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Who would be a turtle who could help it? A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, she can ill afford the chances she must take in rowing toward the grasses that she eats. Her track is graceless, like dragging a packing-case places, and almost any slope defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, she's often stuck up to the axle on her way to something edible. With everything optimal, she skirts the ditch which would convert her shell into a serving dish. She lives below luck-level, never imagining some lottery will change her load of pottery to wings. Her only levity is patience, the sport of truly chastened things.

The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled Cuban rumba dancer's fancy dress. In my California kindergarten class, the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT. It's the moment when I first begin to learn that teachers can be wrong. They have never seen the dancing plants of Cuba.

Humps of shell emerge from dark water. Believers toss hunks of bread, hoping the fat reptilian heads will loom forth from the murk and eat. Meaning:you have been heard.

What a fuckup you are. What dumbshit you do. Your father's voice still whispers in you, despite the joys that sweeten each day. Your Genius it isn't until, dying away, it worms back through the sparkling dream where you drown him in an inch-deep stream: your knee in his back, your strength on his skull, it begins singing praise for your skill.

A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star Sad in the west; And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far, Rememberest: Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow And fragrant hair, Falling as in the silence falleth now Dusk from the air. Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why, Poor heart, repine, If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh Was never thine?

A lavender fog breeds with our children. Our girls are dying on the roadsides, their wombs pried open by the scramble that grows inside. Save us from the lavender fog — it’s the ghosts of your dead people, who have never bothered our village before. Their shapes convulse in our water sources. When we get close enough to hear their ghostly voices, they say yum-yum pleadingly and shout out better better as in I’ll get better. Some of our children have taken these as lyrics. Your ghosts are corrupting the youth. Stop using us as musical instruments, this is a great taboo you have violated! Go back to making tubes of wood vibrate and scraping your goat gut.

If it’s true that Johnny Weismuller stole his Tarzan yell from the Alpine yodel, did Hank Williams in the back seat of his Cadillac dream the ululation of Bedouin women welcoming the horsemen back from war? When I was a boy only a fool would fake a country sound, and my father made his voice over to ring as simple as Jack Parr’s Midwest porkless, yamless, no-cornbread-or-cracklin’ patter. He didn’t want to be from Butts County, Georgia, and hated farm chores and coveralls. Football got him out. The FBI gave him a way to travel under cover, but I have heard him, years later, after choir practice and the church social, sit back with a Pall Mall and follow Eight-Finger Fleming’s banjo frail. He’d hold that smoke deep, his ash glowing till his throat was bathed in tar, and then he’d cut loose and scroll it out, a yodel to make Roy Rogers blush. It was no hymn, I’ll tell you. We had a brick split-level in the suburbs, and the radio station of choice adored Perry Como’s croon. My mother adopted words like boocoo and oodles to mask her peach-orchard drawl. An uncle might tell a farmer’s daughter joke, the rake fleeing the cocked shotgun stopping on a hill to yodel, “Andyouroldladytoo,” but nobody could say ain’t or you’uns or I’ll get to it directly

If my fingers could twang the guitar as before they would not be what they are and neither would I. I would be back in young-time. Incline towards me, Gwendolyn, this Monday, and lend me your ear while I loll on my pillows to turn your songs from strings into tin.

As if because you lay (deeply embarrassing) inside my body, I could (inconceivable) follow your swift thoughts into their blue immersion even now, stilettoes flickering, or schools of fish maneuvering, first clear and then occluded, though now and then a piercing gleam cuts through; as if the snow reflections that glaze the winter afternoon to porcelain could penetrate the secrets of a skull that happens to have lodged (improbable) inside me once. Your liberation twelve years ago today is the occasion you and your friends are celebrating now behind a door that’s firmly shut. The fantasy you’ve lately been devouring features an evil mage with hourglass eyes. Last week, when you were furious at me (I must have thrown some precious thing away), you swiftly slipped into your parents’ room and turned the bedside clock an hour ahead. Discovered as the culprit, wickedly you smiled. You knew time was my enemy.

The voice that beautifies the land! The voice above, The voice of thunder Within the dark cloud Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land. The voice that beautifies the land! The voice below, The voice of the grasshopper Among the plants Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.