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The Holy Ghost was browsing in his or her library one day in the future, unaccountably bored, oddly querulous, vaguely wanting something that would be quietly unfamiliar. "It doesn't have to be great," said the Holy Ghost with the faintest note of exasperation in his or her voice, "just so long as it has its own special character." Gliding along the billion shelves, incredibly graceful despite his or her mood. Then the deft and lovely hand of the Holy Ghost lit on a slim volume of poetry— it was your book. It was your book. The first poem caused the Holy Ghost to frown; ah, but not with disdain, rather with curiosity! The second poem brought a brightening of divine eyes. And the page was turned as if by a pensive breeze. Maybe it happened after your death, but so what? It happened. "I'm taking this back to my perfect desk," said the HG. "This is really something."

This was a true happening but (as you will see shortly) not such as would ready me for future ones. What has brisk disaster to do with a leisurely ordeal? Neither event, as you will notice also, has made me an understanding man. It was my watch one night, away then on the sea, when leaning on a couple of crates of something I dreamed of nothing special into the dark, and whispered the smoke of a sugared native product into the dark. Then from behind a quick rush burst not six feet over me with a sawing and then a cracking sound, and the other watch pointed up where a black squall ran port-side into the distance and a six by six crate lid veered and disappeared like a gull. But the other time we were idle ashore for days somewhere there are sandy foothills and small plains with weeds that stand like birds, and there was a steady blow on land that left off out at sea, leaving us all peculiar if I remember. The wind rasped the dense whorls of sharp leaves low on the ground and shrilled through the heads on the tall seed-stalks, and all those days the sound rose until we, without hope, without breath bore the conviction that our sojourn had not begun and had no end, like a period of dissipation. In certain Spanish havens the beggars come to you saying “Give me an amount. God will make it good.” Had they been wise those ladies would have said something of that kind and proffered a gratifying smile to their junior treasurer the other Tuesday and maybe been spared a peculiar fall. For forgetting their cards or missing dues or due to rancor from a month of planning they were turned away from the luncheon which might have saved them through its regular plaudits and calls to order. Instead they turned immediately back after some while waiting with other members in vying groups where the sound rose and narrowed, and from the dim hushed hall those five ladies, my individual patrons, came across the park together, under a hefty sun, under slight muffling rain, to my teashop. I worked on a cruising vessel one season and saw a woman being led below about a minute after she had vaulted the rail, and now her face cluttered with casts of hair returned to me, and a suggestion of the odor of moist wool. Then, after ordering, over the tinkle of service, the ladies called me and began the question of a particular person none had touched, wondering by turns in words like these: “Maybe when he was a child he went alone one night along the lakeside or followed streams in the dark and mating mayflies swarmed him or he was caught by a swirl of slippery animals risen from rotted cresses. It could be too a bird’s egg fell on him, that red and yellow spattering his coat showed him the partial form of brain and bill and wings like candy arms.” A second lady established the problem but in studious and in idle terms: “He must have tried becoming a sphere once when something hurt and must have failed. He is a cylinder and lacking the perfected self-containment of the sphere he nonetheless has beauty and though incomplete is unassailable.” The third advanced the first with this addition: “Maybe when he was a child and a good half he planted a happy garden for himself and tried to bring a boyish girl inside to share his secrets he could not bestow.” The fourth supposed some more years and less hope and figured on effects of disaffection: “Perhaps it was a time sprouting potatoes came creeping like things of the undersea surrounding him that gave him the first fevered turn toward what we now call his fine beauty.” The last lady came near to reconciling them: “Some awareness certainly shook him unawares once and he flinched and flinching has made him beautiful to all of us who admire huge eyed skittishness, the fawn standing some steps off always awkward and desired.” Odd gulls often join before a gale to bank and shrill in company, then at the heavy time of it they hush and float broadcast. Those ladies did the same the other Tuesday. Hopeless and breathless, both I and they rode like sitting birds into a last lull, and I was not (as you have seen) prepared by quick calamities of ocean labor for land bound suffering at ease. Understanding or unconcern could serve but pain and malice won, and who may be forgiven even his shapeless victories? “The boy is never by himself,” I said, “but by him stands an unseen friend whose face came in the petal fall under a secret tree, who meets his vague eyes with beaming gaps and his remote grin with a long lipless smile.”

Because a black bird flew across the road; Because the attendant at the pump turned surly; Because the uncertain weather Made Mother nervous, And, back home, the telephone kept ringing In an empty house; Because a white bird flew across the road. How far had they come? How far did they go? Seeing, along river after river, Between shores of brush and willow, Only the bend ahead and the bend behind Under a sky featureless and hard As a shallow bowl; through tautologies Of a landscape unendingly repeated Mile after mile; down Main Street After Main Street, replications Of the same petty civic scenery; Hearing the ghosts of trains Crossing between cornfields, Clattering over the points, moaning Above creosote and cinders, As if the imagination Could produce nothing more Than the same landscape, cornfields, Rivers, and Main Streets Pulling them, like a magnet, not toward But away from , not into the future, But away from the past; Until a white bird flew across the road With its mysterious message, that said to some, “Turn back,” and to the rest, “Go on.”

