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Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells. Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars. Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner. This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

August is the cruelest month: never enough daylight, too much heat, no holidays and nothing matters except September’s dawning responsibilities, but the August of 1994 I was Holden Caulfield, summer camp senior counselor for the junior trail blazers, black and brown children two weeks shy of first, second, and third grade. Nothing is as positive, as motivating a force within one’s life as a school bus full of kids singing along to the local radio station blazing hip-hop and R&B. (Imagine this cherubic chorus riding upstate to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.” [“Muuur-derah!”]) My workday is filled with hazards like chocolate melted sticky swim trunk pockets, insistent sunburn, and the assorted rah rah of parental unsupervision, but those bus rides back from upstate water parks and pools were my favorite times working. Have you ever ridden in a cheesebus with ashy children asleep against you, staring at sudden trees — more numerous than project windows — blurring along the highways like confusion giving way to doubt, the heady smell of dried chlorine and musty towels lulling you into the soft timbre of a Midwest falsetto? Tell me what it is to fall in love with a lightskin girl covering the Isley Brothers. I was not two weeks into 21 years old. I had yet to wear a box cutter in my fifth pocket, or see a semi-automatic aimed at my center mass, to feel its dumbness against my spine. My life was uncertain, save for its unlikely length under my control, like the pilot who falls short of what he says, what he says he’s all about, all about. All my homeboys were still alive, just like Aaliyah Dana Haughton, not yet an angel of the cruelest August, begging a boy, who may not be in the mood to learn what he thinks he knows, to look beyond his world and try to find a place for her.

Haze of wave spume towards Small Point, Seguin Island Light like a whale's spout— maybe life washes itself here, cools off. It never comes clean. See all the sails up and full in the windy parade of skin and sand and brine. Soon the rocks will pluck each wave's feathers. Soon the beach like the moon, waning, will be 1/8th its size. Somewhere else—maybe Ireland—the tide will bottom out then. For now the sun blesses the bodies at home in theirs, and those less so, to ruin and ruin's aftermath— whatever that is—and the waves rolling in, little snowplows, nimbus in miniature; how the beach fishhooks east, one child— is that mine, or some spirit I was one more usher of?—face up, arms and legs scraping a temporary angel in the sand.

When I was nearly six my father opened his magic doctor bag: two tongue depressors fastened by a rubber band; one flick of his hairy wrist and lo! we invented flight.

Near the Naked Juices I passed A man my fingers walking Across his back he turned and held up A box said what Might this be I said oh You’re tactile too what’s your name He said William Amos Miller I said I thought you were born in 1872 he said so You know who I am yes you’re the man Who journeyed to the center of Earth In your mind he smiled on my arm said do You know that the Earth also journeyed To the center of my mind I said I never thought of that he asked Again about the box I shook it sniffed Said Mike and Ike is it fruit He inquired not exactly well I think I shall have an apple wait You haven’t paid oh My money nowadays is no money he pushed Outside we walked across the ice To the intersection he made to go across Wait you can’t go across we have to wait For help oh help he said crouching Until our hands touched the cold ground He said I said we said we see With our hands I jumped up and said you’re the man

Wind and the sound of wind— across the bay a chainsaw revs and stalls. I've come here to write, but instead I've been thinking about my father, who, in his last year, after his surgery, told my mother he wasn't sorry—that he'd cried when the other woman left him, that his time with her had made him happier than anything he'd ever done. And my mother, who'd cooked and cleaned for him all those years, cared for him after his heart attack, could not understand why he liked the other woman more than her, but he did. And she told me that after he died she never went to visit his grave—not once. You think you know them, these creatures robed in your parents' skins. Well, you don't. Any more than you know what the pines want from the wind, if the lake's content with this pale smear of sunset, if the loon calls for its mate, or for another.

When he called, there were 261 emotions at play. I thought there were only wistfulness, humiliation, and mere bitterness left, but lo, I see now the brilliance in the numbers. Emotions 75 and 78 made me happy just to know they existed. I felt less alone, more impervious. I was emboldened by the existence of 152. Though, how was I supposed to accept 9, 14, and 179? We deserved better, distress and indigence aside. Something about 260 broke the spell inside me and offered up a tiny shift: I opened my eyes in the fog and tore off the surfaces of 261 and 4 with a great shout.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? —Allen Ginsberg "Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell— ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles." I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things, lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road. In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetry but die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears with the sound of tires on blue macadam.The doors close in an hour....

