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1 White lather on black soap— Maria’s gift. It reminds me Of when a woman died And they handed me her ring. Then they left to divide the roots for her. Daylight went down there shining. By accident, cleaning the hearth Of a house to leave it for good, I learned how to see A star come out: work My hand into the ashes. 2 “You’ve thrown a chestnut hull into the fireplace again,” Said Colette’s mother, “My clean ashes!” Naughty Colette had soiled the washing ashes Of applewood, poplar, and elm. Stretched over the big cauldron In the washhouse, hemp cloth held the ashes The washwoman poured a jug of boiling water on. They smelled almost sweet as the lye Filtered into the mass of linen. The air darkened with blue clouds. In the smoking lava layer of ashes, A few cinders of chestnut hulls, The tannin’s yellow stain. 3 Look for something You’ve been every day of your life. You said it was “lonely.” I’m certain it is also “clean.” My body’s big years diminish soap. My grandmother, whose diamond it was, Had a stone in her tub. I rubbed it on my feet As later I walked, Building little hoofs, All summer shoeless on creek gravel. That black bar of stone In the widow’s clean house, That volcanic pumice skips Over most hard places But softens at least one. 4 Once there was a downpour of rain They took as a judgment. It confused her billowing, steaming skirts. Another time—those times were hard— The executioner let go the twisted hemp From her neck sooner than he should Because the flames reached his hands. Nor would I, if I’d had to live then, Put my hands into the fire Those three hours it took to reduce her. But after, I’d scrub all over With the ashes of the still warm Black heart of the witch.

For Erna Brodber Be ye my fictions; But her story. — Richard Crashaw I can bring a halo into the night cave, quiet with music (do not ask the music), to her shaded there in the moon; her fine spectacles steam their pond rings; her animal eyes fix on the lintel of the door as the wax owl glances back at me. I am her little cotton tree the breeze combs white into a final note, her diminuendo poco a poco ... Moon-afro, myself outpaces me in wonder of her. She goes off and I seep under the black sprout of her house, to rise a salmon bell on the hill dissolving mild cloud fractals, without grief or malice.

I will die in Paris with a rainstorm, on a day I already remember, I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away— perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn. It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood, and, today like never before, I've turned back, with all of my road, to see myself alone. César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him, everyone, even though he does nothing to them, they gave it to him hard with a club and hard also with a rope; witnesses are the Thursday days and the humerus bones, the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .

After the second conference, I would be cast in the role of a young dancer with a prestigious New York City ballet company. I would be cast in the role of the mother, a former dancer now amateur artist, whose career ended at 28 when she became pregnant. I would be cast in the role of the exotic beauty who is more in touch with her sensuality. I would be cast in the role of the director, a cruel and demanding genius who would sleep with the ingenue. I would be cast in the role of someone selected to compete for the part alongside several other dancers. I would be cast in the role of someone who bites the director, and/or doesn't get along with the other dancers. I would be cast in the role of the aging principal dancer. My rigid technique would make me the ideal choice, but I would also lack the passion required by this role. I would practice all the time. I would become increasingly paranoid. I would get drunk and yell, with dark makeup all around my eyes. I would barricade myself in my room. I would become increasingly critical. I would tell her how pretty she is, and carefully pull mittens over her hands before bed so that she does not hurt herself. I would sing her a lullaby. I would see my own image everywhere. I would be annoyed with her. I would paint picture after picture of the person I loved and hated. I would get a rash. I would get into an accident. I would eat the cake offered to me, although I did not want it. I would injure myself. I would hallucinate that I am having sex with my friend, and during this scene there would be a ripping, chewing sound. The scene is obviously misogynist. But it felt so real. I would peel skin away from my fingernails in long strips. It would happen in the bathroom. My friend would perform my role in my absence. I would perform my friend's role in her absence. I would sleep with the director. I would wish to sleep with the director. I would be left alone in the building. I would betray my friend. My friend would betray me. I would feel the envy and aggression of others keenly. I would feel envious and aggressive towards others. I would seem rather childish. I would be rigid and controlling. I would pass out. I would scratch my back until it bled, and wear clothing designed to cover these scratches. I would not be part of the group. I would discover her in my room, wearing my costume, I would congratulate her, kiss her, shove her into the mirror and hide her body. Only then would I notice my own wound. Crying as I watched her performance.

Do you know where our child has gone? I’m sorry. Do you know what has become of him?I’m sorry.[        .] Is he hiding in a closet?No. Is he crouched among the shoes?No.[        .] Should we look in the closets?He’s not in the closets.[        .] Should we check the empty boxes?He’s not in the empty boxes.

Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix And mismatch, and settle about our lawn furniture, like air Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness. What can we say to either of them? How can they be so dark and so clear at the same time? They ruffle our hair, they ruffle the leaves of the August trees. Then stop, abruptly as wind. The flies come back, and the heat— what can we say to them? Nothing is endless but the sky. The flies come back, and the afternoon Teeters a bit on its green edges, then settles like dead weight Next to our memories, and the pale hems of the masters’ gowns. ________ Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him. Perhaps. And perhaps not— dust and ashes though we are, Some will go wordlessly, some Will listen their way in with their mouths Where pain puts them, an inch-and-a-half above the floor. And some will revile him out of love and deep disdain. The gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our undersides. Rows of gravestones stay our steps, August humidity Bright as auras around our bodies. And some will utter the words, speaking in fear and tongues, Hating their garments splotched by the flesh. These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased. ________ Dante and John Chrysostom Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap, A pilgrim’s way ... You might too Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon, Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes, What hasn’t happened to happen yet Still lurking behind the stars, 31 August 1995 ... The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes In the landscape, such things, such avenues, lead to dust And handle our hurt with ease. Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue waters above the earth: Why do the great stories always exist in the past? ________ The unexamined life’s no different from the examined life— Unanswerable questions, small talk, Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments— You’ve got to write it all down. Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar Of evening, you’ve got to write it down. Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile, God’s sleep, you’ve still got to write it down, Moon half-empty, moon half-full, Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black, Spider at work between the hedges, Last bird call, toad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry ... ________ We go to our graves with secondary affections, Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled, star charts demagnetized. We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass. Sure we’re cold and untouchable, but we harbor no ill will. No tooth tuned to resentment’s fork, we’re out of here, and sweet meat. Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards, What letters will we illuminate? Above us, the atmosphere, The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call. Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince, The letters undarken and come forth, Your X and my X. The letters undarken and they come forth. ________ Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse, Spirit of slides and silences, Invisible Hand, Witness and walk on. Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures, Succor my shift and save me ... All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind, And in the gardens and dwarf orchard. All afternoon The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages Under the rain, abstracting the necessary word. Autumn’s upon us. The rain fills our narrow beds. Description’s an element, like air or water. That’s the word.

