, by their indignant whispers Others they desecrate, their own insure, in their smug vespers. At mattins for their own sins pray to be forgiven, Revelling in others while walking home from heaven. Martrylike suffer for transgressions of the parish, Or say they do, particularly the most garish. But humbly at their bedside never hope that Jesus has destroyed Others' misfortunes wholly, lest themselves be unemployed. Such and so balsting are their faded Joys Which Time, nor Sickness, never quite destroys. Balder and balder every haircut Cutting a caper as lewd as he dare cut, Quasiphilosophically Capricorn carouses Ill at ease in such respectable houses, The disinherited soul of an atrabilious Semi self-deprecating paterfamilias. With many eyeglitters at women's legs in stockings And at the schoolboys' furtive corybantic eyecockings, His Bacchanalian belly he wobbles like a sack with metaphysical justification as Dionysiac, And ungenteel jokes undoubtedly due to his strabismus Distorting even the quaint festivities of Christmas. Remembering in the artificial afternoon Old days when Pan his saxophonic tune Under the ilex played, and how the figwood image Nimbly swayed in the nights of lustful scrimmage, And how in pleased surprise he uttered several Eurekas At finding the gross fungus Ithyphallus Impudicus. With him his father's hair his father's scalp reveals Commensurate, with scratching too much during silent meals, With virgin's blood the holly on the wall Drips. As from Druid branches fail to fall Light, intense pearl juices from alabaster fitting, The proper tight-drawn hostess cuts unwitting Symbols of fertility from Christmas cake. All jollity Is fastened down. Only innocent frivolity Saturnalia is allowed in houses of good quality. Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. The door bursts open wide The Sunday china stands up horrified. Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. All he has ever remembered Bulges out like a plaster panel badly distempered. Tiddledywog. Meh, membrum caprinum erexit: Culpabat, alia aliam, quia ipsa conspexit. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. First he puts under the mat Persian cat and Pekinese dog. Then the tables' and chairbacks' torselling Smashes, and piles on potsherds of Worcester porcelain. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Forefeet dangling like clappers Dancing about he grips the frightened flapper's Flaxen coils, throws to the ground and violates her. Which done she becomes he: he hates her, And turning on the boy, knocks his eyes out, Strips him, and using sinewy tail as a knout Flogs the boy till he eddies and faints. And the mother faints, Whom Capricorn props up upon the chintz And bathing her forehead with cold milk and tea Reverses coldness that used to be. But when she recovers, recovers himself and batters The woman to death. This seems to mend matters. Next pausing somewhat incommoded by his toils, The carpets, cushions, colour schemes he soils. Last in fierce memory of dislocate desire The house itself he dislocates with fire. Scatters the redhot imitation coals Over this mortuary of human souls. The imitation furniture goes up in smoke And well fired china serves as admirable coke. Like wood distilled that dribbles clammily Oozes the ectoplasm of his burning family. Various vermicular disseminations

Of your fate Fast asleep On the bed you made Dream away Wake up late

Bewildered Saint of the curse, bulbous

Dad calls her the Dowager but I call her Aunt G. Aunt G. at the Polo Lounge. Aunt G. drinking gimlets by the pool. Aunt G. asking about Babe even though she’s the only one who sees her that much anymore. She wears ten rings. Seven on her right hand, which Dad calls the Seven Stars. They make the glass seem like it’s going to crack. She doesn’t like me very much. I know it. I’m not her kind of girl. I won’t wear dresses and when she placed the ring inside my hand I just said, “No, thank you.” Not even thinking how rude that might sound. What would I do with a ring like that? I’ve got my own stars and she doesn’t really want to give me presents anyway. She gave Babe a car, her dark brown Aston Martin. And she gave David a watch to “remember home by.” She gave my Dad a look when he said, “David’s a good soldier.” Like he gave her something bad to eat. She just shook her head and said, “I’ll never understand what kind of man you are.” And then she said Dad would have that young boy’s blood on his hands. Which I don’t understand. Or why she said, “You’ve gone and lost the both of them. You’re your very own Pol Pot,” while looking through her purse. It shone so bright it blinded me. For a second I saw spots and couldn’t focus on the thing. One clear stone that caught the light and made reflections on my glasses. I didn’t want it. I don’t wear things like that. “Who are you?” she asked, not in a mean way but like she truly didn’t know. And didn’t really care. She took it back and asked me if  I’d talked to Babe and I said I had not and no one else had either. I said, “She’s living in the hills.” And she looked at the ring for a minute and put it back in her purse.