On the back of an invoice I wrote my name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters And because money was involved And so was my name ever in jeopardy On the back of the same invoice I rewrote my name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters And in Leopardy and in Jeopardy I resolved, dissolved upon a radical eradicator Inking in, dissolving upon Jeopardizing in my own name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters

1 Where am I from? In black basilicas dragged incessantly down a cross is a man who here resembles a dress snatched from a hanger, there: thick clouds of muscles — an overcast body — embodied weather of one hardly-known country. (A country where I am from?) Dragging him, they stick their hands under his armpits. How cozy their hands are in such a warm place! Through a cut in his chest Eve watches with her one bloody eye. Of a cut in the chest — a red eyelash! But where am I from? 2 Yes, a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger. Inside black alphabet dragged incessantly down each letter is a man. 3 To a telephone in a long hallway as if to a well for water. (Well, where am I from?) (Neither mama’s nor papa’s, my round face takes after a rotary phone.) A rotary phone is my gene pool. My body rings as it runs to put my head on the strong shoulder of the receiver. Blood is talking! Blood connection is weak. Inside the receiver I hear crackle as if fire were calling. Who is this? It’s me, fire receiver. But where am I from? 4 Days of merciless snow behind the kitchen window — snow got deposited like fat under our skin. How large we’ve grown on those days! So much time spent at the kitchen table trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives, yet no one bothered to tell us that words, uttered once, crowd in the brain like in a hospital lobby. That time is supposed to heal only because once it was seen with a scalpel in its hands. You’ve made a mistake, you’d say mysteriously, pointing at lines written by a child. Think of another word with the same root. As if words can have roots. As if words didn’t come from darkness, cat-in-the-bag words, as if our human roots were already known to us. Here’s Grammar, here’s Orthography, here’s a paper rag “bread, milk, butter.” What roots? What morphology? What rules of subjugation? How is it even possible to make a mistake? Here’s Physics,Chemistry, Geometry with its atlas, now, where are Vaclav’s letters, 1946? What to do about the etymology of us? Our etymology? 1946 crowds my hospital lobby. The face of a rotary phone, the face of a clock, the face of a radio on the wall — these are my round-faced progenitors. But Vaclav’s face — where? (Again a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger.) And where are the letters? One per week, in his best Sunday handwriting? Inside the receiver — fire. (How cozy are my ears in such a warm place!) But where am I from? 5 A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a first apartment — a coat, a jacket, a leather purse fat with pills, but where are the where-letters from the where-face? Evacuated face, de-evacuated face, sick not sick, stuck through face, vacuum face, lab rat face. This country was tested on Vaclav’s face. Now we can live in peace. So, where am I from? A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a deactivated face, vacated face. A face snatched from a hanger. Absence as an inner organ. 6 In a village known for a large puddle where all children fall between the two categories of those who hurt the living things and those who hurt the nonliving things, in a village known for being unknown (where am I from?), a graveyard around an old church, the frightening alphabet around the village, an alphabet on gravestones, marble letters under the moth-eaten snow. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. 7 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. A bone is a key to my motherland. 8 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. Eve watches with her one red eyelash. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. In my motherland people kneel before wells. In my motherland people pray to the crosses of flying birds. A bone is a key to my people. Among my people, only the dead have human faces. Still, where am I from? 9 Women saints in berets of golden threads, who are they by your feet, seated like pets? An angel with wings of a peacock, an angel with a human face. But who are they by your feet, seated like pets? Now, if you wear such golden berets, if you tame children and angels, if your white boneless fingers leaf through a book while I gnaw on this wooden verse, would you, holy women who wear golden berets, put the hairs on my tongue into a pigtail? 10 A mouse-tail of a word for a word-loving rodent! Inside my alphabet dragged incessantly down each frightening letter is a man. My frightening alphabet in his best Sunday handwriting. A letter addressed to lost letters, phone-face, clock-face, radio-face — face as an inner organ. Where are Vaclav’s letters as an inner organ. On the borderlines of my motherland — wet laundry claps in the wind like gunfire. Have you heard of my motherland? My motherland is a raw yolk inside a Fabergé egg. This yolk is what gives gold its color. This face is a fire-receiver. This face is an inner organ. A bone as a key to my people. Where am I from? 11 The golden bones of my motherland are ringing!