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Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change is train tracks. She’s sure of it. The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery by the side, but not the tracks. I’ve watched one for three years, she says, and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow. Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore. The wood was split and some of the ties were gone. Every Tuesday on Morales Street butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens. The widow in the tilted house spices her soup with cinnamon. Ask her what doesn’t change. Stars explode. The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals. The cat who knew me is buried under the bush. The train whistle still wails its ancient sound but when it goes away, shrinking back from the walls of the brain, it takes something different with it every time.

Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snowflake never can you guess what’s on their mind sometimes I can feel what they’re feeling detect it like hairs on the back of my arms, together we live, talk, walk the same sidewalks, to die buried in a foreign cemetery for others to sit upon ponder their own light, why am I free, what must I do, does someone love me like I do, new skin gives way to wrinkles, hair fades to gray, bones grow strong then decay, strength seeps every time one pees, sleeps, ages, loves, muscles grow then shrink the body a temporary vessel destination unknown. April 28, 2002

Today is a Tuesday, one of many. He has a girl he loves every Tuesday, her day off. He burns at the fine fire of her conscience, tells her they’ll be married someday. He has a wife, Doreen, a freckle-faced fat thing who harbors resentment that during her Tuesday at her mother’s, he insists on going to the movies. Rose petals he picks up in the neighbor’s yard end up at Tuesday’s feet and sprinkled through the sheets. Of course they must make love, since he sees her only once a week. Doreen requires sex after seeing her mother. He feels like an ox on Tuesday, powerful and massive. He tells this to Tuesday and to Doreen. Doreen tells him he is an ox a brute master of the air and his rightful bed. But Tuesday, who knows oxen are slow moving, dim witted, and castrated at birth, follows him home instead of playing her dulcimer, climbs the wall, watches him mounting his wife, leaves rose petals on his doorstep, takes the train to cornfields, steers and heifers watches the city disappear in rain. Thinks briefly of how tenderly he rose in her fingers while the remains of their breakfast, eggs and potatoes cooled on the wooden table with the tattered tablecloth.

I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene. I looked for him behind an isle of trees; I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been,—alone, ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly, Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight. And once I marked his flight go round and round, As where some flower lay withering on the ground. And then he flew as far as eye could see, And then on tremulous wing came back to me. I thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry; But he turned first, and led my eye to look At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook, A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. I left my place to know them by their name, Finding them butterfly weed when I came. The mower in the dew had loved them thus, By leaving them to flourish, not for us, Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him. But from sheer morning gladness at the brim. The butterfly and I had lit upon, Nevertheless, a message from the dawn, That made me hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground, And feel a spirit kindred to my own; So that henceforth I worked no more alone; But glad with him, I worked as with his aid, And weary, sought at noon with him the shade; And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’

Books are door-shaped portals carrying me across oceans and centuries, helping me feel less alone. But my mother believes that girls who read too much are unladylike and ugly, so my father's books are locked in a clear glass cabinet. I gaze at enticing covers and mysterious titles, but I am rarely permitted to touch the enchantment of words. Poems. Stories. Plays. All are forbidden. Girls are not supposed to think, but as soon as my eager mind begins to race, free thoughts rush in to replace the trapped ones. I imagine distant times and faraway places. Ghosts. Vampires. Ancient warriors. Fantasy moves into the tangled maze of lonely confusion. Secretly, I open an invisible book in my mind, and I step through its magical door-shape into a universe of dangerous villains and breathtaking heroes. Many of the heroes are men and boys, but some are girls so tall strong and clever that they rescue other children from monsters.

City life is a whirl of poetry readings and forbidden tertulias, gatherings where young and old, rich and poor, male and female, dark and light— runaway slaves and freed ones, former masters and former servants—all take turns sharing secret verses rooted in startling new ideas. Each evening, I go home with a mind that glows in the light of words, which leap like flames...

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are. My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself. The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.

The tulips make me want to paint, Something about the way they drop Their petals on the tabletop And do not wilt so much as faint, Something about their burnt-out hearts, Something about their pallid stems Wearing decay like diadems, Parading finishes like starts, Something about the way they twist As if to catch the last applause, And drink the moment through long straws, And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed. The way they’re somehow getting clearer, The tulips make me want to

It was a life of exile under the trees. My father came to the stockyards. My mother from a farm. In 1952 or 2 my parents flew from Kansas City to Indianapolis to look for a house when my father was transferred. I think of them far above me small as birds when they flew, and the earth to them was a sandbox in our backyard where I made roads to a house I never found. I often think of wives in tract houses. The cows and pigs my father yarded before they walked up the ramp to the kill. Sometimes I thought we were together because of something terrible we had done. My father's Cherokee heritage tucked under some sort of shame. The past _______ What was it? I call to them above me no larger than a leaf.

Herr Stimmung—purblind—moves in corporeal time. Think how many, by now, have escaped the world’s memory. Think, how all his wandering is only thought. Having once tried to live in the quasi-stupor of sensation, now he picks his way through areas of spilth, seeking the least among infinite evils. His hope: intermittent. To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die? Though he feels, true enough, death’s wither-clench. Thinking always of something permanent, watching the while how everything goes on changing. He has seen where Speed is buried. Eyes exorbitant. He has the tension of male and female: active, divided. Anger and lust. What he eats tastes exactly like real food. He would search out interphenomena, if he could decipher the interstices. The broken line. Immediate havoc. Circular heaven. Square earth. He cries world world, and there is no world. He claims superiority over the other animals, being the only one who can talk, the only one to have doubts. Herr Stimmung knows a whale is big. Its skeleton might shelter a dozen men. Not existing, not subsisting—in sisting. Not object, not subject— e ject. (He works within opposed systems, every one of them opposed to system.) “Fillette”—in confusion he addresses himself—“n’allez pas au bois seulette.” He knows who is allowed to wear what kinds of beads. He knows how fruit trees are inherited. All his self-objects lie in the inoperative past. Herr Stimmung springs from a long undocumented ancestry. He has a special attitude towards terror.