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A porcupine skin, Stiff with bad tanning, It must have ended somewhere. Stuffed horned owl Pompous Yellow eyed; Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig Sooted with dust. Piles of old magazines, Drawers of boy’s letters And the line of love They must have ended somewhere. Yesterday’s Tribune is gone Along with youth And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach The year of the big storm When the hotel burned down At Seney, Michigan.

The word is the making of the world. — Wallace Stevens It’s a filmstrip afternoon and we’re all grateful to the humming projector in the middle of our desks, the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult. There’s a vague promise of revelation from the title and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice calling from a house carrying within it our freedom not to answer. Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress is falling asleep at her father’s desk, turning into Alice in Wonderland as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar. The Mad Hatter and Jabberwocky tell her to lure the letters into a trap so they can beat them to death with mallets. We’d like to see that. Without words no one could tell us what to do. We know grammar is just a byproduct, like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew too fast for its own good and that history is a series of conspiracies by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is falling asleep on the wide window ledge, her blue polyester pants gapped to reveal her white socks and pink spotted shins. We try not to look. The Mad Hatter doesn’t say that the alphabet was first used to keep track of property or that for centuries people believed if women learned to write the lost world would never be recovered or that the Mayans believed outsiders wrote things down not in order to remember them but to free themselves into the work of forgetting. That year Mrs. Bradford taught us about the Lewis & Clark expedition over and over again. We never learned why it mattered so much to her or what possible use it could be to anyone. The professor tells Judy about the thousands of words Arabs needed for camels and their parts, the dozen words Eskimos had for snow, and a chimp who learned seven human words. A voice made visible says: magic is a matter of fact to you, Every miracle has to have its qualifications, reservations, footnotes and our heads rise from our desks. The rest of the year will be a series of substitute teachers who teach us nothing but footnotes and their own reservations. Mrs. Bradford dead of a brain tumor. We sit in our sixth-grade desks with the blinds closed against the tree-lined streets as the letters of the world rise up and, forming a single word, eclipse our world and fill our mouths with shadows.

So I'll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked, planting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery before he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia's bewildered look before her pink slip came in the flimsy institution. In the videos of C, a jejune overwhelmed the cast. D built dollhouses. Even Lonnie down at Shell found him less a man for it, the night they went off to see the stock cars break. I wanted E's hair, but by the end it was no more. F refused alms, pulling the man up by his shirt in the street, and G sought rewards. Marybeth said H fondled her for sport. Now you, I, Smokey, hell bent on a village version of Club 21, embarrassed by our attentions. Mistrust it was. Dig me a chamber of preparedness. William T. Osborn, 1964-1993

All dark morning long the clouds are rising slowly up beneath us, and we are fast asleep. The mountains unmove intensely. And so do we. Meadows look down. A city there looks up and stirs a little. Adrift the rolling tiled roofs of buildings, the deadly trains of grinding sand and morning— a spy unfolds his paper, the coffee’s served. A bride and groom stand shivering on a tarmac in the mist, and they are happy. Each one and all of us entangled, the room is moist with us, the house unfinished, windowless, and we are fast asleep. The brother of the groom can’t get close enough. He leans against the brightest ridge and ladder, the sucking sound of memory as heaven picks up speed and hurtles through his burning skin its frozen blankets to the sun.

