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1 When we were leaving home for the army you burst into tears on the train. You said, “I will miss my parents. I have never travelled that far.” But you also claimed it was everyone’s duty to defend the country, and you would fight the Russian Revisionists to the dead end. I lowered my head and did not cry. But my mother’s eyes, dimmed with tears, were striving in the cold wind to hold back the train going to the North. 2 On the Northern land our foot-prints disappeared in the snow. The hard ice was slowly losing its layers. We didn’t have to wear fur hats on our patrols along the borderline, and watered our horses at little springs. 3 At last the rain loosened the black earth. Azaleas bloomed on the mountain slopes. The woods did not understand war. The mountains and the rivers did not understand war. But every night we slept with our clothes on. We were prepared to fight. 4 The tanks, which played the enemy, were running through the valley. Wooden grenades and rubber bazooka-projectiles started raining towards them. Everything was false, but we did it seriously. Why did you choose that tank with a revolving barrel like a gigantic scythe, to lay an explosive package at its back? It laid you on the ground and its caterpillar ran over your limbs. We carried you down the hill. Your blood dropped into a small brook flowing towards the Amur. 5 White ceilings, white walls, white nurses. Only your black eyes were sliding slowly. Our eyes collided. You were staring at me in deadly silence. Can you speak? Can you hear what others say? You are two feet shorter than before. You sluggishly turned into your ward like a startled turtle. Watching your warped back I was sending off an epoch. 6 Are you still alive? You are a little dog, abandoned, often groaning at the door of my conscience. Tonight, in the long silence again I am thinking of you.

Don't say Sir Pigeon in his cobalt bonnet. Don't find among your notes jottings on duvets and blizzards and the page unwalked across black missives of girlhood must be sent off and do not claim the furnace of the universe is powered by human screams. When the dark turns dark or when the bullet lifts a scalp, it is enough to know the lover feels the slap that the world can hear the sharp shout which wakes the cat her claws one inch from the rabbit's bobbing scut.

What god was it that would open earth’s picture book and see the two of us on a road, snowfields glittering on every side and poplars bent like the fingers of an old man clutching what he loved about the sun? Which one was it that would peer into our thatched, white-washed farmhouse, and see the fur, flies, and shit-stained walls? Which one laughed at the barbed wire fences, the wall topped with broken glass? Which of the many who came then, gleaming and rimed in hard sunlight? Which of those who bobbed like ice along the winter shore? What did we have that any god would want? Quick, if you can find it, hide it.

Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels Tap-dance on the water. They pluck the tuna hatchlings As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry, Might once have picked up pearls From a broken necklace. Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them. Birds from above and big fish from below Rip at the pack until it comes apart Like Poland, with survivors in single figures. The krill, as singletons almost not there But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling, Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen— A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir And nullified, a deep-space mass extinction Watched only by the Hubble telescope. Make your bones in a shark family if you can. If not, be tricky to locate for sheer Translucence, a slick blip that will become— Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws— A lobster fortified with jutting eaves Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done, Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.

The midnight streetlight illuminating the white of clover assures me I am right not to manicure my patch of grass into a dull carpet of uniform green, but to allow whatever will to take over. Somewhere in that lace lies luck, though I may never swoop down to find it. Three, too, is an auspicious number. And this seeing a reminder to avoid too much taming of what, even here, wants to be wild.

I realise it’s not all salad sandwiches at pinewood picnics, endless volleyball. I’ve heard the argument that talk of shame and how our forebears thought their bodies dirty; how we've all got one. Seen one, seen ’em all. But it’s not for me, beneath my double load of Calvinist and voyeuristic tendencies. For me, I have to see the clothes come off: the way a button’s thumbed through cotton cloth - a winning move in some exotic game with no set rules but countless permutations - or how a summer dress falls to the floor with momentary mass and with a plash that stirs us briefly as we ply our passion; a hand pushed through the coldness of a zip, three fingertips that follow down the spine to where a clasp is neatly spun undone amidkiss, by prime legerdemain and who cares that it happens once in four and never, never on the first undressing, it must be better than a foreskin snagged on gorse thorns or a cold, fat nipple jammed in the scissor drawer, the bounty and the blessing, the mystery of nakedness reduced till on a par with go-go palaces where goosebumped, grinding strippers strut their stuff in the birthday clothes of backstreet empresses, down on a par with the oncologist who gropes for lumps, the night-morgue man who clips his nails amongst the naked, bin-bagged stiffs. So, stranger, what I want to say is this: if you’re to join me in a little sinning (and this is my place up here on the right), please understand I’d value some reluctance, a cold-feet shiver, as in the beginning when Eve discovered modesty and slipped in and out of something comfortable. For there are many ways to skin a cat, but ours is human nature - things come off so rarely. Come in. Let me take your coat.

