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At the table, at the grave not knowing whether to grieve or celebrate, they seemed to find a way within the stalled noon clatter and the dusk over oily swamps and elder tangle along a locked stockade of heavy machines, as the blue heron, looking down, flew farther on. Nothing dissolved for them the mortal green and black in transparent power of spacious streams now gone from earth. The flickering they found, terror-hope-terror, in fire of sunset clouds remained unwavering in its progress to night and day and night. And yet the pleasure they took in everything did not wear out. The limestone quarry of a poorer century, lipped in birds and berries, treasured up, still treasures up, old rains beneath its surface of dusty jet— still waits behind their houses on airless nights to be the dreams and drownings of new children.

Down the prickly cow path to the creek we journeyed as if we were insects making our way along scars in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses down the prickly cow path to the creek in chigger-shade where thoughts of time making our way along scars lost what they meant up at the house when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses we pulled from our pockets matches swiped in chigger-shade where thoughts of time tasting of sulfur at the tips lost what they meant up at the house listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles we pulled from our pockets matches swiped the surface of the water trembling tasting of sulfur at the tips once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine the surface of the water trembling the prairie had been a giant sea he told us once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine none of us sure what we believed the prairie had been a giant sea he told us we journeyed as if we were insects Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us none of us sure what we believed

1. Josef Mengele Drowns While Swimming at a Beach in Brazil, 1979 His name then: Wolfgang Gerhard. How easy, slipping on another man’s skin. Another country, too, its sun’s heat and light as insistent as a pair of forceps. His pants, left crumpled on the beach, forged papers and a few hard candies in the pocket. Where the water was shallow, he could look down and see his shadow passing over the pale sand, a wobbly twin, matching him stroke for stroke for stroke. 2. Li Po Drowns Trying to Embrace the Reflection of the Moon in the Yangtze, 762 The moon is no drinker of wine, so I must compensate. Surely you’ve heard the crows and nightingales egging me on? The day has dispersed from the courtyards like a gang of sparrows, and nothing is left of the world that is not pecked-over, hard and dark as the dream of an apple seed. The young men laugh at an old man drinking alone, but here are my companions: my shadow, as loyal and thin as a starved dog, and the moon, his whole face wrinkling with laughter. 3. Bob, the Circus Seal, Drowns Himself in His Tank in Galveston, 1911 By then his teeth had rotted out, and he often turned to his owner with his mouth open as if about to speak, a ruined smell jetting from inside. He had already attempted it, three days before, but his owner dove in and pulled him up onto the slimy planks. His circus show days were long gone. Sure, some afternoons a kid might walk by and see the scabby painting on the side of the building: the hoop, the pedestal, the ghost of a man in a top hat, the striped ball now like a clot of pus streaked with blood, hovering over the sleek, dark head. 4. Natalie Wood Drowns under Mysterious Circumstances near Santa Catalina Island, 1981 Let me tell you: death is a long silk glove dropped to the floor. It doesn’t remember the heft of the arm, the fingers dancing. That limb is gone, and nothing will hold its shape again. You twirl your pastel skirt. You watch two cars race toward the cliff, and there is nothing you can do. So many lives you’ve entered like a room: swooned, held the prop pistol to your own face, sang for the back row. But was it your voice? What was that name you were born into? Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko? What happened to her? Was she the one taken, her family butchered, living another life among the enemy people? Was it the morning? when she stopped scanning the horizon for rescuers that she turned into you? 5. Hippasus of Metapontum Is Drowned at Sea for the Heresy of Discovering Irrational Numbers, ca. 500 BCE His fellow Pythagoreans had already built a shrine to his memory and placed it where he passed by every day, but he did not take the hint. It was on the ship that they seized him. God was an integer, firm as an unripe apricot. But weren’t there streets in the city that wound forever into the minute darkness? Weren’t there dreams where he met himself again and again, without ever seeming to wake? The sea is incommensurable. Each lungful of air kept dividing itself, even as the boat became a decimal point on the far horizon. 6. Bennie Wint, 20 Years after Faking His Drowning Death, is Discovered Alive, 2009 In the first years after I disappeared, I read every report of drowning: children, mostly boys, mostly in their bathtubs, mostly accidents. Old men whose lungs filled with fluid while they sat in their armchairs. Fishermen. Swimmers. Immigrants crowded onto rafts. Some men, their throats seize up, and they die without ever swallowing a drop, as if they never left the shore. Some nights I dreamed what never happened: I held my drowning in my palm like a giant pearl. Some days, standing behind the cash register of my new life, I felt my lungs flatten out like a pair of discarded socks. Did I ever think of the woman I left on the shore as I kicked out past the last of the breakers? I won’t say. Here it was: I might have drowned trying to pretend to. I had to swim so far out, then mark a different beach and swim back a different man, without knowing if his strength was enough to carry me to shore.