Near the camp was a river and in our house were absentees and hands that will one day wake us in vain I had just turned seven while he was sitting in the shade ironing his clothes the blue jacket sagging over his shoulders I paid no attention to the road or the three steps and didn't notice the carpet I don't remember who was it that said to me or to another "When you grow up poetry will become your house" The dust that eats the memories always distances those folks yet their chairs appear from afar, from behind the hills and over the houses, to hang in an air of summer and holm oak, those shaded chairs that reach the heart on shoulders topped with five flowers Which flowers are speech which flowers are silence? And I can't remember whether it was my uncle who stood at the door, whether we had palm and lotus trees in our house in Karameh, whether my mother who gave birth to me on the shelf was folding our clothes behind our father's back so he could sleep The watchdogs used to cry from the heat, and poetry, Husseini of Jerusalem, and Khidr the mystic were all in our house as was my uncle who came from a pond within Hebron's walls Twenty years would pass before a photo could tell us we have grown older and that's that My father used to discompose his friends with his days, and women with the thread of seduction in his voice as he would sprinkle chatter in their rivers while walking about here or there with a lilt, he'd let his days fall off him and let others gather them as he walked on gold that came only for him And I can't remember: in our courtyard there were holm oaks, a fountain, a tiled floor by a huge door, we were confused and in a hurry The closet that faced us in the second room had a mirror the mirror we now seek And my father was standing alone in the hall that led the stairs to the roof thanking his days or preparing for Wednesday's nap or Thursday's morning as he left, among the things he'd leave, the water can full of water while around his chairs our Saturdays rose My father didn't want too much from life: a house, five boys who don't mess with his papers, which were already chaos, and two girls so that braids could float all around the house

Why cry over dried flowers? They’re meant to be straw. Why cry over miniature roses? They’re meant to be small. Why cry over Buddha’s hand citron? Why cry over the hidden flower? Why cry over Mother’s burnt forehead? Her votive deathglow, her finest hour.

Sin Título, from the series The Tempest, 1998, by Arturo Rodríguez I am the altar boy with feet flattened by the catechist’s paddle, my skin toasted like stalks of sugarcane at Lent, my shorts baptized in the salt pans of saints. I don’t wear a mask (God hates carnival) but a wool hood, Holy Week’s, that Sister Rose knitted by the charcoal altar, her wooden teeth clacking as she hymned in Latin, the moles on her jowl like prickly pears for penance. My own teeth are those grates that grilled the martyrs, & my little lamb’s ears quiver each afternoon when the wind coughs in fits and pale skies smoke with incense from a clandestine Mass, perhaps on a runaway shallop with sails sewn from stolen cassocks, perhaps on a newborn isle with a thatched church, novices crawling like iguanas around stations of the cross. There’s no home for orphans like us raised in a convent by the wharf where the footless angel blows his trumpet for vesper, and the abbess marches us to the clapboard altar when the cock crows. We sleep in straw cubbies, our sheets those crinkled newspapers that swaddled us like groupers in the foundling’s basket. Hey, you, girl with the twisted neck, your dollhouse will keep on shrinking between your dirty legs. Not even holy water can make you clean. Hey, boy, the more you pull on the kite, the more your house of dreams will get lost in summer’s wayward clouds. Let us live in the meadow, our true home, every bush a hearth, every pond a font: O blessed loam of nettles whose fireflies light the shrine at night, whose blue brooks spread out like veins of  Calvary.

Tulips panted against the wall.So much need to feed a crisp stem

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart and cemented with tears; Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman's tool hath touch'd the same. A HEART alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow'r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame To praise thy name. That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

1. DELIRIUM, AFTER RIMBAUD How many hours I kept that vigil by your side— entire nights, eyes wide, as you so sweetly slept. What I was wondering: why you yearned to evade the real. No one has prayed harder for anything. It wasn’t for your life I feared, but for mankind. Did you, in the end, find secrets for changing life? 2. DEFACED, AFTER RILKE The head we cannot know, nor its bright fruit, the eyes. And yet the body has its gaze: a lamp turned low. Or else the breast would cease to dazzle, the hips fail to curve into that smile that begets more than a kiss. And flesh would lose all life, not flare till there’s no blind it can’t see you behind. You must change your life. 3. DENIAL, AFTER SEFERIS The afternoon grew hotter along our secret shore. We thirsted in the glare but couldn’t drink the water. On golden sand we traced your name beside the sea. The wind came like a sigh; our writing was erased. How passionate our life, how full of sex and song, spirit and heart—how wrong! And so we changed our life.