Sonnet 19 (On His Blindness) by John Milton 1. spent In Sonnet 19, Milton makes the seemingly deliberate choice to avoid “the” and “a” — respectively, the most common and the sixth most common words in English usage. Instead of these articles — 
definite and indefinite — the poem stages a territorial dispute between 
possessives: the octave is “my” land, the sestet is “his” land, with the occasional “this” or “that” flagging no man’s land. We come to understand Milton’s mistake — the professed regret of the poem — as this act of claiming. It is only through his taking possession that the universal light is divided up, apportioned into “my light” — a finite commodity that by being subjected to ownership becomes capable of being “spent.” “Spent” — a word like a flapping sack. My mistake was similar. I came to consider my body — its tug-of-war of tautnesses and slacknesses — to be entirely my own, an appliance for generating various textures and temperatures of friction. Should I have known, then, that by this act of self-claiming, I was cutting 
myself off from the eternal, the infinite, that I had fashioned myself into a resource that was bounded and, therefore, exhaustible? 2. wide The “wide” is always haunted by surprise. In a dark world, the “wide” is the sudden door that opens on unfurling blackness, the void pooling at the bottom of the unlit stairs. To be bounded is our usual condition; to be open is anomalous, even excessive. A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divide. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way. We can understand why Milton, in the narrowing orbit of his blindness, would have considered wideness, unboundedness to be threatening. What’s less clear is why the wideness of the wide-legged girl is also considered threatening. Does the wideness of the wide-legged girl evoke a kind of blindness, a dark room where one might blunder into strangers, the way two men once met each other in me? 3. hide “But why hide it in a hole?” asks the Master, returning from his long absence, sparks of bewilderment flaring into rage. An unanswered question worries at the Parable of the Talents: why is the Master so terribly angry? It is not as if the servant had stolen the money, or spent it—his sin is one of omission, of overly risk-averse investing. A talent was a unit of weight in ancient Greece: in monetary terms, it was worth eighty pounds of silver, or 6,000 denarii—nearly twenty years’ wages for the average worker. But Milton uses the word in its more modern sense, dating from the fifteenth century: a natural ability or skill. How did a word for a deadweight of metal come to mean something inborn, innate? Confusion between the inorganic and the natural trickles into the parable and the poem. The Master prides himself on being a man who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he did not scatter seed. Was the servant’s fault to confuse coins for seeds, did he think he was planting when he was merely burying, did he mistake for viable what had no chance of living, what had never been alive? 4. bent And what about the hole, which for so long had held treasure? Did it wonder why — despite all the moistness and richness it could muster — those cold, glinting seeds never sprouted? Did it understand that, if released into the wider world, the coins could have quickened, multiplied? That instead of an incubator, the hole had become an oubliette, a place where otherwise fruitful things were sent to languish, to become lodged, useless? “Useless” — a word like a capped lead pipe, like the extra bone in my foot I will never pass down to my daughter. A thing becomes useless if it is bent out of shape. To “get bent” is to be put to another kind of use, a use my therapist considered tantamount to rape. To bend is to be bound, to bow down without breaking, with perhaps just the head tilted at an angle so as to peer upward. 5. present The Master has become the Maker. The servile body wholly “his,” splayed wide in a welcome-home, bound up in a beribboned bow. But the reader will object. This is all wrong. First of all, in the sonnet, “bent” doesn’t mean to bow down as if in submission to an outside force, but instead denotes an innate or internalized tendency or inclination. Second, a “present” is not a gift, but a verb meaning to offer openly, full-faced, the sun beaming down on a clean page. Third, the body never comes into it at all. “Therewith” — a safe word, a strongbox to be buried. 6. chide Is a “true account” a story or a sum? Is the Maker an audience or an auditor? The page scoured white by little grains of fear. A story has an ending. A sum has a bottom line. There was no accounting for me because my allotment leaked out of me, month after month, I scrubbed the sheets as if effacing the marks of a crime. Then one day the fear reversed itself. Like a photo negative but in higher contrast—its whites more glaring and its darks more glossy, as if a whisper-thin suspicion had come unzipped. “Chide” is an enormous understatement. The servant isn’t merely scolded, he is cast into “the outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” If the “outer darkness” is deemed to be a punishment, then does that lustrous inner darkness count as a reward? 7. denied It seems unfair, is Milton’s point. To be assigned a task, but not provided sufficient materials to complete it, is to be placed in a situation of contrived scarcity, like a lab rat or like the youngest sister in a fairy tale. The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins—which prefaces the Parable of the Talents — centers on this scarcity. The virgins wait for the bridegroom, to greet him with lamps alight. Five virgins have brought extra flasks of oil, but five virgins have let their lamps burn out and must go lampless into the night to look for oil. That much we are told, but questions hover around the shadowed margins of the story. Why isn’t the bridegroom with the bride? Why is he so delayed? Why is the bridegroom met in the middle of the night by a phalanx of lamp-bearing virgins, like a troupe of pom-pom girls or like a sacrificial rite? The virginity of the virgins renders them piquant, memorable. Adorning gothic portals, evoking thresholds, entrances, they are a particular feature of French cathedrals—much more so, one suspects, than if the parable had called them “maidservants” or even “bridesmaids.” The presumed desideratum of the story does not interest us much: the sated bridegroom at the midnight feast, the smug, unctuous faces of the wise virgins. Instead, the imagination pursues the foolish virgins rushing into the night, their desperation making them vulnerable, their vulnerability making them erotic, the fill-holes of their useless lamps dark and slick with oil. Is this how I was taught to sexualize insufficiency, the lack that set me wandering night after night, my body too early emptied out? 8. prevent “Prevent” — a word like a white sheet folded back to cover the mouth. A white egg bursts from the ovary and falls away, leaving a star-shaped scar.Corpus albicans, the whitening body. Such starbursts, at first, are scattered constellations, frost embroidering a dark field. But at what point does this white lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, opacity, obstacle—the ice disc clogging the round pond, the grid of proteins baffling the eye? “Prevent” — a word that slams shut, a portcullis (Latin:cataracta). Letter to Leonard Philaras, September 28, 1654: “the dimness which I experience by night and day, seems to incline more to white than to black.” 9. need Has Patience been looming in the background all along, silent, so as not to intrude upon a blind man’s consciousness? Patience, whose garment is “white and close-fitting so that it is not blown about or disturbed by the wind.” At the turn of the sonnet, Patience pries open its sculpted lips, its stiff tongue like a weaver’s shuttle drawing woolly strands through the warp and weft of Milton’s blindness, a white monologue that admits neither interruption nor rejoinder. Milton’s little murmur stitched back into his mouth. Woven tight enough to repel need — a liquid beading on the surface, the blood the needles drew from me week after week, hundreds of stoppered vials consigned to the biohazard bin, en route to the incinerator. “Need,” from the High German, for danger. “Murmur,” from the Sanskrit, a crackling fire. 10. best The best beam in contentment, ranging themselves in rows. Erect as test tubes but forswearing undue pride in such uprightness, mustering shoulder-to-shoulder with the fellow-elect. The best arrayed in regimental ranks, in refrigerated racks, white hymn of the unneeded, white hum of the unneeding. “Best,” originally superlative of bot(Old English: remedy, reparation). The best affect a pious pose, mouths held taut in tongueless Os.Sotto voce chorus of that soft, subjunctive song:if you were complete ... if you were replete ... Superlative. The most remediated. The most repaired. 11. state To be scooped out, emptied of need and rinsed clean of its greasy smears, pristine as a petri dish on a stainless lab table. Enucleated, the white of the egg awaiting an unknown yolk. “Yolk” from geolu(Old English: yellow). Not to be confused with “yoke” from geocian(Old English: to be joined together). A yoke is an implement, meant to be used, to fill a need. But where there is no field to be plowed, no wagon to be pulled, why demand a yoke that is useless, needless? One day the Romans sent for Cincinnatus to lead the republic against the invading Aequian army. He laid down his plow in the field and went to war. When the Aequians surrendered, Cincinnatus spared their lives but decreed that they must “pass under the yoke.” The Romans fashioned a yoke from three spears, two fixed in the ground, and one tied across the tops of the two verticals. Since the horizontal spear was only a few feet off the ground, the Aequians were made to crouch down like animals in order to complete the surrender. This is thought to be the origin of the word “subjugate,” to be brought under the yoke. To bear a yoke is to be bowed down, oxbowed, cowed. One day they laid me down on a gurney, my feet strapped in stirrups, my legs bent and splayed like the horns of a white bull. 12. speed But why would Milton, of all people, use the word “Kingly” as a compliment? Roundheaded Milton, who wrote tract after tract in defense of regicide, who would later be detained for opposing the Restoration? At this point, our suspicions are confirmed: Milton has disappeared entirely from the poem. We haven’t heard from him since the turn of the sonnet. We’ve been lulled by the cadenced voice of Patience, its dusty tongue self-lubricating, its pallid breath clouding the room, precipitating frangible chains of hydrocarbons, their branchings barbed like fluffs of eiderdown. Through the faint reticulations, we discern no dark stoop-shouldered figure, but only white-robed forms, upright as if hung from hooks, their faces unyielding as lanterns, shuttered as if once aflame. 13. rest Rest — a word like a gauze bandage, a ropy weave of collagen knitting its way across a wound. Outspread as if fingered, gelid gestures suggesting solace: to stanch, to shield, to seal, to shut off. Rest — the rind of the best, a contoured pod that cradles the shape of what it doesn’t hold. Rest — those who are left when thousands have sped away, the bereft, who litter the land, with husks for hands, vacant-eyed, vacant faces raised like basins under a contrail-scarred sky. 14. wait To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simply to wait. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness. To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted rootstock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip. To stand and wait for the one who reaps where he has not sown. Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape. To foster the raw scion as if it were a son, to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.