My eyes are shaky and glimmer like the stars. My head turns to the left and it moves just like a pendulum. The kids laugh and shake it back to me, all the ways I’m stupid, not like them. But I know how the grass sounds when the locusts come, like a spaceship taking off and how it makes the air shake. Captain Lovell, I heard it in the branches and the leaves. I heard the rocket leaving. My teacher said it wasn’t so, that you’re past hearing but my father said I could. He puts his hands hard on my shoulders from behind and holds my head still with his looking. But I can feel how much I want to shake and let myself go loose and double like a cloud of mayflies on the lake, you know just how they rise so you couldn’t see just one of them, not even with your thumb held up to catch one with your eyes. It’s something I can’t do that Babe and David can, can’t sight the stars or use a telescope or ever fire a gun. Dr. Lovell, I like to think you’re spinning and can’t feel it like I can’t feel the world shake unless I’m really tired and then it’s like a gift to let it go and just stop trying so hard. I like to think you let go too and when the kids run at me and move their heads from left to right and call me “Zigzag” I look up and wish myself up there with you just calm and swinging through the stars.

Shakey Eyes Horton had nystagmus too. That’s what my father said and took me to the record store so we could buy him and take him home to listen. Babe says he’s so square but we go all over. We listen to music for hours and dance around the house like crazy skeletons: loose with all our bones knocking, we go, “click click click” and wave our arms and shake until we rattle all the china in mom’s cabinet. He turns the volume up and we spin like planets round the sun. Babe says he’s no fun but I know different because I see him laughing and I try, which she just never does. She walks into the house with Jasper waiting in the car. She grabs some clothes or asks for money, though she doesn’t even come to do that anymore. They don’t even talk. Last time we had the music on loud and we were dancing. I was letting my head swing back and forth and she just stood and watched us with the strangest look and I said, “I’m Shakey Eyes! Come dance,” and moved my arms around. I followed her up the stairs, swinging like a satellite and going, “Ooh ooh ooooohhhhh,” just like a low-down good- for-nothing so and so. I know she thinks I’m funny but she didn’t laugh and I said, “Come dance! You know you’ve got the blues.” Then I said, “You’re no fun.” She said, “You don’t know him like I do.”

She came to see him in the safehouse to interface without biography or autobiography. I am, she told him, the only one here who cares whether you continue to live. I care, he said, but it was formulaic. His propensity, not a precondition. The ground beneath his feet smelled of everything other men’s feet had ever ground into it. It was blank for all horrors, all aftermaths. A fly dazzled in a sunbeam through the windowpane. Like water, he seemed to say, & she agreed with him. I would like water, he repeated. She pretended not to hear him, because that was the sort of slippage that could save him & suddenly she was not against it. He could continue to live if he could continue to mean himself or anything as poorly as he had just then.

He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something in it to make me love him. —From the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner by the Wampanoag when Lancaster, Massachusetts, was destroyed, in the year 1676 The stream was swift, and so cold I thought I would be sliced in two. But he dragged me from the flood by the ends of my hair. I had grown to recognize his face. I could distinguish it from the others. There were times I feared I understood his language, which was not human, and I knelt to pray for strength. We were pursued by God’s agents or pitch devils, I did not know. Only that we must march. Their guns were loaded with swan shot. I could not suckle and my child’s wail put them in danger. He had a woman with teeth black and glittering. She fed the child milk of acorns. The forest closed, the light deepened. I told myself that I would starve before I took food from his hands but I did not starve. One night he killed a deer with a young one in her and gave me to eat of the fawn. It was so tender, the bones like the stems of flowers, that I followed where he took me. The night was thick. He cut the cord that bound me to the tree. After that the birds mocked. Shadows gaped and roared and the trees flung down their sharpened lashes. He did not notice God’s wrath. God blasted fire from half-buried stumps. I hid my face in my dress, fearing He would burn us all but this, too, passed. Rescued, I see no truth in things. My husband drives a thick wedge through the earth, still it shuts to him year after year. My child is fed of the first wheat. I lay myself to sleep on a Holland-laced pillowbeer. I lay to sleep. And in the dark I see myself as I was outside their circle. They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks, and he led his company in the noise until I could no longer bear the thought of how I was. I stripped a branch and struck the earth, in time, begging it to open to admit me as he was and feed me honey from the rock.