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What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

In Shia Islam, the Twelfth Imam is said to have disappeared in the ninth century. It’s believed his return at the end of the world will deliver order from the chaos. no one ever brings up the wages of virtue        the cost of avoiding that which you were built to do some men actually love their enemies remind me to tell you about them when you arrive and when will that be again? I’ve already spiced the duck and hidden the sherry even grain has genes that say drink this or bend there so much like our own I am rubbing yogurt through my hair getting ready for your return I read old mail from my bababazorg the Farsi like tea leaves or exotic blades years ago he melted into the tautness of earth like a pad of butter on turtle meat the birch curled its tongue I was full of credible fears today I’m full of olives and smoke sucking a fat red cigar and ashing on the good lace I’m comfy as a snake sleeping in a silk shoe though my glasses are foggy or maybe I just got perfume in my eye either way I’ll recognize you by your heartbeat you’ll recognize me by the green bird in my shirt pocket if you hurry I’ll let you hold her her flightlessness will mean nothing in fact my whole house has been cleansed entirely of symbols a strange call came from the west and I understood it in this new language I burnt away my candles and woke the sleeping spider resting his fangs against my hand there will be nothing here to distract you from your work just some old pears browning in the kitchen and a glass vase of pink roses humming their little songs

All my stories are about being left, all yours about leaving. So we should have known. Should have known to leave well enough alone; we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put our cards on the table, your card was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t get till 4 am, so tired from wanting what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads, we’d lost our minds.Love, I wanted to call you so fast. But so slow you could taste each letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear. L, love, for let’s wait.O, for oh no, let’s not.V for the precious v between your deep breasts (and the virtue of your fingers in the voluptuous center of me.) Okay,E for enough. Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . . But not so wrong to try. That means taking a lot of walks, which neither of us is good at, for different reasons, and nights up till 2 arguing whose reasons are better. Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13 years my marriage. 5 years you my friend. 4th of July weekend when something that begins in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods so we can keep the crazy beads clicking, clicking. It wasn’t a question of a perfect fit. Theoretically, it should be enough to say I left a man for a woman (90% of the world is content to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman lost her nerve, I left for greater concerns: when words like autonomy were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on; bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket to call one, then the other, or to call one twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him— remember? Now that I’ve done it, he says he doesn’t. I’m in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly, but two sheets of glass to shiver between. This is called being street-smart: dialing a number that you know won’t be answered, but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried. And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called hedging your bets? I fish out my other coin, turn it over in my fingers, press it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.

“what, to the american slave, is your 4th of july?” —frederick douglass i.  august 1619 arrived in a boat, named and unnamed, twenty, pirated away from a portuguese slaver, traded for victuals. drowned in this land of fresh, volatile clearings and folk with skin like melted cowrie shells. soon shedding servitude. soon reaping talents sown on african soil. after indenture, christians, colonists. not english, but not yet not-white. antoney and isabella, whose marriage stretched the short shadows of america’s early afternoon into the dusky reaches of evening, whose conjugal coitus spent first the choice coin of africa on rough virginian citizenship, baptized their son, william, into the church of england. ii.  december 1638 fear must have shuddered into boston on the backs of true believers — men and women of an unadorned god — deep in the heavy black fabric of their coats and dresses like a stench. black a mark of pride they wore as if branded, never dreaming they could take it off. envy anticipated their advent. glittered at them, settling in, from the knife blades of the massachusetts. seeped like low-pitched humming from the fur lining the natives’ warm blankets. but desire docked in 1638. in from the harbor flocked a people whose eyes sparked like stars, even near death. whose hair promised a mixture of cotton and river water and vines, a texture the fingers ached for. who wholly inhabited a skin the midnight color of grace that clarified the hue of the pilgrims’ woolen weeds. fear and envy claimed pride of place, put desire’s cargo to good use. iii.  march 1770 that night, crispus attucks dreamed. how he’d attacked his would-be master and fled in wild-eyed search of self- determination. discarded virginia on the run and ran out of breath in salt-scented boston. found there, if not freedom, fearlessness. a belief in himself that rocked things with the uncontrolled power of the muscular atlantic, power to cradle, to capsize. awoke angry again at the planter who’d taken him for a mule or a machine. had shouldered a chip the size of concord by the time the redcoat dared to dare him. died wishing he’d amassed such revolutionary ire in virginia. died dreaming great britain was the enemy. iv.  july 4th: last but not least 17-, 18-, 19-76 and still this celebration’s shamed with gunpowder and words that lie like martyrs in cold blood. africa’s descendents, planting here year after year the seeds of labor, sweating bullets in this nation’s warts, have harvested the rope, the rape, the ghetto, the cell, the fire, the flood, and the blame for you-name-it. so today black folks barbeque ribs and smother the echoes of billie’s strange song in sauces. drink gin. gladly holiday to heckle speeches on tv. pretend to parade. turn out in droves for distant detonations, chaos, controlled as always, but directed away from us tonight. stare into the mirror of the sky at our growing reflection, boggled by how america gawks at the passing pinpoints of flame, but overlooks the vast, ebony palm giving them shape.

