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Chile, 1834 A month before his dinner with the visiting Spanish lawyer, he had “set out for the purpose of geologizing,” and rode back over the ridge of the Chilecauquen with a huge jute bag of living shells from the sandy flats at the coast, and with another, as full, of dead barnacles scraped from the rock. A few months forward from that dinner —on the island of San Pedro, where the Beagle was anchored awaiting him—he would be sneaking up on a fox “of a kind very rare” and donking it stoutly “on the head with my geological hammer.” (The fox, he’ll write, “is now in the Zoological Society.”) So what does he think, when the Spanish lawyer expresses a disbelief that the King of England would be so loco as to bother to ship to this sensible, orderly country a man “to pick up beetles and lizards, and to break stones”? No, the whiff of something “off ”—like suspect meat—attends eccentric stunts like these. “I do not like it: if one of us were to go and do such things in England, do not you think the King of England would very shortly command us to leave his shores?” Renous, another student of bugs and rocks, from Germany, is also there at dinner, and he mentions then that once, in a house in San Fernando, he’d been discovered contemplating the transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. He couldn’t deny it: there they were, the writhing green proof, in an open box! “The Padres and the Governor consulted, and agreed it must be some heresy”—and so Renous was arrested. Darwin can only shake his head in a quiet bemusement as his guests converse. Those inchling creatures crawling over their chopped-up foliage, heads as blunt as thimbled thumbs . . .heretical? How could anybody believe that the innocent jumble in the baskets and flasks of a naturalist is dangerous? * And Lillian Colton—the woman in Owatonna, Minnesota who for forty years has avidly collected the seeds of that state and, with them (“poking them into place with toothpicks and gluing them down”), has portraitured “American presidents, movie stars, country musicians, rock and roll legends, scientific and religious leaders (including Mother Teresa)” —what suspiciousness might seize the Spanish lawyer if he saw her on her rounds? What edgy wariness would grip him if he chanced on Nellie Staves, “at 87 perhaps the most famous Adirondack trapper,” out in the summer to harvest shell-shaped fungus off the dead trees of those shaded, spinous hills? —she’ll work for twenty hours straight on one, with the point of an old school compass, stippling it into the scene of a great alert-eyed ram or a sunrise, watching as the fungus’s own interior, brown juices dye the image into permanence. Who would these represent, for the Spanish lawyer, what forbidden Other?—a girl in the corner, walling her attention away from her sisters’ strident hip-hop, by reading a fanciful tale of witches? a girl on a dancer pole at Sturgis, strobing her tits for the boys in a quick 1-2-1 semaphore of fuck-the-work-week revelry? Surely not. Surely these are no threat to his world. And yet for nothing more than positing a newly ordered sky map, Giordano Bruno was led in chains from his cell in the Roman prison of Castel San’Angelo, there where he’d spent eight years as the Inquisition hammered at his ideas and his calm resolve. It was February 19th, 1600; he was tied to an iron stake; a wedge was stuffed in his mouth, to prevent any final utterance of blasphemy; and he was burned alive. The leg skin bubbled off of his body like a Christmas pig’s. It turns out that a redone sky implies a redone God—and a God is intolerant of this, a God is jealous of any counter claim to the pedigree of His cosmos. Yes, but . . . surely not this mushroom picker? not this boy who simply speaks to invisible friends as he wanders around the alleys? Oh but that would depend on the given Spanish lawyer of that given day and circumstance. In Ghent, a cock was put on trial and sentenced to death for repeatedly disturbing the peace of the Lord’s day, Sunday. It had been warned; so now it was just, to lead this beast to a chopping block —restoring the sanctified order. * Kansas, 2004 Ah, for a witty transition from “cock” to my neighbors Suzette and Edie!—lesbians, now in love with each other for over a decade and wanting only to declare their love in a marriage vow, “like anyone,” as Edie says. Not that my schoolboy humor would find favor in their reading life . . . although we get along; some shared affinity enables The Church of the Gay Girls and The Orthodox Congregation of Guy to coexist with an amiability. Still, I’ve witnessed other people pass them by with the slitted, ophidian stare of xenophobia. Suzette and Edie —are they the new apostasy? are they our own Anne Hutchinson? In 1638 she was found guilty, after a two-day trial, of heresy—of being “a woman not fitt for our Society.” With will, she had embraced doctrinal misinterpretations, “some of them blasphemus, others erroneus and all Unsafe, and of the Devill of Hell,” and she was excommunicated from Massachusetts Bay Colony “evermore.” Her actual crime?—a claim “the Holy Spirit illumines the heart of every true believer” without the need of a minister intervening. For this, she was harried into the wilds —it was called a “hiving-out”—and set at the mercy of wolf and of winter, “and it were Death to return.” Her other actual crime?—that after a pregnancy, she had been delivered “of thirtie monstrus Births or therabowts at once, some of them Bigger, some Lessr, some of one shape, some of An other, few of any Perfect shape, None at all of them of Human shape”—which perhaps is what you’d expect from a woman of “nimble Witt and active Spirit and verie Voluble Tonggue.” At the Republican convention, it was, indeed, the voluble tongue that Edie always flapped so saucily (and too, I’d guess, her rainbow-hue WE’RE ALREADY BEDDED . . . WHY NOT WEDDED? T-shirt) that (on her side) led inevitably to the violence. A surly officer suggested that she move. She pointed out how she was already in the caged-off square allowed for free-speech protest, and had no intention of leaving. There were “gestures they exchanged”. . . and then a stun gun’s 50,000 volts were suddenly alive inside her, just enough to crumple her into helplessness so that, when the panic began, she was trampled by friends and police alike. A lung was crushed, and when I visited three weeks later, her skin was still a nightmare Turkish rug of bruise. (For a moment, I saw in the air around her the first disabling gust of snow in the woods at the border of Massachusetts Bay in 1638.) To be fair, I should add that the confrontational officer doing crowd control went home with his head little more than a pocket of blood and neural damage. Do not, I warn you, ever lightly cross a Wiccan bowler. * Terms I haven’t yet used, from my pile of notes: separatist, sedition, dogma. Finally, though, when those clouds of abstraction open up, it’s always one specific ordinary rainy day, in Chicago, in 1961. I’m thirteen, squeaky-voiced, and with an adam’s apple popping from my thin throat like a doorknob—while my father is large, he fought the neighbor’s crazy German shepherd to a standstill once, and behind him are generations of him, solemn and knowing. We’re standing there in front of the house, in a dim autumnal downpour, and it wouldn’t look to anyone else like an even match, my scrawny shouts, his thousands of years of righteousness; and yet, in emotional terms, I have the upper hand. I won’t believe in his God. I won’t believe in any God, in any synagogue, in any mumbo jumbo or rabbinical teetotum, and I’m screaming this and screaming this and screaming this, until I see the rain become his face, and for the only time except his mother’s funeral on a similar day of wet and chill in a shivering mix, my father cries in front of me. And God, if He’s there, must write my name down on a list that He’ll turn over to His deputies on Earth —His Spanish lawyers. There are many terms for this, but only one rain. Now it’s falling, grayish twill, on a hill along the coast of the Chonos Archipelago islands. 1835. A mound of seals in the distance, “huddled together, asleep: they appeared to be of a loving disposition; but even pigs would be ashamed of their dirt,” which is picked at by the turkey-buzzards. Terns, gulls, black-necked swans. A deposit of sandstone. “Four great snowy cones” of the local volcanoes. He couldn’t be happier. He has computed the number of eggs in a tenth-of-an-inch of a sea-slug’s potent slime, he has suggested how “a great volume might be written, describing one of these beds of sea-weed.” The otter. The spunky Chilean mouse. He has read “a most interesting discussion on the history of the common potato.” He couldn’t be more mesmerized in the grand salons of Paris than here, in the rain, with his sodden insect net. And who would complain? He isn’t any rooster. He isn’t going to rudely wake anyone from a long sound sleep.

