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It is pleasant, very pleasant, to sit at a wooden booth surrounded by parrots, wheels, right-turning conch shells, the victory banner and the endless knot, the lotus, the treasure vase, the golden fishes— is this not so? Is it not pleasant to sip Tsingtao beer, or Zhujiang, or Yanjing, and tap your fingers on the bamboo mats? After we’ve drunk enough, there will be Buddhist Delight, Mongolian beef side dishes, a whole host of sauces, even some pizza and chicken wings if children are present, as well as the small ice-cream machine, lotus paste, pears, smiles and bows all around. It is pleasant, is it not, to linger outside the door that opens to the parking lot of this small strip mall beside this secondary road and look upon the scattered cars all come to rest here like boats in China, floating on a quiet evening tide.

He makes better errors that way. Pass it around at breakfast: the family and all, down there with a proximate sense of power, lawyering up. Less log-heavy, your text-strategy beat out other options, is languid. Duets in the dust start up, begin. Again. He entered the firm at night. The 26th is a Monday.

Proudly swept the rain by the cliffs As on it glided through the trees Still following ever the liko The Ahihi lehua of the vale. Chorus: Farewell to thee, farewell to thee Thou charming one who dwells in shaded bowers One fond embrace ere I depart Until we meet again. Thus sweet memories come back to me Bringing fresh remembrance of the past Dearest one, yes, thou art mine own From thee, true love shall ne’er depart. I have seen and watched thy loveliness, Thou sweet Rose of Maunawili And ’tis there the birds oft love to dwell And sip the honey from thy lips.

I never thought Michiko would come back after she died. But if she did, I knew it would be as a lady in a long white dress. It is strange that she has returned as somebody's dalmation. I meet the man walking her on a leash almost every week. He says good morning and I stoop down to calm her. He said once that she was never like that with other people. Sometimes she is tethered on their lawn when I go by. If nobody is around, I sit on the grass. When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper in her soft ears. She cares nothing about the mystery. She likes it best when I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends. That makes her happy the way it always did.

Was it Pascal who said “Almost all our misery has come from not being able to remain alone in our rooms”? Baudelaire thought it might have been, but was not sure. And let’s take a look at that “almost” which I’m very glad is there. I can think of lots of misery that had nothing to do with my not having been alone in my room. When I get a rejection email on a train for a piece of work I had high hopes for is one example. Or to go way back, when I returned home to find my white mouse dead when I was eleven or twelve. Or to take a mundane example, when a plane I’m booked on is twelve hours delayed, while I hang about the airport. I have never had a huge problem with solitude, it is true. As a child I read voraciously, and would find some hidden corner to lurk with my book. The game of golf is one where one can enjoy being alone, especially very early on a beautiful morning. The time when I most felt alone was when the missionaries came to my school and we all had to endure a silent retreat for three days. At the end of that time 
I felt like one of those astronauts in films who have to stay on the moon for months. Baudelaire claimed his friend the Devil loved bleak, solitary places where the spirit of murder and lust was more likely to ignite. He decided that this was not really a danger for most of us, though, only for those idle, fanciful folk prone to enigmas and dreaming. The type of person who should most avoid being alone is a chatterbox or maybe a television pundit. But what’s to stop these people being verbose in their own company? Did Crusoe, for example, stay quiet on his island before Friday came? According to Elizabeth Bishop in her great poem, “Crusoe in England,” he did not. And in order to write that poem, Ms. Bishop needed to be alone. This did not stop her from cooking meals and inviting friends to help her eat the food and drink wine with her. After this, probably the next morning, she went back to the poem and her solitude. I feel the French maybe exaggerate the benefits of  being alone. That philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre for example, his play Huis-clos with its famous line “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Yes, we all know how annoying other people often are, and how strong the urge to escape from them can be. But the two characters Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot show that even in an absurdist setting companionship has its importance. It’s said Beckett got his inspiration for this play from one or other of two versions of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon which he saw on a trip to Germany in 1936 or ’37. In both versions of the painting one of the men has his hand on the other man’s shoulder, a sign of companionship if ever there was one. Baudelaire quotes the French philosopher and moralist Jean de la Bruyère (or Delabruyère, as the man signed himself), “What a great misfortune we cannot be alone,” as if to chastise anyone who wants to plunge into a crowd or go into a busy bar. What about the great French word fraternité, the third of the three words that were the rallying cry of the Revolution? I want to close this by giving another quote from de la Bruyère: “Out of difficulties grow miracles.” I prefer this one. Anyone in an awkward social situation should dwell on that.

