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Even though the laws have changed my grandmother still takes us to the back of the bus when we go downtown in the rain.It's easier, my grandmother says, than having white folks look at me like I'm dirt. But we aren't dirt. We are people paying the same fare as other people. When I say this to my grandmother, she nods, says,Easier to stay where you belong. I look around and see the ones who walk straight to the back. See the ones who take a seat up front, daring anyone to make them move. And know this is who I want to be. Not scared like that. Brave like that. Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit wherever we want now.No need in making trouble, she says.You all go back to New York City but I have to live here.

At six I lived for spells: how a few Hawaiian words could call up the rain, could hymn like the sea in the long swirl of chambers curling in the nautilus of a shell, how Amida’s ballads of the Buddhaland in the drone of the priest’s liturgy could conjure money from the poor and give them nothing but mantras, the strange syllables that healed desire. I lived for stories about the war my grandfather told over hana cards, slapping them down on the mats with a sharp Japanese kiai. I lived for songs my grandmother sang stirring curry into a thick stew, weaving a calligraphy of Kannon’s love into grass mats and straw sandals. I lived for the red volcano dirt staining my toes, the salt residue of surf and sea wind in my hair, the arc of a flat stone skipping in the hollow trough of a wave. I lived in a child’s world, waited for my father to drag himself home, dusted with blasts of sand, powdered and the strange ash of raw cement, his deafness made worse by the clang of pneumatic drills, sore in his bones from the buckings of a jackhammer. He’d hand me a scarred lunchpail, let me unlace the hightop G.I. boots, call him the new name I’d invented that day in school, write it for him on his newspaper. He’d rub my face with hands that felt like gravel roads, tell me to move, go play, an then he’d walk to the laundry sink to scrub, rinse the dirt of his long day from a face brown and grained as koa wood. I wanted to take away the pain in his legs, the swelling in his joints, give him back his hearing, clear and rare as crystal chimes, the fins of glass that wrinkled and sparked the air with their sound. I wanted to heal the sores that work and war had sent to him, let him play catch in the backyard with me, tossing a tennis ball past papaya trees without the shoulders of pain shrugging back his arms. I wanted to become a doctor of pure magic, to string a necklace of sweet words fragrant as pine needles and plumeria, fragrant as the bread my mother baked, place it like a lei of cowrie shells and pikake flowers around my father’s neck, and chant him a blessing, a sutra.

That was not the summer of aspic and cold veal. It was so hot the car seat stung my thighs and the rearview mirror swam with mirage. In the back seat the leather grip was noosed by twine. We were not poor but we had the troubles of the poor. She who had been that soft snore beside the Nytol, open-mouthed, was gone, somewhere, somewhere there was a bay, there was a boat, there was a scold in mother’s mouth. What I remember best is the way everything came and went in the window of my brief attention. At the wake I was beguiled by the chromium yellow lemon pies. The grandfather clock’s pendant of unaffordable gold told the quarter hour. The hearse rolled forward over the O’s of its own surprise.

for Fabbio Doplicher We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what's a cheap date, they asked us; what's flat drink). Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib—and there was one administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked "What's poetry?" Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world." Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry— (we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)— poetry is what he thought, but did not say.

What horror to awake at night and in the dimness see the light. Time is white mosquitoes bite I’ve spent my life on nothing. The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing, sitting around with Something’s wife. Buzz and burn is all I learn I’ve spent my life on nothing. I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing lifting household stuffing— carpets, dishes benches, fishes I’ve spent my life in nothing.

