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I can’t touch you. His face always returns; we exchange long looks in each bad dream & what I see, my God. Honey, sweetheart, I hold you against me but nothing works. Two boats moored, rocking between nowhere & nowhere. A bone inside me whispers maybe tonight, but I keep thinking about the two men wrestling nude in Lawrence’s Women in Love. I can’t get past reels of breath unwinding. He has you. Now he doesn’t. He has you again. Now he doesn’t. You’re at the edge of azaleas shaken loose by a word. I see your rose-colored skirt unfurl. He has a knife to your throat, night birds come back to their branches. A hard wind raps at the door, the new year prowling in a black overcoat. It’s been six months since we made love. Tonight I look at you hugging the pillow, half smiling in your sleep. I want to shake you & ask who. Again I touch myself, unashamed, until his face comes into focus. He’s stolen something from me & I don’t know if it has a name or not— like counting your ribs with one foolish hand & mine with the other.

Every story has its lean meat and its solid church so he started to rape her for years. However, owls close their eyes in the daytime because they’re awake all night, and she waited for him at the handle of his hunting knife the bells ringing afterward with the kind of lust she’s always known. After that her flights were silent and her voice, of rats and mice. I don’t understand sorcery or omens even eyes as penetrating as hers, but under her feathers and all along the tips of her flight where she’s let me touch her, I’ve kissed her fright.

All in the stilly night the muntjac roars from its hedge: a barking roar of July, heat, its own broken-open fruition under black viscose, a sky static with plane-roar. The intermission after the greatest air show in the world; fields and lane recovering; tarmac tonguing sky again, languid in the summer half-dark, towards Fairford where ancient glass trembles, facets of dark open to tumble out king, revenge-tragedy, triumphal colors of God.

And where my organ of veneration should be— wormwood and gall. Grudge sliver. Wailbone, iron, bitters. I mean to say the miniature waterfalls have all dried up in this miniature place where day is duty cubed, time is time on task and every mind optimized for compliance. Time to delint my black denim traveling stuff. The flourescent major highlighter has dimmed to minor. I'm so dying I wrote when I meant to write so tired. And when I sleep I dream only that I'm sleeping. Please see my black stuff's dusted off. Night has no dilution anxieties, but only the infinites are happy: Math. Time. Everything happy goes to many decimal places while flesh passes through gradations of glory. I visualized it, the nurse said of the bedsore. Everything exists at the courtesy of everything else. Please see that my grave is kept clean. Beloveds, finite things in which the infinite endangered itself, excarnate to memory and the divine substance has limited liability. You're kind, I tell the infinite. Too kind.

You elbow me with your corduroy jacket when a box chock-full of antique marbles comes up. I can’t hear your whispers above the auctioneer’s racket. The clipped speech of the auctioneer cracked me up when you impersonated him in bed. Like a wild, thick mop I soak up every copper smell from your corduroy jacket. In two days, I will drive you to the airport, packed with other couples pressed tightly at the top of the escalator. Lines sear my cheek from your corduroy jacket when we hug—then a quick kiss good-bye tacked on at the end. I’ll finger the rim on the paper coffee cup you leave in my car. When I hear your name I can’t forget how your long torso pressed against my bare back, bluish in this early light. Your fingers shot into me, popped my spine into a wicked arch. There is no lack of how it haunts me still—what I bid—lost, sacked and wrapped for other girls. I should have looked up to see who else was bidding, but I studied the folds in your jacket. My limit is spent, loud and certain as the auctioneer’s racket.

