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Rather than hold his hands properly arched off the keys, like cats with their backs up, Monk, playing block chords, hit the keys with his fingertips well above his wrists, shoulders up, wrists down, scarce room for the pencil, ground freshly to a point, piano teachers love to poke into the palms of junior pianists with lazy hands. What easy villains these robotic dullards are in their floral- print teaching dresses (can those mauve blurs be peonies?). The teachers’ plucky, make-do wardrobes suggest, like the wan bloom of dust the couch exhaled when I scrunched down to wait for Mrs. Oxley, just how we value them. She’d launch my predecessor home and drink some lemonade, then free me from the couch. The wisdom in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where Monk grew up, is that those names, Thelonious Sphere, came later, but nobody’s sure: he made his escape by turning himself into a genius in broad daylight while nobody watched. Just a weird little black kid one day and next thing anybody knew he was inexplicable and gone. We don’t give lessons in that. In fact it’s to stave off such desertions that we pay for lessons. It works for a while. Think of all the time we spend thinking about our kids. It’s Mrs. Oxley, the frump with a metronome, and Mr. Mote, the bad teacher and secret weeper, we might think on, and everyone we pay to tend our young, opaque and truculent and terrified, not yet ready to replace us, or escape us, if that be the work.

(homage Jacob van Hoddis ) The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards A blade snaps in two during an autopsy The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois’ pointy head A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship God’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone The peace night makes according to the world comes

In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed. The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me on the heating system, offers an anecdote of a broken casserole, recites all of the Welty lore he has rehearsed. She taught him when he was young, and now he serves her legend, lets me lean in toward the books—I cross the line of what’s allowed, never touching. He shows me photos—two loves lost, one a married man—then on the way down, pauses before a feather in a box, reciting Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He begins to weep at Let her drop, adds, Like Welty’s loves! Now I stop— is he comparing her to the god, or Leda? He cannot bear her, her Unfulfilled Love. I cannot bear this either—how dare he conjure up for her such disappointment, such wasted longing? I want to be the mirror of her photographs, to be her figure of my own conjuring. I want to believe I, too, could be happy here, in this solitary house, in this small town, amidst the rows and stacks of books. Untouched.

—no matter how much muscle I might have mustered—my mother was like to come along behind, reach around me to take it up again from where I’d left it, lift it back into my line of vision and in one practiced motion from that strangle in her bare hands and thin air work a second miraculous stream of silver dishwash into the day’s last gleam . . .

World like a coat, silver clasps, ermine lined, warm with the dead inside, rolling around in the red center—I thought everything had a purpose—this was back when I still drank—and wasn’t I a special traveler, nestled in that pocket amongst the butterscotch candies, the matchbooks? Unessential but accounted for, a steady thing to touch. World like a morning glory, withered every evening, world like a bristling dog, terrified of thunder—I can’t believe how I believed, or how that belief assumed a shape around my body, taking on the imprint of my heat, gaining solidity. When anyone questioned me, I held it forth, let them touch the sleeve—I needed nothing. World like an egret, still and white on the highway divider, world like a regret typed out and then erased—I cannot hold you any closer without everyone seeing, I cannot hold you at all, it seems, your evergreens, your curling potato vine; it’s all too much much, and I a bit of goosedown, a thistle fluff, naked and hatless, unaccounted for and extra, the world like a world like a world.

There was ance a may, and she lo’ed na men; She biggit her bonnie bow’r doun i’ yon glen; But now she cries, Dool and a well-a-day! Come doun the green gait and come here away! When bonnie young Johnnie cam’ owre the sea He said he saw naething sae lovely as me; He hecht me baith rings and monie braw things; And werena my heart licht, I wad dee. He had a wee tittie that lo’ed na me, Because I was twice as bonnie as she; She raised sic a pother ‘twixt him and his mother, That werena my heart licht, I wad dee. The day it was set, and the bridal to be The wife took a dwam and lay doun to dee; She maned, and she graned, out o’ dolour and pain, Till he vowed that he ne’er wad see me again. His kin was for ane o’ a higher degree, Said, what had he do wi’ the likes o’ me? Albeit I was bonnie, I wasna for Johnnie: And werena my heart licht, I wad dee. They said I had neither cow nor calf, Nor dribbles o’ drink rins through the draff, Nor pickles o’meal rins through the mill-e’e; An werena my heart licht, I wad dee. His tittie she was baith wily and slee, She spied me as I cam’ owre the lea, And then she ran in and made a loud din; Believe your ain een an ye trow na me. His bannet stood aye fu’ round on his brow His auld ane looked aye as weel as some’s new; But now he lets ’t wear ony gate it will hing, And casts himsel’ dowie upon the corn-bing. And now he gaes daund’ring about the dykes A a’ he dow do is to hund the tykes; The love-lang nicht he ne’er steeks his e’e; And werena my heart licht I wad dee. Were I but young for thee, as I ha’e been We should ha’e been gallopin’ doun in yon green, And linkin’ it on the lily-white lea; And wow, gin I were but young for thee.

