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For Conchita García Lorca Moon came to the forge in her petticoat of nard The boy looks and looks the boy looks at the Moon In the turbulent air Moon lifts up her arms showing — pure and sexy — her beaten-tin breasts Run Moon run Moon Moon If the gypsies came white rings and white necklaces they would beat from your heart Boy will you let me dance — when the gypsies come they’ll find you on the anvil with your little eyes shut Run Moon run Moon Moon I hear the horses’ hoofs Leave me boy! Don’t walk on my lane of white starch The horseman came beating the drum of the plains The boy at the forge has his little eyes shut Through the olive groves in bronze and in dreams here the gypsies come their heads riding high their eyelids hanging low How the night heron sings how it sings in the tree Moon crosses the sky with a boy by the hand At the forge the gypsies cry and then scream The wind watches watches the wind watches the Moon Translated from the Spanish

I I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. II I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy— Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato's parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. III And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t'other there And wonder if she stood so at that age— For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler's heritage— And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child. IV Her present image floats into the mind— Did Quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind Had pretty plumage once—enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. V What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? VI Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. VII Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man's enterprise; VIII Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Fresh spring the herald of loves mighty king, In whose cote armour richly are displayed All sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring In goodly colours gloriously arrayd: Goe to my love, where she is carelesse layd, Yet in her winters bowre not well awake: Tell her the joyous time wil not be staid Unless she doe him by the forelock take. Bid her therefore her selfe soone ready make, To wayt on love amongst his lovely crew: Where every one that misseth then her make, Shall be by him amearst with penance dew. Make hast therefore sweet love, whilest it is prime, For none can call againe the passèd time.

In that proud port, which her so goodly graceth, Whiles her faire face she reares up to the skie: And to the ground her eie lids low embaseth Most goodly temperature ye may descry, Myld humblesse mixt with awfull majesty, For looking on the earth whence she was borne: Her minde remembreth her mortalitie, What so is fayrest shall to earth returne. But that same lofty countenance seemes to scorne Base thing, and thinke how she to heaven may clime: Treading downe earth as lothsome and forlorne, That hinders heavenly thoughts with drossy slime. Yet lowly still vouchsafe to looke on me, Such lowlinesse shall make you lofty be.

This holy season, fit to fast and pray, Men to devotion ought to be inclin'd: Therefore I likewise on so holy day, For my sweet saint some service fit will find. Her temple fair is built within my mind, In which her glorious image placed is, On which my thoughts do day and night attend, Like sacred priests that never think amiss. There I to her as th' author of my bliss, Will build an altar to appease her ire: And on the same my heart will sacrifice, Burning in flames of pure and chaste desire: The which vouchsafe, O goddess, to accept, Amongst thy dearest relics to be kept.

If you believe in the magic of language, then Elvis really Lives and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin. If you believe the letters themselves contain a power within them, then you understand what makes outside tedious, how desperation becomes a rope ends it. The circular logic that allows senator to become treason, and treason to become atoners. That eleven plus two is twelve plus one, and an admirer is also married. That if you could just rearrange things the right way you’d find your true life, the right path, the answer to your questions: you’d understand how the Titanic turns into that ice tin, and debit card becomes bad credit. How listen is the same as silent, and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

I rubbed wax crayon against blowing paper. From the rock face footed a dancer white through red. My family gave me over to it, gone for the river. Were I a peasant harvesting grapes near Beaune in the last century, even, I might have dreamed a saint lifting off for Arles, Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and knowing about cannon in that long peace, might have been troubled therefore that my flier hauled a magnum of the best and bloodied the west sky with it and vanished. My fisting that loose sheet in place was secretarial, not visionary! Already in that decade small tribes entered the void like windows on a skyscraper when the bent janitor makes his way. But those flick back on each night, costly difference. It is not only portents in dream or flapping images of the gone or the soon-to-be-going or the tremblingly poised that catch like undertow the foot in tide-rip toeing down the singing or remembered beach. We study populations in the forests, we hold the paper flat, mark, note, warn—the dictated prophecies do their work, we do some work— cut horn from rhinos so they won’t be poached. But, to go on from there, one needs to stand in the doorway some evening and feel the air as if it were fire pulling illusionlessly, letting the draw of one fact heat its chain of links, such as, Japan clear-cutting forests in Siberia where tigers not already harvested lope their dwindling range, two hundred as the hinge for their growled arc of existence, bones of the others ground to powders for old men’s potencies. One needs to feel the tug of the draft on skin, the drag of process utterly anciently itself. Faster, now, the pull is from birth through dwelling through dissolution, along lines streaming through us, ageless winds.

