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They swing across the screen in brave array, Long British columns grinding the dark grass. Twelve months ago they marched into the grey Of battle; yet again behold them pass! One lifts his dusty cap; his hair is bright; I meet his eyes, eager and young and bold. The picture quivers into ghostly white; Then I remember, and my heart grows cold!

In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds and children In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys and the lovers, Father In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise of our cities In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches where the dead are, Father In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners out on the black water In all that has been said bravely, in all that is mean anywhere in the world, Father In all that is good and lovely, in every house where sham and hatred are In the name of those who wait, in the sound of angry voices, Father Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring.

I can now confirm that I am not just fatter than everyone I work with, but I’m also fatter than all their spouses. Even the heavily bearded bear in accounting has a little otter-like boyfriend. When my co-workers brightly introduce me as “the funny one in the office,” their spouses give them a look which translates to, Well, duh, then they both wait for me to say something funny. A gaggle of models comes shrieking into the bar to further punctuate why I sometimes hate living in this city. They glitter, a shiny gang of scissors. I don’t know how to look like I’m not struggling. Sometimes on the subway back to Queens, I can tell who’s staying on past the Lexington stop because I have bought their shoes before at Payless. They are shoes that fool absolutely no one. Everyone wore their special holiday party outfits. It wasn’t until I arrived at the bar that I realized my special holiday party outfit was exactly the same as the outfits worn by the restaurant’s busboys. While I’m standing in line for the bathroom, another patron asks if I’m there to clean it.

What images could yet suggest their range of tender colours, thick as old brocade, or shot silk or flowers on a dress where black and rose and lime seem to caress the red that starts to shimmer as they fade? Like something half-remembered from a dream they come from places we have never seen. They chatter and they squawk and sometimes scream. Here the macaw clings at the rings to show the young galahs talking as they feed with feathers soft and pink as dawn on snow that it too has a dry and dusky tongue. Their murmuring embraces every need from languid vanity to wildest greed. In the far corner sit two smoky crones their heads together in a kind of love. One cleans the other’s feathers while it moans. The others seem to whisper behind fans while noble dandies gamble in a room asserting values everyone rejects. A lidded eye observes, and it reflects. The peacocks still pretend they own the yard. For all the softness, how the beaks are hard.

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—they’re so much more beautiful than anything he might be saying, though I’m no longer in a position really to judge, having stopped listening some time ago. He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop and can therefore get along fine without my attention. He started in reading poems about his childhood— barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers, that sort of stuff—the loss of innocence he keeps talking about between poems, which I can relate to, especially under these circumstances. Now he’s on to science, a poem about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying to imagine himself turning into hydrogen. Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining myself sliding up his wife’s fluid, rhythmic, lusciously curved, black- stockinged legs, imagining them arched around my shoulders, wrapped around my back. My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her! He will, no doubt, once she leaves him, leaves him for another poet, perhaps, the observant, uninnocent one, who knows a poem when it sits down in a room with him.

The line is long, processional, glacial, and the attendant a giant stone, cobalt blue with flecks of white, I’m not so much looking at a rock but a slab of night. The stone asks if anything inside the package is perishable. When I say no the stone laughs, muted thunderclap, meaning everything decays, not just fruit or cut flowers, but paper, ink, the CD I burned with music, and my friend waiting to hear the songs, some little joy after chemo eroded the tumor. I know flesh is temporary, and memory a tilting barn the elements dismantle nail by nail. I know the stone knows a millennia of rain and wind will even grind away his ragged face, and all of this slow erasing is just a prelude to when the swelling universe burns out, goes dark, holds nothing but black holes, the bones of stars and planets, a vast silence. The stone is stone-faced. The stone asks how soon I want the package delivered. As fast as possible, I say, then start counting the days.

As if  anyone has the desire    . . . Vickey trailed off, pouring another lager There'll be nothing left But fur and bone, as my lawyer once explained To my ex, she resumed, tapping a long cigarette On the bar. My, you're a bit snarky tonight Said Luther. Maybe you need a change of  venue, A beach with your breath on it Oh, she replied, nodding towards the far corner booth, These writers are so obnoxious I wish they'd find a new place to complain. Ha, said Hillary, they wouldn't know a good story If  it bit 'em in the butt. Plus, added Vickey There's always the lurking danger One may launch into a speech on human nature. I'll back that, said Rick (who, when animated Would lick his index finger and sweep it back and forth As if quickly turning pages of a catalog) They're just a bunch of spare parts clogging a garage. Hear, hear, exclaimed Hillary, let's give it to the boors And literary whores. How a bonfire magnifies everything. Or that early Skift of snow across brown meadows When you still haven't canned the peaches. Settle down Rick, said Luther, this isn't Chicago Indeed, Vickey countered, this town used to be known As Little  Jerusalem by certain parties in the old days All the churches. And hypocrite politicians, Added Luther. Well, it's all downhill from the north Where wanness began its mission, continued Rick, Waving his empty pint. Jesus, you can be a bore, said Vickey All heroes become bores eventually, instructed Hillary But did you know when Rick was born He looked like a little worm. His aunt told me — Luther, studying her profile, said I was a little worm too

When we gathered at the house, while the men all looked at their shoes and the women whispered,baby, baby, baby, she sat down with a fist full of paper napkins and folded them into birds. When she filled her hands, she crossed the room to the hearth and threw a bird into the flames, then another, then another until she had destroyed all she created. Years later when I asked her what she meant, she couldn’t remember.The worst has already happened, she said.What good is metaphor to us now?

To my daughter, 1954 This is the terminal: the light Gives perfect vision, false and hard; The metal glitters, deep and bright. Great planes are waiting in the yard— They are already in the night. And you are here beside me, small, Contained and fragile, and intent On things that I but half recall— Yet going whither you are bent. I am the past, and that is all. But you and I in part are one: The frightened brain, the nervous will, The knowledge of what must be done, The passion to acquire the skill To face that which you dare not shun. The rain of matter upon sense Destroys me momently. The score: There comes what will come. The expense Is what one thought, and something more— One’s being and intelligence. This is the terminal, the break. Beyond this point, on lines of air, You take the way that you must take; And I remain in light and stare— In light, and nothing else, awake.

Yes, I wanted them to levitate. Unfortunately, I hadn't a leg to stand on. Cut-out camels plodded across the blackboard's high sill. Yet the desert below refused to unfurl its mica wings. When I asked them to try to remember, to release a soap bubble from their marvelous arsenal of wands, they resisted. They lined up, suspicious in individual spotlights. The fountain inside the scissored palm could only rise so high, maybe just a trumpeted C. Which is high, but not like those huge blue dreams that used to float by, shot from cloud-atomizers, the original public breeze on its back in the grass. Let's try to guess who or what is being borne up by this caravan of thin- skinned humps, a-bulge, inoculated? I tell you every one has a rider, a crop. It's been done this way for some time. If we pause here by the pillars of sand, up to our poet-knees in anarchy, won't each gulp of hoarded water from the toppled monument be sweeter passed hand to hand in the sun-colored dipper? Up to our thighs in it now, and spared what drills it- self into the rock daily, so it can claim to know zero after zero, and make that nothing into a sound like silent bells, split parched hooves, plodding.