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—

One finger is the tundra, one finger is the Bodhisattva, one finger is mother Slovenia. Two fingers still remain, beckoning and with awful force feeding me seventeen hands with this arrangement. Alone, I’m alone on the roof of the world and drawing so stars are created. I’m spurting through the nose so the Milky Way is created and I’m eating so shit is created, and falling on you and it is music. I am God. I am God and I’m dancing. This table is a gift, this house is a gift, this garden is a gift, these squirrels are a gift. These human legs are murmuring mantras. Alone, alone. Glug glug glug I drink gulps of light and I brush. So I shower and put myself back, alone. I alone am the center of the world’s light, the Lord’s lamb. I alone am all animals: a tiger, an ant, a deer, a rabbit, a porcupine (a hedgehog), a butterfly, an insect, a piranha, a baby rabbit, a daddy rabbit, the god of ferrets, the straw hat of a sketched puppy and his paws. I alone am all plants: strawberries, birch, hazel, pumpkin, fern, dandelion,juves(juves is a plant with thin roots, resembling the roots of parsley, but it has a nose and head like a porcini cap and one birch’s hand, sitting all day in a race car like a liana), maple, oak, corn, alone. I alone am all the people named in this book and all the others: Joe, Janet, Agatha, Veronika, Boris, Ivan, Italo, Pierre, alone. I alone am the air, smoothly, the lining, two parallel tracks, pot(to sweat),pot(the road), the cause, the forceps, Lope de Vega, the streak, the dot on the forehead, the dot in the air, alone. Alone, I alone am the air and the golden butter, linden bark, the king, the sickle and hammer, the Dalmatian, the saw, Armenia, the key, alone. Translated from the Slovenian

Featherweight lawn chair, cooler for a footrest, and me a squatter on the landlord's dock where baitstealers teased a thousand times a day until rowdy boats and summer scared them deep. Day and night I snoozed on the porch beneath a filthy orbit of fanblades to the opera of my neighbors fighting and reconciling in the glow of stolen wattage. I saw them swimming once. Maybe naked, judging from their skittish talk, but the water smeared their bodies' pale particulars. It was just me and the Tickfaw River. Me with the taste of a tin can in my mouth, feeling no pain, lighting a cigarette backwards, the Tickfaw tricking me closer and closer with echoes and music out of nowhere. Is it funny that I was too lit to notice twenty-five orange yards of extension cord stretching from my outlet, over the driveway shells, to feed the hungry plug of their deep freezer? Mother would have pitched a fit if she discovered the stash of whiskey in the woodpile, and my father wasn't laughing if he looked down from his company of stars.

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face. It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere. Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle: Miraculous, the breathing plain. Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty— The squint itself consoled, at ease . . . The ten-fold forest almost the same . . . And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread. January 16, 1937

The young men ride their horses fast on the wet sand of Parangtritis. Back and forth, with the water sliding up to them and away. This is the sea where the goddess lives, angry, her lover taken away. Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here, the people say. Do not swim in the sea. Give her an offering. I give a coconut to protect the man I love. The water pushes it back. I wade out and throw it farther. “The goddess does not accept your gift,” an old woman says. I say perhaps she likes me and we are playing a game. The old woman is silent, the horses wear blinders of cloth, the young men exalt in their bodies, not seeing right or left, pretending to be brave. Sliding on and off their beautiful horses on the wet beach at Parangtritis.