It was a time when they were afraid of him. My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse with broken knees no one would shoot. Then again, he was like the orange tree, and young women plucked from him sweet fruit. To meet him, you must be in the right place, even his sons and daughter, we wondered where was papa now and what was he doing. He held the mystique of travelers that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees. Then, when you follow, you find nothing, not a stir, not a twig displaced from its bough. And then he would appear one night. Half covered in shadows and half in light, his voice quiet, absorbing our unspoken thoughts. When his hands lay on the table at breakfast, they were hands that had not fixed our crumbling home, hands that had not taken us into them and the fingers did not gently rub along our lips. They were hands of a gypsy that filled our home with love and safety, for a moment; with all the shambles of boards and empty stomachs, they filled us because of the love in them. Beyond the ordinary love, beyond the coordinated life, beyond the sponging of broken hearts, came the untimely word, the fallen smile, the quiet tear, that made us grow up quick and romantic. Papa gave us something: when we paused from work, my sister fourteen years old working the cotton fields, my brother and I running like deer, we would pause, because we had a papa no one could catch, who spoke when he spoke and bragged and drank, he bragged about us: he did not say we were smart, nor did he say we were strong and were going to be rich someday. He said we were good. He held us up to the world for it to see, three children that were good, who understood love in a quiet way, who owned nothing but calloused hands and true freedom, and that is how he made us: he offered us to the wind, to the mountains, to the skies of autumn and spring. He said, “Here are my children! Care for them!” And he left again, going somewhere like a child with a warrior’s heart, nothing could stop him. My grandmother would look at him for a long time, and then she would say nothing. She chose to remain silent, praying each night, guiding down like a root in the heart of earth, clutching sunlight and rains to her ancient breast. And I am the blossom of many nights. A threefold blossom: my sister is as she is, my brother is as he is, and I am as I am. Through sacred ceremony of living, daily living, arose three distinct hopes, three loves, out of the long felt nights and days of yesterday.

And then we cowards who loved the whispering evening, the houses, the paths by the river, the dirty red lights of those places, the sweet soundless sorrow— we reached our hands out toward the living chain in silence, but our heart startled us with blood, and no more sweetness then, no more losing ourselves on the path by the river— no longer slaves, we knew we were alone and alive.

The phone call, from my wife. She’s hungry, she’s pregnant, someone kicked her in the stomach—we have to. I say yes, but the reply I keep to myself is, We don’t have to do a goddamn thing. A dog. I’m talking about a dog I would have otherwise left to starve. Now though, five years since, I love this animal, Lucy, more than I can most people. • A boy names his dog and five cats after our Lucy. The boy, my brother, born in Henry Ford’s hometown, lives now in Lebanon, which the Greeks called Phoenicia, and they tried but failed to subdue it, same as the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, the British, the French, the Israelis. There, my father built a house with money earned in Detroit— as a grocer, with social security. Also there, the first alphabet was created, the first law school built, the first miracle of Jesus— water, wine. • On the first day the bombs fall they flee and the boy asks to go back for Lucy, the dog. As for the cats, No. They take care of themselves. One week into it he wonders who feeds them, who fills the water bowls. Maybe the neighbors, the mother thinks out loud. The father is indignant:Neighbors— what neighbors? They’re gone. The mother is stunned: What do you mean, gone? After a month, everyone forgets or just stops talking about the animals. During the ceasefire my father drives south, a thirty-minute trip that lasts six hours—wreckage upon wreckage piled on the roads, on what is left of the roads. The landscape entirely gray, so catastrophic he asks a passerby how far to his town and is told, You’re in it. • My father finds three of the cats, all perforated, one headless. The dog is near the carport, where it hid during lightning storms, its torso splayed in half like meat on a slab, its entrails eaten by other dogs scavenging on the streets. Look. They’re animals. Which is to say, there are also people. And I haven’t even begun telling you what was done to them.