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habit smacks its dull skull like a stuck bull in a brick stall and my version of what I know is like eye surgery with a backhoe on grace so much beyond my pitiful gray sponge of a brain I'd not believe it exists except for such doses of felicity as this.

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp to hear confession from an Eagle Scout tortured by forty years of sin and doubt. You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp. Handlers, allowing you to hike with me, followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront down a firebreak this camper used to hunt. Through all I said you suffered silently. I blamed the authors of my unbelief: St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene, the Jesuit who raped me as a teen, the altar boy when I was six, the grief of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above. In a thick Polish accent choked with love,

Sometimes, mystified by the behavior of one of my sons, my wife will point out if   it’s age-appropriate, making me wonder why I still shout at ballplayers on tv and argue with the dead. Last week, my oldest son, with a wild pitch, turned my left ankle into an eggplant. I didn’t yell at the doctors who refused my insurance, or get angry with a friend who told me to soak it in bourbon and garlic. No, I read Montaigne who said self-revelation is the purpose of discourse, which, in his day, meant knowing whether to be flattered if a friend didn’t use a food-taster, or amused if a witch cast a spell of   weeping on an in-law. Blaise Monluc, the king’s lieutenant general during the civil wars, Montaigne says, threw so many hanged Protestants down a well you could reach in and touch the top one’s head. Yes, Monluc, who was fond of saying “When the scaffolds are full, use trees,” knew what was appropriate. On occasion I’ll run into a lobby to avoid greeting a friend, not because my mind vanishes and I can’t remember his name, which is true, but because I must flee what is darkest in me. In other words, when evicted from a strange lobby into a stranger street, where every scaffold is full and bodies dangle in the long blue sorrow of the afternoon, without context, explanation, or sympathy, it’s good to know, even momentarily, how to live, among the relevant, the passionate, and the confused.

The age demanded that we sing And cut away our tongue. The age demanded that we flow And hammered in the bung. The age demanded that we dance And jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit that it demanded.

She slumps in the disabled bay clutching a waffle-cotton gown around a spreading paunch, shambling breasts. Why not say ‘I’? For that’s who sits at 6 a.m. waiting for the health club pool to open in the rain. A grown woman, after all, supposed to know her whereabouts. Today’s my mother’s birthday, a 1907 Aquarian of the self- denying kind, ‘never say “I”’ her motto. She had me nailed for years. Her voice drowns out the radio’s chattering static. Now I’m the same age she was, dying, observing noble savagery: a gathering knot of skinny women, tight black butts in leotards, regulation sneakers, Brazil-waxed calves, gripping i-pods, mobiles, water bottles. The men stand back, silent, sullen, balding, bored and out of it. Health stalkers, renouncers of smoke and flame, deniers of brimstone. One hell of a century: between the holocaust and the atom bomb who are these people? Between the deep and shallow end, never say thank you or good morning. Avoid eye contact. Signals may be misinterpreted. Slow Lane, Fast Lane, Walking Lane Only’s where I’m at. The moving parts count laps: twenty five’s a half-hour’s worth. I sing myself a rumba to keep rhythm; the Speedo wall clock ticks a strict 4/4 defeats my ruse while dove’s feet skitter arrow-wise across the perspex roof. No Diving Running Eating Smiling Share if lanes are busy. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. The waiting crowd are all, like me, up early talking or silent, more vivacious than galahs, more foolish than parrots. We stand and wait, walk up and down in the rain talking or not, holding in sagging muscle, spreading paunch, talking about things that must matter. So much seems to hang on getting in that door.