Many of my race have lived long without the touch of these fine things which separate us from beasts. Things I call my own now. Having served thirty-six years as needleman for a family far more ape than we will ever be, I rode the moonlight train to find my free. Up here it is colder than I like, but the gentlemen admire my frock coats above all. I taught my son this trade and hope this picture I made will help retrieve him. Come summer I leave this coast for Philadelphia where I hear we of color can breathe yet more free. Tonight I stitch. The breeze off the bay smells of aria. It is almost the season for cloaks.

We are waiting, grandmother and I, for the white bird. The black bird grows larger above our heads, Its immense wings spreading as it dives down To pull her away piece by piece. Grandmother is not ashamed; She lies open before me, white as bone, Glistening with morphine, giving me this last gift. The hungry bird chitters and squawks, circling. I will stay until the bones are picked clean; I will stay until the wide wings swallow the last of the light, Until the white bird is free at last.

As others or ourselves let’s say—furtive, then, inconsequent and sad— or on the edge of thought, perhaps, or into some predictable meandering, the outward accelerations of water against its shore dissipating into erosions, cuts and counter-cuts, remembered as landscape, the convenient certainties of an abandoned past. Is it tree or treeline or the massing of leaves against the sky or color freed from shadow or something of color deepening against shade, the sensible bluff that heaves above the bluff’s presumed insensible marl? River, again, always enclosed by its own turnings, its own turnings overgrown.

The casseroles just showed up. According to her sister a symbolic casting of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear— according to a friend she looked just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon, suitcase still in the trunk. She’d carried him dead for days. Out above the reeds a sphere of birds stretches and knots, rises as one brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger when it came filled every chair.

Wake me in South Galway, or better yet In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind. Improvise a hearse—one of those decrepit Postal vans would suit me down to the ground— A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan. Once you've got in off the road at Newquay Push aside some barstools and situate me Up in front by the door where the musicians sit, Their table crowded with pints and a blue teapot, A pouch of Drum, some rolling papers and tin Whistles. Ask Charlie Piggott to play a tune That sounds like loss and Guinness, turf smoke and rain, While Brenda dips in among the punters like a hedge-wren. Will I hear it? Maybe not. But I hear it now. The smoke of the music fills my nostrils, I feel the attuned Box and fiddle in harness, pulling the plough Of the melody, turning the bog-dark, root-tangled ground. Even the ceramic collie on the windowsill Cocks an ear as the tune lifts and the taut sail Of the Galway hooker trills wildly in its frame on the wall, Rippling to the salt pulse and seabreeze of a West Clare reel. Many a night, two octaves of one tune, We sat here side by side, your body awake To a jig or slide, me mending the drift of a line As the music found a path to my notebook. Lost in its lilt and plunge I would disappear Into the heathery freedom of a slow air Or walk out under the powerful stars to clear My head of thought and breathe their cooled-down fire. When my own session ends, let me leave like that, Porous to the wind that blows off the ocean. Goodbye to the company and step into the night Completed and one-off, like a well-played tune— Beyond the purified essence of hearth fires Rising from the life of the parish, past smoke and stars, Released from everything I've done and known. I won't go willingly, it's true, but I'll be gone.

It’s not so easy to smash the compass. To rely on the winds     the golden hum of Herb Kane clouds navigating the tips of these mountains. It’s not so easy to modify the compass. To apologize when your brothers are spreading the sashimi and churning the shoyu mustard. It’s not so easy to ignore the compass because it seems to have always been here in all its sextant glory     pointing distracting you from Wākea’s blue teeth nibbling Papa’s chest. It’s not so easy     but it’s possible to say “aloha, for now” to family and friends pouring bags of ice into clean coolers before the big show. To walk past uncle’s squid lū‘au bubbling green, to get in that car and drive, with nothing but a fistful of quarters for the library Xerox machine. It’s possible     because when those books slide across the counter and you walk to an empty table     the compass begins to shake and the needle is never the same    again. With every turn of a Pacific page you realize      pukas are being filled or new ones      uncovered. And the art of listening brings with it memories, of the physics of his hips and hands     when you first saw him cast that net     slicing the horizon. The needle doesn’t like it when you flatten the cube to discover your kūpuna were always just around the corner    from where you sit      now. And the halftime show hasn’t even started, yet. The time it takes to get from the third million-dollar commercial to the fifth     is equal to the time it takes to find the Kānaka Maoli name of the land that raised you     buried under the pavements     under the brand new      two-lane     fast food      drive-thru. But what the compass really hates      what it’s really afraid of is when you see the lo‘i in the same way that you see that empty Sunday afternoon library     when you finally see the moana in your kūpuna’s eye. So now      when you return home and the cooler is empty and the sashimi spiral is nearly gone   unfurl those Xerox copies across the dining table     consoling the cousins who lost money on the spread. And as the compass repairs itself    as it always does it will feel the sting when it finds you       tomorrow with your back being warmed by the morning sun.