My hands hold, my father’s older the wires– picture rolls once, then steadies… an English castle! A voice-over drones about Edward I, who, to subdue the Welsh, built castles. Some sixty years, dozens of engineers, the masses conscripted from the villages. My father moves on to a Zenith with a bad tuner. TVs interest him, not English with their damp, historical programming. *    *   * Here there were Indians, mound builders. Here, an English fort, a few farmers. And here the industrialist settled his ass, John Ford on the river dredging sand for making glass. Plate glass. (Why should America buy from Europe?) Some half dozen years, German engineers, and hundreds of Slavic peasants. Grandfather sat on his samovar warming himself and making excuses, but finally, he set off. Got a room, became a shoveler. Got a wife, a company house. Ford City: a valley filling with properties. No one got along– Not Labor and Capital, not Germans and Slavs, not husband and wives, for that matter. *    *   * Edward’s castles were ruins by the fifteenth century. Not from Welsh armies, but the rise of the middle class. The towns around a castle thrived: tailors, smithies, cobblers, coopers. Drawing in the Welsh peasants. And what with intermarriage and the rise of capitalism… a castle grew obsolescent. I turn off the set. My father hunts cigarettes at the Kwik-Mart on the corner. Overhead, my mother’s footsteps, the tonk of bottles, the scraping of plates. *    *   * During Eisenhower’s reign my grandfather retired and mowed his lawn until I took over. He primed the filter, set the choke, then we took turns pulling till the sputtering engine caught. (“Somanabitch,” he spit) And watched me as I mowed back and forth for two dollars. Once in the garage he showed me a scythe. He mowed hay in the old country, and the women would follow, raking it in windrows. *    *   * The factories today are mostly closed down, or full of robots or far off in Asia. Ford City lives through the mail: compensation, a thin pension, and, of course, Social Security. I always drive along the factory, windows rolled down; I want my kids in the back seat to see. Seven or eight, probably pensioners, congregate on the corner, each man dressed quite alike: Sears jacket, cigarette, salt-and-pepper hair. “Honk the horn,” my oldest begs. He waves and waves zealously until a man turns–a man with my face, but full of sweetness now, silence and clarity.

No remembering now when the apple sapling was blown almost out of the ground. No telling how, with all the other trees around, it alone was struck. It must have been luck, he thought for years, so close to the house it grew. It must have been night. Change is a thing one sleeps through when young, and he was young. If there was a weakness in the earth, a give he went down on his knees to find and feel the limits of, there is no longer. If there was one random blow from above the way he's come to know from years in this place, the roots were stronger. Whatever the case, he has watched this tree survive wind ripping at his roof for nights on end, heats and blights that left little else alive. No remembering now... A day's changes mean all to him and all days come down to one clear pane through which he sees among all the other trees this leaning, clenched, unyielding one that seems cast in the form of a blast that would have killed it, as if something at the heart of things, and with the heart of things, had willed it.

Dropping napkins, corks, and non-compostables into the trash, I see that friends have mistaken my everyday chopsticks for disposables, helpfully discarding them alongside inedibles: pork bones, shrimp shells, bitter melon. Among napkins and corks, they do look compostable: off-white, wooden, warped from continual washing — no lacquer, no ornament. But anyone who thinks these chopsticks are disposable doesn’t live with chopsticks in the comfortable way of a favorite robe, oversized, a bit broken. Thin paper napkins, plastic forks, and non-compostable takeout boxes constitute the chopstick’s natural habitat to many I hold dear. With family or alone, I’ll maintain that chopsticks aren’t disposable, but if I can make peace with the loss of utensils when breaking bao with guests, I’ll be one of them, not digging in the napkins and corks. Compostable chopsticks are the answer: everyday and disposable.

New York City, 2001 One night, not long after the disaster, as our train was passing Astor, the car door opened with a shudder and a girl came flying down the aisle, hair that looked to be all feathers and a half-moon smile making open air of our small car. The crowd ignored her or they muttered “Hey, excuse me” as they passed her when the train had paused at Rector. The specter crowed “Excuse me,” swiftly turned, and ran back up the corridor, then stopped for me. We dove under the river. She took my head between her fingers, squeezing till the birds began to stir. And then from out my eyes and ears a flock came forth — I couldn’t think or hear or breathe or see within that feather-world so silently I thanked her. Such things were common after the disaster.

We opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver and brought up from the coal cellar jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit. We dismantled, we took down from the walls, we bundled and carted off and swept clean. Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing the door behind us, going our separate ways from the house we had emptied, and which, in the coming days, we would fill again and empty and try to fill again.