There are, of course, theories about the wide-eyed, drop-jawed fascination children have for them, about how, before he's learned his own phone number or address, a five-year-old can carry like a few small stones the Latin tonnage of those names, the prefixes and preferences for leaf or meat. My son recites the syllables I stumble over now, sets up figures as I did years ago in his prehistory. Here is the green ski slope of a brontosaur's back, there a triceratops in full gladiator gear. From the arm of a chair a pterodactyl surveys the dark primeval carpet. Each has disappeared from time to time, excavated finally from beneath a cabinet or the sofa cushions, only to be buried again among its kind in the deep toy chest, the closed lid snug as earth. The next time they're brought out to roam the living room another bone's been found somewhere, a tooth or fragment of an eggshell dusted off, brushing away some long-held notion about their life-span or intelligence, warm blood or cold. On the floor they face off as if debating the latest find, what part of which one of them has been discovered this time. Or else they stand abreast in one long row, side by scaly side, waiting to fall like dominoes, my son's tossed tennis ball a neon yellow asteroid, his shadow a dark cloud when he stands, his fervor for them cooling so slowly he can't feel it— the speed of glaciers, maybe, how one age slides into the next.

He walked to the window stared down twenty stories to the street gaseous and dizzy as a swamp not visible at this height but there had been a street down there and he knew It came with the apartment and the guarded foyers and halls and the doorman holstered beneath the uniform the television split-screening front and rear entrances He knew it was all there and he was here twenty stories above the unsetteled swamp-mist he knew the trucks bound for the bridge were still passing near he could feel them rumbling in the soles of his feet so he knew the floor he walked on was someone's ceiling and it was all normal tonight and countable a two-year lease because a desirable with full view of river- a five-by-three balcony through the door is $200 deposit fully carpeted self-defrosting refriger- the balcony door is stuck but He can stare twenty stories down from the windowsill watching the swamp smokes curl and thin and the swamp lapping at the base and the unpaid-for miracle one inch at a time

I loathe that I did love, In youth that I thought sweet, As time requires for my behove, Methinks they are not meet. My lusts they do me leave, My fancies all be fled, And tract of time begins to weave Grey hairs upon my head, For age with stealing steps Hath clawed me with his crutch, And lusty life away she leaps As there had been none such. My Muse doth not delight Me as she did before; My hand and pen are not in plight, As they have been of yore. For reason me denies This youthly idle rhyme; And day by day to me she cries, “Leave off these toys in time.” The wrinkles in my brow, The furrows in my face, Say, limping age will lodge him now Where youth must give him place. The harbinger of death, To me I see him ride, The cough, the cold, the gasping breath Doth bid me provide A pickaxe and a spade, And eke a shrouding sheet, A house of clay for to be made For such a guest most meet. Methinks I hear the clark That knolls the careful knell, And bids me leave my woeful wark, Ere nature me compel. My keepers knit the knot That youth did laugh to scorn, Of me that clean shall be forgot As I had not been born. Thus must I youth give up, Whose badge I long did wear; To them I yield the wanton cup That better may it bear. Lo, here the barèd skull, By whose bald sign I know That stooping age away shall pull Which youthful years did sow. For beauty with her band These crooked cares hath wrought, And shippèd me into the land From whence I first was brought. And ye that bide behind, Have ye none other trust: As ye of clay were cast by kind, So shall ye waste to dust.

To kill correctly takes calculation. Down to a science. Arsenic cacodylic acid. Know water and rice on a cellular level. Make sure no surviving seed can be collected and planted. Because even a small seed assures survival. Because mortars, grenades and bombs cannot destroy a grain. Because our heart is made of seeds. Know what it takes to kill the seeds. Know what it takes to deprive the plant of water, to dehydrate it. To be surrounded by love but unable to absorb it.

After Denise Levertov Must be a stumbler, bleeder, as some floccus remains here, carded into ragged sleeves by barbed wire. I’d believe in a God who can learn to work new spindles, new pupils uncomprehending the reasons light rosins in winter, and still spill clumsily, bleeding. Now drizzle caught in oily pockets loads the fleece with wealth. I’ve often wondered what the fence keeps out in a country bereft of predators. I long ago reconciled instinctive sympathy for the perfect innocence of animals with an equally ardent carnivory. Arms retreat guilt-free through the widest breach in the garment, having chosen a meal the stauncher faiths call impassible, withdrawing to empty folds. I hope you feel safe when you die.