Who will you point to? In the needle's eye, or selling what you won at the strait gate, who will know how to kiss you and just when to pull the hair at your neck and say your name? No single victim will ever be the last. Not, at least, until one victim purifies the whole issue of suffering by crying out that his pain means nothing because it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. The clusters of exiles in their storefronts will be free then. History will end. Lover will take her hand from her lover's mouth and see only his mouth, not a sightless fish's eye scored onto the sheet's marble. It's a wise child who knows it is no angel. The rest of us grow up hovering, visiting our lives in the moment of pain or orgasm or when the little fingers of pity push inside us and we feel loved. Our suffering gales beneath our wings like applause. We long to repeat it, to explain it to stay aloft and clear our lives in that mid-heaven of nostalgia and apology. We hover over the camps, the forced retreats, the ends of nations that no one can recall now except as code words for catastrophe. We alight for pleasure, touching the victims as the hurt husband touches the bed his wife has left. Father loved you with a passion. Or else from fear of your long, inarticulate future, he turned silent, edging into crank broadcasts by a small radio on the screened porch. Perhaps, as my father did, he moved out into another house and had a daughter with a redheaded woman who mistook his silence for grief. My father never lost anything. For years, I went to school with the daughter as she grew fat and her red hair reached her knees. Who were the victims? At what moment should my father have cried out, the mothers have cried out, or I have taken the fat hand of my sister and walked off through the needle's eye? And it's a wise child who can understand that the mothers and fathers on the trains see only the receding pastorals, the lamplit villages of other angels, and that his suffering is only one pinpoint on a lithic hoarding of departures each passenger reads like an advertisement of heaven. The wise child goes crazy. How could he not? How could he not be heartbroken to learn that even compassion is compassionless, that it uses the real or imagined pain of others and himself for wings, for memory, for a marriage proposal, for the cruel angelism that adores victims and makes a fifth, airier element out of pain? We recede. We recede. A virus finds that place deepest behind the heart where it unweaves itself into a pattern of false starts like knots of villages and the one house lightening at the crest of a green street as its doors close to us. Dearest, that is another crime of pluralism. Hope, jagged with beginnings, scatters our one real life among a dozen houses, little illnesses of longing whose low fevers contract the heart. You have but one heart. And I have one. At the crest of a green street we give them away. The night thanks us. The fences shiver with cats, and the flowers close. Feeling comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. It is not a train. It is not one instance of lovemaking or a lifetime spent together running the dogs, dying finally face down in the yard bed of herbs. We are all the same. Or, rather, we should believe we are the same in order to be happy with the same things and not to be stealing from each other. We put each other in camps. I crush my lover with a kiss and then it is impossible to love her. What must die if we are to live without barbed wire and bad sex is the very idea of otherness. And to kill the idea, we have merely to find one victim in ourselves who will die for nothing. My father could not stop getting children. The people on the trains cannot stop watching the passing villages for their own ghosts and early angels. I cannot stop finding houses in which to lose my heart a dozen times in the fits and starts of a little passion exalted. Life is not going to be bearable, I think, for a long time. The exiles will play cards in their storefront lodges. History will slide on. And one will pull the hair at my neck. And one will cover my mouth as she makes love to me. The streets are snowed in under heaven's leaflets. Our beds are scored with the sightless eyes, the eyes of others. The air is sickeningly heavy with applause.

As I reach to close each book lying open on my desk, it leaps up to snap at my fingers. My legs won’t hold me, I must sit down. My fingers pain me where the thick leaves snapped together at my touch. All my life I’ve held books in my hands like children, carefully turning their pages and straightening out their creases. I use books almost apologetically. I believe I often think their thoughts for them. Reading, I never know where theirs leave off and mine begin. I am so much alone in the world, I can observe the stars or study the breeze, I can count the steps on a stair on the way up or down, and I can look at another human being and get a smile, knowing it is for the sake of politeness. Nothing must be said of estrangement among the human race and yet nothing is said at all because of that. But no book will help either. I stroke my desk, its wood so smooth, so patient and still. I set a typewriter on its surface and begin to type to tell myself my troubles. Against the evidence, I live by choice.

A mothball May. I lean against the kitchen wall. The sacred pear tree on the hill. The skyline, small green wheat waverunning with the wind. From west to east the green’s spanned out by men on horseback and on foot, men with long staffs slow-motion, searching. The saddles glint. What are they sweeping for? Why coming this direction? Are those staffs guns? If  they are after quail, or hares, why is their fanning law-enforcement grim, as for a felon, a missing person, or one too imbecile to find her way? One who laid waste the safe place by the kitchen wall, bankrupted her May day, malpracticed pear and gifted wheat? I’m waiting, men.

The songs swept down from the northern steppes with cinerary horse and sword and vestment in the wake of battle suicidal for a bronze translation of flesh burnt to a vertical vapor trail of fame which, so they claimed, would be undying by which they meant the dying would be just prolonged a little longer as on a ladder made of air each legendary smoke of name could only climb by thinning till it wasn’t there. And now as the steel tips of our devices dig, sort through and analyze what’s left behind: scant traces of berserk debris, dumb soot of ritual effaced by dumber ash, beneath ghost towns the ghosts have all abandoned, all we unearth intact now are the untranslated bones of babies, inhumed at home in older dwellings on deeper strata under mud floors in pits — placed carefully on sides, knees drawn to chests, skulls cupped in pebble bones of hand, the dead nursling, the stillborn, the miscarried — unnamed, unadorned, as if the only grave goods buried with them were their perishing — as if that were what the mothers wanted to keep close, keep hidden, safe from the heroic stench of burning upward while their breasts still swelling dripping freshened the black dirt sucking at their feet.