It is just as well we do not see, in the shadows behind the hasty tent of the Allen Brothers Greatest Show, Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini in Nikes and jeans sharing a tired cigarette before she girds her wrists with glistening amulets and snaps the tigers into rage, before he adjusts the glimmering cummerbund and makes from air the white and trembling doves, the pair.

Who will stay behind, and what? A wind. Blindness from the blind man disappearing. A token of the sea: a strand of foam. A cloud stuck in a tree. Who will stay behind, and what? A single sound as genesis regrasses its creation. Like the violin rose that honors just itself. Seven grasses of that grass do understand. More than all the stars hence and northward, that star will stay that sinks into a tear. Forever in its jug, a drop of  wine remains. What will be left here? God. Not enough for you? Translated from the Yiddish

There are many kinds of open. — Audre Lorde We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut. Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm; we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch, sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar and lobe. We are hippocampus and exposed nerve and cornea. Areola, pigment, melanin, and nails. Varicose. Cellulite. Divining rod. Sinew and tissue, saliva and silt. We are blood and salt, clay and aquifer. We are breath and flame and stratosphere. Palimpsest and bibelot and cloisonné fine lines. Marigold, hydrangea, and dimple. Nightlight, satellite, and stubble. We are pinnacle, plummet, dark circles, and dark matter. A constellation of freckles and specters and miracles and lashes. Both bent and erect, we are all give and give back. We are volta and girder. Make an incision in our nectary and Painted Ladies sail forth, riding the back of a warm wind, plumed with love and things like love. Crack us down to the marrow, and you may find us full of cicada husks and sand dollars and salted maple taffy weary of welding together our daydreams. All sweet tea, razor blades, carbon, and patchwork quilts of Good God! and Lord have mercy! Our hands remember how to turn the earth before we do. Our intestinal fortitude? Cumulonimbus streaked with saffron light. Our foundation? Not in our limbs or hips; this comes first as an amen, a hallelujah, a suckling, swaddled psalm sung at the cosmos’s breast. You want to know what women are made of? Open wide and find out.

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is.

Nobody sings about alligator eyes anymore, barely peeking out of the water, bouncing on the ground and rolling into the pond, leucistic. People think of traits, symmetrical fetuses giving orders from space, making playlists even as they’re being born. Things have come to eyes that gaze in directions we can’t think of. You are told by a judge that nothing new will ever happen. You lie to his face looking straight into the gaps that want to appear. Each night I count the celebrities. The silhouette of this long stretch of time where opportunities spark and fizzle like islet cells quickly eaten by bosses and strangers, nearly identical computer-generated faces, with smiling or disgusted expressions. It appears again, the farcical pulchritude, hobbits of caution in non-events first paying a visit to mitigators, then Mario, then TIAA-CREF. Can you escape an alligator if you run silently and glide into the water? People with happy faces and no luck at all, good or bad, jam the signal with a sickle.

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses, the blue one, especially. Your first love rounding a corner, that snowy minefield. Whether you step lightly or heavily, you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance before evening falls, letting no one see you wend your way, that wonderful, old-fashioned word,wend, meaning “to proceed, to journey, to travel from one place to another,” as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work. You have to get over your resentments, the sun in the morning and the moon at night, all those shadows of yourself you left behind on odd little tables. Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan, crawl over this ego or that eros, then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain. Another old-fashioned word,yonder, meaning “that indicated place, somewhere generally seen or just beyond sight.” If you would recover, you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot to that bridge in the darkness where the sentinels stand guarding the border with their half-slung rifles, warned of the likes of you.

A high-yellow lawyer woman told me I ought to go to Europe to “broaden your per spective.” This happened at a black black cocktail party an oil portrait, Andrew Carnegie, smiling down