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You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly makes you laugh like mules. Chances dance off your wrists, each day ready, sprites in your bones and spite not yet swollen, not yet set. You gather handful after miracle handful, seeing straight, reaching the lighthouse in record time, pockets brim with scimitar things. Now is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm. Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick twins, carried on your backs, each vow new to touch and each mistake a broken biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines without levers, easy in bowel and lung. One cartwheel over the quicksand curve of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

Naked before the glass she said, “I see my body as no man has, Nor any shall unless I wed And naked in a stranger’s house Stand timid beside his bed. There is no pity in the flesh.” “Or else I shall grow old,” she said, “Alone, and change my likeliness For a vile, slack shape, a head Shriveled with thinking wickedness Against the day I must be dead And eaten by my crabbed wish.” “One or the other way,” she said, “How shall I know the difference, When wrinkles come, to spinster or bride? Whether to marry or burn is bless- ed best, O stranger to my bed, There is no pity in the flesh.”

The sky has been dark for many years. My skin has become as damp and pale as rice paper and feels the way mother’s used to before the drying sun parched it out there in the fields. Lately, when I touch my eyelids, my hands react as if I had just touched something hot enough to burn. My skin, aspirin colored, tingles with migraine. Mother has been massaging the left side of my face especially in the evenings when the pain flares up. This morning her breathing was graveled, her voice gruff with affection when I wheeled her into the bath. She was in a good humor, making jokes about her great breasts, floating in the milky water like two walruses, flaccid and whiskered around the nipples. I scrubbed them with a sour taste in my mouth, thinking: six children and an old man have sucked from these brown nipples. I was almost tender when I came to the blue bruises that freckle her body, places where she has been injecting insulin for thirty years. I soaped her slowly, she sighed deeply, her eyes closed. It seems it has always been like this: the two of us in this sunless room, the splashing of the bathwater. In the afternoons when she has rested, she prepares our ritual of tea and rice, garnished with a shred of gingered fish, a slice of pickled turnip, a token for my white body. We eat in the familiar silence. She knows I am not to be trusted, even now planning my escape. As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze.

The youngest living thing in L. A. was my baby. The oldest living thing was the wind. The wind grew well in that city in the desert. As did my garden of well-tended cement. As did my baby, whom I held like a heavy statuette. I named him Mill at his birth  . . .As the wheel goeth by drift ofwater . . . And he grew and the wind blew and we lived in that desert and . . . no rain. No rain, no river. No sound of water. But for— The fountain water. The official fountain. Which flowed. Every day. Every day the baby slept. The baby breathed. The fountain flowed. It flowed imperceptibly. As if its water were fast asleep. We stood on the fountain’s shore: woman + newborn. We made one totem. I named the baby Easter Island. We played I Spy. I saw: coins at the fountain’s bottom. Eyes. Copper cataracts, winking through the water at us. I held the baby close. I held the baby stiffly. I brought the baby to see nobody. I saw: statues in the fountain’s water. Statues in tall grasses on the shore of a sea. I turned to tell somebody. The city had disappeared into complete silence. There was only: the baby. We were watching the water wrinkle in the wind. In the distance, maids were ironing. Overhead: jets drew ciphers in the blue with their chalk. The drift of the maker is dark. Beware that by the drifts thou perish not. The statues, the statues in the strange fountain were looking at us. They were weeping and turning, turning and weeping. They might have seen the city shimmering in the sun and wind, and known . . . It was a city with no one in it. If a door somewhere on the street opened, it would always be . . . no one. It would be a bad draft that had blossomed. I longed for meadows white with drifts of snow. I named the baby Drift. In the winter I had planned to bring him north. To a barn’s eaves, to hear icicles drip. To prepare him to grow up in the path of the next great glacial drift. City whose sky was white jet streaks. Whose houses were apparitions of asbestos flakes. Whose homeless sipped wind from tins. Whose only water was the strange fountain. Angel, my angel, my sweetheart, wake up. See the foam on the wave, seethe tornado, the hurricane. We stood on the fountain’s shore. The wind blew particulates of rug powder, of lemon-scented floor polish. The maids of the city were cleaning so completely. And mutely. There may have been other names I gave the baby. Zeno sweet Zeno Little fellow little fellow Vertigo I said to the baby, We will stand here until there is snow on the mountain. I may have meant to say fountain. We peered all day into the strange fountain. I said to myself, That is just your face stiffening around your cheeks. That is just grass growing at your feet. I held the baby all the time, and he never ever cried.

Tennessee: We are here, between trees, with the tempo of a rosary being strung in a queue of escalating beads— Carolina: It’s not quite the count in the countinghouse of my chest but the heart does make an awful attempt t: and a circle wherever it may be there was music coming on c: which though machinery-like moves not in cogs, and never springs, but waves through t: like wired applause for antic backstage buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it fades c: but only after the chorus has pulsed t: it drops off with sudden decision, like fountain water gone dross c: or it reaches the furthest point the branch turns from us, and is for some arc fully quiet... t: until the roulette snaps its jaw and the choir’s circuit opens to one c: like a pigeon unhinged, its wings in sudden white-rumped ascent t: unopposed by iridescence c: unopposed by iridescence

Of course they are empty shells, without hope of animation. Of course they are artifacts. Even if my sister and I should wear some, or if we give others away, they will always be your clothes without you, as we will always be your daughters without you.

When I saw one of those men touch your hair, I heard for the first time in many a year the ancient battle trumpets and I saw the banners of an army winding off to war and felt that blind power urging me to knock him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor. If nobody had held me back, stopped me, I would—God help me—have killed him on the spot, stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I'm sorry, but you must be aware your winding hair is different now, a hornets' nest, a snakes' lair! Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.

Your idea of embracing horror was overwhelmed by the horror: in the mild milkiness of the afternoon, on the bluff that commands a vision of bank towers knifing up far higher than the rising, empty shell of the moon ... on the height where you stand and still can't understand your life as anything but slow dying, your time seeps out as into a warm bath, the way the exemplary career of Petronius the Just—pornographer and satirist- once leaked away.

It’s too cold to smoke outside, but if you come over, I’ll keep my hands to myself, or won’t I. I would like to tell you about the wall eaten up by the climbing plant—it was so beautiful. Various things have been happening to me, all of them sexual. The man on the bus took off his pants so I could see him better. Another man said, “Ignore him darlin’. Just sit on my lap.” But I’m not one of those who’s hungriest in the morning, unlike the man at the bakery who eats egg after egg after egg. Listen. Come over: the cold has already eaten the summer. I need another pair of ears: from the kitchen I can’t tell if I’m hearing wind chimes or some gray woman with failing arms dropping a pan full of onions and potatoes. This morning I need four hands— two to wash the greens, one to lift a teakettle, one to pour the milk. This morning, one little mouth will not do. We could play a game where we crouch on the tiles, two yellow dogs drinking coffee from bowls. We could play a game where we let the breakfast burn. Outside there’s a world where every love scene begins with a man in a doorway; he walks over to the woman and says “Open your mouth.”

if you like let the body feel all its own evolution inside, opening flagella & feathers & fingers door by door, a ragged neuron dangling like a participle to hear a bare sound on the path, find a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat of the bulbous stalk pecked out to the core so you can bore back to the salamander you once were straggling under the skin grope toward the protozoa snagging on the rise toward placental knowing who developed eyes for you agape in open waters the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your hagfish spine who will bury your bones investigate a redwood rain or tap the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put your flat needles on dry ice to inquire after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring next to you, find you are most closely related to grass your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when did you begin your coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before the African honey badger but after the dark protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the sun become the earth you had no nouns, did you