Shook the box like a maraca. Stood around like a dope in my punch-colored dress, clutching your box to my chest. Opened your plastic receptacle, the size of a jack-in-the-box. But instead of gaudy stripes, your box is sober-suit blue, hymnal blue. Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders. Remarked to your box: "REINCARNATION comes from roots meaning 'to be made flesh again.'" Stowed your box under my bed for a week to seed dreams in which you advise me. (This didn't work.) Opened the Babylonian Talmud at random. Read aloud to your gritty, gray-white powder: "There are three keys which the Holy One, blessed be He, has not entrusted into the hands of any messenger. These are: the key of rain, the key of birth, and the key of the resurrection of the dead." Worked myself up to watery eyes. Any intensity evaporated the instant I stopped reading. Tried to intuit your format, sift it from tides of void. Does shape play a role? My watch ticked in an exaggerated way. Closed my eyes, sent forth mental tendrils seeking the nothing of you. They curled back on them- selves, weaving around the wing chair, a dog's leg, a lamp stand, eventu- ally heading back toward the nothing of me.

Eat cereal. Read the back of the box over and over. Put on my red velvet jumper with white heart shaped buttons. Walk to the bus, pick up discarded cigarette butts and pretend to smoke. Get on the bus. Girls yell,Wire head, ugly black skin. Take a window seat, under the radio speaker. Look for cats hunting in the fields. Go to class. Stay in at recess. Steal chewing gum, plastic green monkeys and cookies from desks. Eat in bathroom stalls. Pure white light pours in. Try to get a bloody nose by punching myself in the same bathroom after lunch. The teacher passes around pictures of herself pregnant.You werefat! I yell.  Everyone laughs. I lap it like licking honey from a spoon.I was pregnant, what’s your excuse? Everyone laughs. I swallow stones. Grow tired in the afternoons, droop like a sunflower in the lengthening light. Get on the bus. Girls yell,Brillo-head! Zebra! Sit in an aisle seat.Your father’s a nigger! I say,No, he’s a fireman. Laughter all around. Pinch myself shut like squeezing soap from a sponge. Walk home. Sometimes find an unsmoked cigarette in the gravel along the curb—long, white, new. Put it to my lips, pull it away and hold it aloft, movie-star-like, all the way home.

Then in the August of my twenty-seventh year, naked except for my seaclogs, I greeted an audience of piers. After my dip, I came up covered in salt and sand: hair tough as an angel’s. Who could disappoint me now among the so-coifed? Disappointing menus for a banquet of twenty-seven. The hostess cannot hear the hotelier, walls blow ope’; lousy with wallets and checkbooks, the air. Naked except for The checks and the monies flapped like birds. I partook of the seasonal activity and caught a check in my hands—to myself from myself— and was caught; I was smart and dumb. I hadn’t been clobbered in such a long time! Now, shoved against the carpeted headrest, I wondered at its cold and slender neck. The nakeder I feel the happier. Camp is over, and the children come out wearing hats; the children are happy for each other, each camp having been maximally appropriate. The ocean grew gritty with proteins. I arose and clomb to the yard with its spigot. It looked up and blinked. Above, kite strings wrote toing and froing was the same motion; tiny sighs above the halls at the county airport; swung on tiny chains; my father swathed me in two handtowels, said nexttime, swim in the sea. A gold thread falls from an eagle’s towel onto the beach. A gold face big as a quarter of the sky looks at us with gold-milk tears in its eyes and the gold girl goes on brushing the countryside with a twig-broom big as a tree. When our competitor finishes third, he approaches the throne with a gold wheel of tillamook.

What I expected, was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles with men And climbing. After continual straining I should grow strong; Then the rocks would shake And I rest long. What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away, The lack of good to touch, The fading of body and soul Smoke before wind, Corrupt, unsubstantial. The wearing of Time, And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth - These, I could not foresee. Expecting always Some brightness to hold in trust Some final innocence Exempt from dust, That, hanging solid, Would dangle through all Like the created poem, Or the faceted crystal.

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world. 2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.” 3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness. 4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death. 5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light. 6. I know that I know nothing about love. 7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank. 8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole. 9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency. 10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes. 11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little. 12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one. 13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time. 14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports. 15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay. 16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up. 17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded. 18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny. 19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death. 20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time. 21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.