Why this sudden at-homeness, all-out, all-in? I can, look, sink myself into you, glacierlike, you yourself slay your brothers: earlier than they I was with you, Snowed One. Throw your tropes in with the rest: Someone wants to know, why with God I was no different than with you, someone wants to drown in that, two books instead of lungs, someone who stabbed himself into you, bebreathes the cut, someone, he was the one closest to you, gets lost to himself, someone adorns your sex with your and his betrayal, maybe I was both

Anna Kyle Brown. Osage. 1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma. Because she died where the ravine falls into water. Because they dragged her down to the creek. In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt. Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring. Because I turned the log with my foot. Her slippers floated downstream into the dam. Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body. Because she lived without our mother. Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land. She was carrying his offspring. The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning. Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull. Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed. But then froze under the weight of frost. During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

Sometimes the rain shines Just when the sun reigns, And that was the way it is Beyond those French doors That late afternoon here In this mind’s early evening Where they still fade in That cool color Polaroid, Pastel shades of her prom dress, A bowl of double peonies, Promising, precocious, Trying, trying to open. • Their friend and he were tight Tight-rope walkers, self-taught Taut-trope-talkers, stalking Jamb-up, arm-in-arm And caroling to lucky stars Their bars and rebars, The night a carousel Of tryst and troth, Of casual carousals, Cocky arousals, Pitching the dark to the dark. (Streetlight and moth, Reader, she married both.) • But then there he was, In the morning’s mourning, Soi-disant Proustian mignon, Aesthetic ascetic And Kansas rube Reducing his thought To a bouillon cube That no one hot Ought ever pore over.

You can't argue beauty's not an accident, the particular heft and angle of a chromosome's spin. A tarted spangle, bright lanyard twist, the slip of cells weighting this boat uneven from stern to prow. We're all skittery as marbles on  a marble floor. Beauty stays, then goes; it fades, we say, something about years and sun, the nights we slept in makeup and left mascara like ashes on the pillowcase. We burned through every one of our dreams. I wasn't always a stepmother, you know. There were whole years when I was a girl. But now, these ladies sell me moisturizer, stand close in their lab coats, pretending at science in a fog of perfume. They wield a contour brush and my cheekbone pops. The magic settles uneasy; it turns out fairy dust was always fake. And the lipstick's made from beetles, shells crushed vermillion. My color is Fleshpot, they say, it's Folie or Fixation. It's Wilderness; it's Artificial Earth. They can't quite make themselves care. We'll waste it, they know, whatever we've been given.

In the huddle you said “Go long—get open” and at the snap I took off along the right sideline and then cut across left in a long arc and I’m sure I was open at several points— glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right I think or maybe first left and then right and I definitely got open but the throw never came— maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far or maybe you actually can’t throw so far but in any case I feel quite open now, the defenders don’t seem too interested in me I sense only open air all around me though the air is getting darker and it would appear by now we’re well into the fourth quarter and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game it is not impossible that I will make the catch.

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that's right, I live a life of privilege in New York, Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. Say that again? I have a rule— I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out. I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning. At the end of my legs were my feet. Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me! Get up. Giddyup. Get going. My feet were there on the far side of my legs. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I don't really think I am going to. Obama is doing just fine. I don't think I'm going to. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I can see out the window it isn't raining. So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong. The poor are poorer than they ever were. The rich are richer than the poor. Is it true about the poor? It's always possible to be amusing. I saw a rat down in the subway. So what if you saw a rat. I admire the poor profusely. I want their autograph. They make me shy. I keep my distance. I'm getting to the bottom of the island. Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling. I'm half asleep but I'm awake. At the other end of me are my feet In shoes of considerable sophistication Walking down Broadway in the heat. I'm half asleep in the heat. I'm, so to speak, wearing a hat. I'm no Saint Francis. I'm in one of my trances. When I look in a mirror, There's an old man in a trance. There's a Gobi Desert, And that's poetry, or rather rhetoric. You see what happens if you don't make sense? It only makes sense to not. You feel the flicker of a hummingbird It takes a second to find. You hear a whirr. It's here. It's there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

I was the Widow McFarlane, Weaver of carpets for all the village. And I pity you still at the loom of life, You who are singing to the shuttle And lovingly watching the work of your hands, If you reach the day of hate, of terrible truth. For the cloth of life is woven, you know, To a pattern hidden under the loom i A pattern you never see! And you weave high-hearted, singing, singing, You guard the threads of love and friendship For noble figures in gold and purple. And long after other eyes can see You have woven a moon-white strip of cloth, You laugh in your strength, for Hope o'erlays it With shapes of love and beauty. The loom stops short! The pattern's out! You're alone in the room! You have woven a shroud! And hate of it lays you in it!