You want to touch big animals, animals not touched by your peers Woe is not you You have the polar bear in Franz Josef Land, the white whale in the Sea of Okhotsk, You have the brown bear, leopard & Amur tiger in Ussuri, the Far East, so east, like a talon it hooks Heilongjiang, claims that edge of Pacific, that swath of maritime lands & a maritime state — Primorsky Krai, home to Vladivostok, the ancient Manchurian forest, its corresponding duck, a short North Korean river- border changing course, redrawn when the bank sloughs off, its markers slipping, washing away — Tumen, sputtering into the Sea of Japan There is an awareness of islands — Oshima, Okushiri, Hokkaido — tucked into the brain of every organism Volcanics, large to small, they perforate the waters northeast to Kamchatka (& that is so far your countrymen send their misbehaved children to so-called corners in their houses) Perhaps you can stand on that shore facing inland & gaze out over the spray of those white whales of yours, the expanse that comprises your jurisdiction Now, what’s the first thing you know is there, but can’t see for mist, et al: Khabarovsk Krai, whose coat of arms is a bear holding a coat of arms of a bear & a tiger holding a blue & yellow coat of arms, inverted Y, tiny crown afloat, big bear pinching his canoe-shaped tongue between his teeth — & what tumbles from there but Black Dragon, scrawling from Inner Mongolia to Tartar Strait, true, for all its bordermaking, to its roots From it & all its names, names for everything: for islands, for fables, the provinces it traces, for gruesome late-Mongol conquerors & the surrounding biology You think about it now & again, thumbing a leatherbound natural history, gift from a pandering South American delegation ripe with stories about their jaguar, the early explorers who called it tigre In the world, there are 9 subspecies of tiger, all eastern, 3 of them extinct Amur is classified as merely endangered & concentrated in Ussuri State Nature Reserve, where you are known because you shot one It is somewhat a farce There is no state — not since Bolshevik word set foot there — only a river bearing the name & you commissioned the research: to study everyone with a name on the Red List of Threatened Species, to house data online at programmes.putin.kremlin.ru, to visit them all & each visit to carry an air gun & a satchel of tranquilizer darts, to shoot, to topple, to affix the GPS collar, to caress the fur (in the case of the whale the skin) & muse to scientists about the big, sleepy oaf: Would she remember, or eat you, or both?

Have you been in our wild west country? then You have often had to pass Its cabins lying like birds’ nests in The wild green prairie grass. Have you seen the women forget their wheels As they sat at the door to spin— Have you seen the darning fall away From their fingers worn and thin, As they asked you news of the villages Where they were used to be, Gay girls at work in the factories With their lovers gone to sea! Ah, have you thought of the bravery That no loud praise provokes— Of the tragedies acted in the lives Of poor, hard-working folks! Of the little more, and the little more Of hardship which they press Upon their own tired hands to make The toil for the children less: And not in vain; for many a lad Born to rough work and ways, Strips off his ragged coat, and makes Men clothe him with their praise.

Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found? Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself. Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, metallic, fuming along the one four-lane street. The poplars of the shelterbelt lean away from the bypass that never had much to pass by but coyote and rabbitbrush. Pinpricks stabbed in a map too dark to read— I stared at stars light-years away. Listen. That hissing? Just a sprinkler damping down yesterday until it’s today. The cottonwoods shiver, or I do, every leaf rustling as if it’s the one about to tear itself, not I. Memory takes the graveyard shift.

A field of thistles, díscharging concentric waves of negative theology, on a mountainside, 2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide), would certainly suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not enough sought state of subtle shock if he’d close this computer and walk up the summit road until the sea’s in view. And maybe in the southeast wind, in broadcast waveform data therein, microsystems stocks he has been checking, clicking all day like an addict gambler, will float up until red numbers cross the black horizon into green—two redtail hawks                                float up on a thermal— maybe even make some money while you’re up here— ask why is each second so charged with a feeling of living in freak Götterdämmerung days of live free radical notion or die into negative white on white sun pride burning away, but equally charged with utopian headlong longevity crowing— why can’t I be steady? Why is my only balance built of collisions and cancelings-out of such sharp spike-of-chaos moods? Field of thistles, red and green. Fields of dollars, thistles, solidi and yen and rand and rupees blowing off the curve of land.