And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel, with a loud voice: —Deuteronomy 27:14 Over the border the barrier winds, devouring orchards of various kinds. Cursed be he that taketh away the landmark of his neighbor. And all the people shall say, Amen.

It was the thought that — if you could watch, if I could leak to the public the film of when I needed to reach you — that would be one way. • From a little-known bluff overgrown last summer with wildflowers, if you could watch a family of turkeys, a mother and 162 poults, if you could watch them abandon their roost on the lowest branch of a cottonwood tree, and lugging 163 tow cables behind them when they departed, if you could watch them dragging the tree through a field overgrown last summer with tanglehead grass. And discarding the yellow tree pitilessly across the rails of the Sunset Limited, which was carrying that day exactly 162 passengers west to their sentencings. It could be one way, I kept telling myself, to awake in summer when everyone’s sentenced and film myself shut of those dead to me. If the lights came up on my train in a field overgrown last summer with tanglehead. If we could slow to a halt in front of the yellow tree obstructing our path. There could be a smash cut, an establishing shot of the bluff where you knelt cutting wildflowers, and off-camera if the cottonwood started hemorrhaging yellow termites, if you could see the mites glowing yellow having drunk the yellow blood of the tree. If I could leak to you what the camera work couldn’t — in a hand-me-down suit an unsavory man he’s inside a renaissance cherry casket, and the casket’s buried eight feet beneath the Sunset Limited’s engine room, and the casket’s rigged on the inside with a hand-crank generator, with Christmas lights in five colors, if we leaked red first then blue, if we leaked green before we leaked orange, last yellow, the light of which illuminates the interior of the casket enough for the man (he’s alive) to watch his face decompose in the mirror that’s rigged to the ceiling, if we could cut to the sentence handed down to the man many years ago, that any unsavory man is a man who should watch himself die. If there was a slow zoom on a woman’s hands typing eight words in first class, a slow dissolve to a child in coach, if he fingers a text that says don’t change for you, don’t change for me

