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God said, “Men have forgotten Me: The souls that sleep shall wake again, And blinded eyes must learn to see.” So since redemption comes through pain He smote the earth with chastening rod, And brought destruction's lurid reign; But where His desolation trod The people in their agony Despairing cried, “There is no God.”

8/1 From here groomed fields and clumps of trees, a silo of corrugated tin and a white barn blur. Unseasonable cool days, high, blue, a few clouds like ripped pillows as if this were a lip of the North Sea and I could look out and imagine Denmark. But I’m in my office three floors up. 8/3 In Armenian there’s a word—garod—rhymes with “maud.” The beautiful ones are not faithful and the faithful ones are not beautiful— a student said that about some Pavese translations, here in my office. Should I tell you what garod means? 8/5 What’s happening in Spitak and Sarajevo and the West Bank is splayed like the cortex of a silicon chip in the fuzzy air. Maria, the physician from Armenia, was 25 & had one plastic arm and one real arm. I met her in East Hampton on the deck of a house on the dunes. After the earthquake she had no husband, no parents, and only one child. “I’m in a good mood today,” she said, “let’s talk about something else.” I poured her an Amstel Light. 8/10 The coolness intrudes— month of wind-sprints and retching for the coach. It comes back like nerve ends after surgery. Along a country road cicadas rattling. Chicory and sweet pea intruding on the ripe barley. I picked up some seed packs from a junk shop on Rt. 20, a tomato blazed in red ink/ 1926, Fredonia, N.Y. 8/11 What’s between us? The red ink of the tomato? How does an image stay? Or is it always aftermath? The way deep black reflected the most light in Talbot’s first calotypes. But garod: tongue of a snake, meaning exile, longing for home. Thomas Wedgwood got images by getting sunlight to pass through things onto paper brushed with silver nitrate: wings of a dragonfly, the spine of an oak leaf— fugitive photograms. But he couldn’t stop the sun until it turned the paper black. Stop the light before it goes too far? Or is desire what garod means? Longing for a native place. 8/17 Maria said she was learning how to connect nerve endings in the hand so hands and arms would work again. There were so many in Armenia without working hands and arms. At the end of each dendrite is a blurred line like the horizon I’m squinting. Image of the other: light-arrested; not the image of ourselves. 8/21 After digging scallions one day Dickinson defined freedom: Captivity’s consciousness, so’s liberty. Maybe garod is about the longing for the native place between two selves. 8/22 I love the brute force of silence in Roger Fenton’s Sebastopol from Cathcart’s Hill, 1855. The Crimean inner war. The artlessness of silver is like my tongue in your wet space, or like the news photos that bring us the pressure of disaster. Beloved topography, garod then must mean yearning. Is that how we loved under the rattling Nippon porcelain, in the light calotyped by the fire escape? 8/25 garod: the grain chute that spills into a dark barn which is endless, like the self when it’s out of reach. Are we so lonely that a constellation could blacken and fill up that same barn, and that be me or you? But still we’re piss and oats and stock in there. We’re like civet, who wouldn’t love it. 8/31 the new glass-plate pictures: transparent as air, Szarkowski wrote like windows the fragmentary, scruffy, particularity of real living behind them—

The pure amnesia of her face, newborn. I looked so far into her that, for a while, the visual held no memory. Little by little, I returned to myself, waking to nurse those first nights in that familiar room where all the objects had been altered imperceptibly: the gardenia blooming in the dark in the scarred water glass, near the phone my handwriting illegible, the patterned lamp- shade angled downward and away from the long mirror where I stood and looked at the woman holding her child. Her face kept dissolving into expressions resembling my own, but the child’s was pure figurative, resembling no one. We floated together in the space a lullaby makes, head to head, half-sleeping.Save it, my mother would say, meaning just the opposite. She didn’t want to hear my evidence against her terrible optimism for me. And though, despite her, I can redeem, in a pawnshop sense, almost any bad moment from my childhood, I see now what she must have intended for me. I felt it for her, watching her as she slept, watching her suck as she dreamed of sucking, lightheaded with thirst as my blood flowed suddenly into tissue that changed it to milk. No matter that we were alone, there’s a texture that moves between me and whatever might have injured us then. Like the curtain’s sheer opacity, it remains drawn over what view we have of dawn here in this onetime desert, now green and replenished, its perfect climate unthreatened in memory— though outside, as usual, the wind blew, the bough bent, under the eaves, the hummingbird touched once the bloodcolored hourglass, the feeder, then was gone.

And auld Robin Forbes hes gien tem a dance, I pat on my speckets to see them aw prance; I thout o’ the days when I was but fifteen, And skipp’d wi’ the best upon Forbes’s green. Of aw things that is I think thout is meast queer, It brings that that’s by-past and sets it down here; I see Willy as plain as I dui this bit leace, When he tuik his cwoat lappet and deeghted his feace. The lasses aw wonder’d what Willy cud see In yen that was dark and hard featur’d leyke me; And they wonder’d ay mair when they talk’d o’ my wit, And slily telt Willy that cudn’t be it: But Willy he laugh’d, and he meade me his weyfe, And whea was mair happy thro’ aw his lang leyfe? It’s e’en my great comfort, now Willy is geane, The he offen said— nae place was leyke his awn heame! I mind when I carried my wark to yon steyle Where Willy was deykin, the time to beguile, He wad fling me a daisy to put i’ my breast, And I hammer’d my noddle to mek out a jest. But merry or grave, Willy often wad tell There was nin o’ the leave that was leyke my awn sel; And he spak what he thout, for I’d hardly a plack When we married, and nobbet ae gown to my back. When the clock had struck eight I expected him heame, And wheyles went to meet him as far as Dumleane; Of aw hours it telt eight was dearest to me, But now when it streykes there’s a tear i’ my ee. O Willy! dear Willy! it never can be That age, time, or death, can divide thee and me! For that spot on earth that’s aye dearest to me, Is the turf that has cover’d my Willy frae me!

