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Willie had a stubborn wart upon his middle toe. Regardless, though, of what he tried the wart refused to go. So Willie went and visited his family foot physician, who instantly agreed it was a stubborn wart condition. The doctor tried to squeeze the wart. He tried to twist and turn it. He tried to scrape and shave the wart. He tried to boil and burn it. He poked it with a pair of tongs. He pulled it with his tweezers. He held it under heat lamps, and he crammed it into freezers. Regrettably these treatments were of very little use. He looked at it and sputtered, “Ach! I cannot get it loose!” “I’ll have to get some bigger tools to help me to dissect it. I’ll need to pound and pummel it, bombard it and inject it.” He whacked it with a hammer, and he yanked it with a wrench. He seared it with a welding torch despite the nasty stench. He drilled it with a power drill. He wrestled it with pliers. He zapped it with a million volts from large electric wires. He blasted it with gamma rays, besieged it with corrosives, assaulted it with dynamite and nuclear explosives. He hit the wart with everything, but when the smoke had cleared, poor Willie’s stubborn wart remained, and Willie’d disappeared.

Wee Willie Winkie Rins through the toun, Up stairs and doun stairs In his nicht-gown, Tirling at the window, Crying at the lock, “Are the weans in their bed, For it’s now ten o’clock? “Hey, Willie Winkie, Are ye coming ben? The cat’s singing grey thrums To the sleeping hen, The dog’s spelder’d on the floor, And disna gie a cheep, But here’s a waukrife laddie That winna fa’ asleep.” Onything but sleep, you rogue! Glow’ring like the moon, Rattling in an airn jug Wi’ an airn spoon, Rumblin’, tumblin’, round about, Crawing like a cock, Skirlin’ like a kenna-what, Wauk’nin’ sleeping folk. “Hey, Willie Winkie – The wean’s in a creel! Wamblin’ aff a body’s knee Like a very eel, Ruggin’ at the cat’s lug, Rav’llin’ a’ her thrums – Hey, Willie Winkie – See, there he comes!” Wearied is the mither That has a stoorie wean, A wee stumpie stousie, That canna rin his lane. That has a battle aye wi’ sleep, Before he’ll close an e’e – But a kiss frae aff his rosy lips Gies strength anew to me.

Amyntas led me to a Grove, Where all the Trees did shade us; The Sun it self, though it had Strove, It could not have betray’d us: The place secur’d from humane Eyes, No other fear allows. But when the Winds that gently rise, Doe Kiss the yielding Boughs. Down there we satt upon the Moss, And id begin to play A Thousand Amorous Tricks, to pass The heat of all the day. A many Kisses he did give: And I return’d the same Which made me willing to receive That which I dare not name. His Charming Eyes no Aid requir’d To tell their softning Tale; On her that was already fir’d ’Twas easy to prevaile. He did but Kiss and Clasp me round, Whilst those his thoughts Exprest: And lay’d me gently on the Ground; Ah who can guess the rest?

When I get up he has been long at work, his brush limber against the house. Seeing him on his ladder under the eaves, I look back on myself asleep in the dream I could not carry awake. Sleep inside a house that is being painted, whole lifetimes now only the familiar cast of morning light over the prayer plant. This “not remembering” is something new of where you have been. What was settled or unsettled in sleep stays there. But your house under this steady arm is leaving itself and you see this gradual surface of new light covering your sleep has the greater power. You think now you felt brush strokes or the space between them, a motion bearing down on you—accumulation of stars, each night of them arranging over the roofs of entire cities. His careful strokes whiten the web, the swirl of woodgrain blotted out like a breath stopped at the heart. Nothing has changed you say, faithlessly. But something has cleansed you past recognition. When you stand near his ladder looking up he does not acknowledge you, and as from daylight in a dream you see your house has passed from you into the blessed hands of others. This is ownership, you think, arriving in the heady afterlife of paint smell. A deep opening goes on in you. Some paint has dropped onto your shoulder as though light concealed an unsuspected weight. You think it has fallen through you. You think you have agreed to this, what has been done with your life, willingly.

...and a decrepit handful of trees. —Aleksandr Pushkin And I matured in peace born of command, in the nursery of the infant century, and the voice of man was never dear to me, but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand. The burdock and the nettle I preferred, but best of all the silver willow tree. Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams; it lived here all my life, obligingly. I have outlived it now, and with surprise. There stands the stump; with foreign voices other willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies, and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.

Because someone thirsty enough to trust Old Testament wisdom followed the deepening greens and found a spring, silver in the shadow of blue ridges, I can kneel beneath this spill of willow limbs a century later and drink water risen from roots to enter the evening through a spout, the way Cherokee stories say the first people were born, washing into the world of such trees whose bark, like the water I cup to my parched mouth, tastes leafy and sweet and has the power, the old ones say, to heal.

Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly, fluttering like a silk-moth behind me blocking my life, my scenes in whichever stage direction she wants. Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me, her ringing calls like an imperial decree. When she sleeps she crashes, like a car into the guardrail of my ambition. Her curse like a poison I cannot smell, an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell. Split personalities, we dream through the night, of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light, Not even my husband can feel her there between us—a secret contract under seal. When I awaken, her irises touch mine; an awful, indecipherable fault line. She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee, trying to recount her history through me, until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb, hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims, the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hair the forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer. Until her thoughts tumble into mine; colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought— My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin, when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in. Her cool white rising is meringue completing— the high-pitched silence of our congealing. She was always ceremonially unfolding his white shirts, unpressing the folds in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kept trying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent to have her near made her more invisible. Her electric breasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic— She never removes her hat upon entering the door to my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!

For I have loved the blade with all my crippled with all my awkward soul loved it for the shine sheen for the ease and grace of doing what it was made to do for I have loved the stubborn womb its beloved intent have loved the hope and then learned to love the lack for I have loved the water the way it comes to me comes for me in all its liquid mystery for I have loved what the water loves its myriad vessels sky basin runnel channel and vein for all it claims and contains for I have loved its muscular flex its rise coil and fall so like Leviathan's mighty desperate heart for I have loved Leviathan for being only for being exactly what god hated and what he made for being water's own knife this wild unholy blade

If an orchidophage’s tastebud magnified resembles an orchid so my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones. Love, little by little it dawned on us the artisanal ice cream, especially the prizewinning caramel, would be out of our reach, like the previous Friday of a Sunday leaving the beach, in the meltdown. When you gasp at the soundfile of cymbals

Not a remarkable wind. So when the bistro’s patio umbrella blew suddenly free and pitched into the middle of the road, it put a stop to the afternoon. Something white and amazing was blocking the way. A waiter in a clean apron appeared, not quite certain, shielding his eyes, wary of our rumbling engines. He knelt in the hot road, making two figures in white, one leaning over the sprawled, broken shape of the other, creaturely, great-winged, and now so carefully gathered in.