What if I ate too much food     there being Not enough money    immigranty And save all the ketchup packets    George Carlin record on the record player saying how many ways you can curse and they are all funny   (small brown bird with a black neck and a beak full of fluff for a nest) The old joke: “How many feet do you have?”     Instead of “How tall are you?” This looks like joy     a joke who looked at you and laughed Look at the map upside down    so that south Is north and north is south it’s the other way around because it’s the commonly agreed to thing    (visual language of the colonizer) or snowful awful     tearful wishful

The last few gray sheets of snow are gone, winter’s scraps and leavings lowered to a common level. A sudden jolt of weather pushed us outside, and now this larger world once again belongs to us. I stand at the edge of it, beside the house, listening to the stream we haven’t heard since fall, and I imagine one day thinking back to this hour and blaming myself for my worries, my foolishness, today’s choices having become the accomplished facts of change, accepted or forgotten. The woods are a mangle of lines, yet delicate, yet precise, when I take the time to look closely. If I’m not happy it must be my own fault. At the edge of the lawn my wife bends down to uncover a flower, then another. The first splurge of crocuses. And for a moment the sweep and shudder of the wind seems indistinguishable from the steady furl of water just beyond her.

Down in the basement, jacked on Kimbo, I’m screwdriving chunks of OxiClean into the washer. Jane:Collage is tattered backdrop, not worth the Time nor Money.

To think I might have been dead, he said to himself, ashamed, as if this were a curse of the heart, raising a bundle of bones to a man’s height. As if it were suddenly forbidden to touch even words that had dropped to the ground. Besides, he was afraid of finding his body in a metal press. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. the tram stood jammed above him like an icebreaker’s prow and all that was left of the car was a grotesque pretzel with a chunk bitten off by the dentures of a demented angel. Something dark was dripping on the rails, and a strikingly pale wind was leafing through a book still warm. People were forming a circle and with deaf-mute sympathy awaited the play’s catharsis, like maggots emerging from under the wings of a beheaded chicken. From afar came the approaching wail of sirens, congealing in the jinxed air-conditioning of that day and that minute. Dewdrops were falling on the back of the neck like remnants of atmospheric dignity. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. No, thank you, he said, I’ll wait; for a silent film had started to run without subtitles, without colour and without answers. And what about the magnetic monopoles escaping seconds after the Big Bang, protons violating the irreversibility of the flow of time? What about the giant molecular clouds under the galaxy’s shoulders, conceiving the embryos of stars? What about the loneliness of the first genes accumulating amino acids in shallow primeval pools at the expense of entropic usurers? What about the desiccated starfish like proto-eagles’ talons dug into the bed of a vanishing sea? What about the mortal migrations of birds observing the sun’s inclination and the roar of sex hormones? What about the caged half-crazed orang-utan who vomits because he has nothing else to do? What about the mice which for a thousand years have learned to sing and the frogs balancing on one leg like the thigh of a beauty queen from Mesopotamia? What about poetry, an enterprise so disorderly it twists the rulers and increases the squint of school inspectors? And what about the little girl in the leukemia ward who, on the toilet, tried to show what kind of moustache the kind doctor has, but as her skinny sticks of hands let go of the edge of the bowl, she falls in and so tried again and again? And what about the weak-kneed intellectual, the professor who understood the approximate universe but forgot the traffic rules? No, thank you, he said to some uniform, I don’t need anything. My papers are in my pocket but I can’t reach there. And he tried to smile a little at this embarrassment of complicated creation. It’s all my fault, he said, thank you. And then he died.

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them- selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. May 1978

What is pink? a rose is pink By a fountain's brink. What is red? a poppy's red In its barley bed. What is blue? the sky is blue Where the clouds float thro'. What is white? a swan is white Sailing in the light. What is yellow? pears are yellow, Rich and ripe and mellow. What is green? the grass is green, With small flowers between. What is violet? clouds are violet In the summer twilight. What is orange? Why, an orange, Just an orange!

Come home, our sons, young drivers, tell us you’re safe, not detained again by police for your dark color, sprocketed hair and a crime you didn’t commit. Maybe your car’s the wrong make or rusty in a neighborhood where cars park in garages at night. Once, when you saw a squad car you remembered Officer Smiley and his dog that did tricks in read-aloud books at J.J. Hill School. Now, as you reach for your license with shaking hands, tension raises the chance something will go wrong. This poem is for you, sons, and for everyone who is afraid— citizens of police, police of citizens. It’s for Philando Castile, a black school lunch supervisor in an inner city school who memorized children’s names and their food allergies. And it’s for the policeman who stopped a car with a damaged taillight. After he used his gun, his voice broke like a frightened child’s. Come home, sons, to mothers like me, alert at night waiting for car lights to beam in front of our house, for the car to belong to our sons, and our sons to still belong to the world.