She turns the bedlamp on. The book falls open in her mottled hands, and while she reads her mouth begins to quiver, forming words like Breathless. Promises. Elope. As she turns the leaves, Eudora's cheek takes on a bit of bloom. Her frowzy hair thickens and turns gold, her dim eyes clear, the wattles vanish from her slender neck. Her waist, emerging from its ring of flesh, bends to the side. Breasts that used to hang like pockets rise and ripen; her long legs tremble. Her eyes close, she holds her breath— the steamy pages flutter by, unread, as lover after lover finds her bed.

She would post herself in the way in lines headed to transfer stops, to change, or haunt intersections with four way full scarecrow indecision, stop on the corners of streets, and in the aisles of buses, preaching only that which has never left these crossings for road, for choice    — the angry fear.       She seats at the feasts   — Thanksgiving, any holiday, any family place setting   — the hunger of others’ satisfaction for herself, she seeks it said this is what she deserves, if only of herself. What she thinks she thinks needs to be said whatever anyone else thinks to be honest. So there she sings from that part of the door she’s never got through, the eye which requires it all taken   off    down all blown away    to get through to that still naked-ness of clear again even if she’s not        still, the voice comes through that if we could listen as she is equally raw    hear with meat and gut below the skin, beyond the last violence, to the silence just before the bone      if we could still hear there we’d hear 2 What hand can you offer one wanting just to get even for what it doesn’t know what, just to take out what it feels on someone else to hurt because it can’t get at where it hurts      itself to have to see to clear like a movie fakes done seeing sharper than thought can cut to it; what hand can you offer one that doesn’t know even as a balance any other than more as my half and who counts itself that much     more and that more proofless     multiple unanswerably human hurts because it can’t figure out a figure to answer how it wants so count doesn’t count higher than want and want also falls short enough to take someone down for it but there is no size for another to be cut down to but none but death    this is so frustrating 3 You see me get the hell away from her don’t you     quick as I can    and I bein nice she act all girlfriend but that bitch dangerous she pull so much rotten shit on peoples she due to get her ass killed anytime and I don’t tend to be nowhere near round I ain’t getting cut down just for standin next to her     I ain’t all that innocent but I don’t be lookin for nothing I don’t deserve

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt, And lived in a small house near a fashionable square Cared for by servants to the number of four. Now when she died there was silence in heaven And silence at her end of the street. The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet — He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before. The dogs were handsomely provided for, But shortly afterwards the parrot died too. The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece, And the footman sat upon the dining-table Holding the second housemaid on his knees — Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

There's a way a woman will not relinquish her pocketbook even pulled onstage, or called up to the pulpit— there's a way only your Auntie can make it taste right— rice & gravy is a meal if my late Great Aunt Toota makes it— Aunts cook like there's no tomorrow & they're right. Too hot is how my Aunt Tuddie peppers everything, her name given by my father, four, seeing her smiling in her crib. There's a barrel full of rainwater beside the house that my infant father will fall into, trying to see himself—the bottom— & there's his sister Margie yanking him out by his hair grown long as superstition. Never mind the flyswatter they chase you round the house & into the yard with ready to whup the daylights out of you— that's only a threat— Aunties will fix you potato salad & save you some. Godmothers, godsends, Aunts smoke like it's going out of style— & it is— make even gold teeth look right, shining. saying I'll be John, with a sigh. Make way out of no way— keep they key to the scale that weighed the cotton, the cane we raised more than our share of— If not them, then who will win heaven? holding tight to their pocketbooks at the pearly gates just in case.

I like it when they get together and talk in voices that sound like apple trees and grape vines, and some of them wear hats and go to Arizona in the winter, and they all like to play cards. They will always be the ones who say “It is time to go now,” even as we linger at the door, or stand by the waiting cars, they remember someone—an uncle we never knew—and sigh, all of them together, like wind in the oak trees behind the farm where they grew up—a place I remember—especially the hen house and the soft clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

(for E) I stop my hand midair. If I touch her there everything about me will be true. The New World discovered without pick or ax. I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969. I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself. My hand remembers, treading the watery room, just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory. Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car, lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace for her mud-pie crusty work boots. She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks & stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far, break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro: souped, shiny, low to the ground. The stars over the Atlantic are dangling salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is $20 a night; special winter off-season rate. No one else here but us and the night clerk, five floors below, alone with his cherished stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails in a primal search for every constellation hiding in the sky of your body. My hand waits for permission, for my life to agree to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car? You are a woman with film reels for eyes. Years of long talking have brought us to the land of the body. Our skin is one endless prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands, I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines. The old claw hammer and monkey wrench that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be thrust into my painter’s pants against my will. I will never be able to wash or peel any of this away. Before the night is over someone I do not know will want the keys to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase me down the street. A gaggle of spooked hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard, never to lay another egg, just as I am jump- ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground of sweet clover.