I was here before the blackamoors were photographed & cataloged, when they first ran up to me & then receded into their poses, descendants of archival Hamites destined to serve their brothers & sisters in a red baroque room, each silent as an iron doorstop. Some peered out of perches askance, shining lanterns & sconces, ready to please, or eager to cast a guiding light among centuries of shadows, a patina of mystery lost in Tuscan dusk. At least their attire isn’t stitched rags. If ebony & alabaster could talk, Lord, the volumes of gossip among  gold-leafed tributes we would hear as vinegar turns back to wine, driftwood to bread. They’ve been perfectly arranged, & almost reveal whose sweat glosses their smooth skin in these rooms of rehearsal. I saw one shift slightly & blink, or maybe it was a dark hum coming from the olive grove, a feeling brought across the sea. They are not claw-footed props & furniture for drunken nights posed to grab a hat or fur coat, dressed in skeins of filigree & false gems, offering a bowl of  black grapes to each envoy or a guest holding a dagger behind his upright back.

for Philip Hobsbaum Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full, Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes Ebon in the hedges, fat With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides. Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks— Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky. Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting. I do not think the sea will appear at all. The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within. I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies, Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen. The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven. One more hook, and the berries and bushes end. The only thing to come now is the sea. From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me, Slapping its phantom laundry in my face. These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt. I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths Beating and beating at an intractable metal.