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After a series of indiscretions a man stumbled homeward, thinking, now that I am going down from my misbehavior I am to be forgiven, because how I acted was not the true self, which I am now returning to. And I am not to be blamed for the past, because I’m to be seen as one redeemed in the present... But when he got to the threshold of his house his house said, go away, I am not at home. Not at home? A house is always at home; where else can it be? said the man. I am not at home to you, said his house. And so the man stumbled away into another series of indiscretions...

I sowed the seeds of love To blossom all the spring, In April, May, or else in June, When the small birds do sing: A gardener standing by, I desired him to choose for me; He picked out the lily, the violet, and pink, But I refused all three. The lily I refused, Because it faded so soon; The violet and pink I overlooked, Resolved was to tarry till June: In June the red roses bud, Oh, that is a lover for me; But I have often aimed at the red rose-bud, And I have gained the willow tree. The gardener standing by, He prayed me to have a care, For the thorn that grew on the red rose-bush, A venomous thorn they were: A venomous thorn indeed, For still I feel the smart; And every time I did it touch, It pricked my tender heart. Away you fading flowers, No more I will you touch, That all the world may plainly see I loved one flower too much.

Alas, how pleasant are their days With whom the infant Love yet plays! Sorted by pairs, they still are seen By fountains cool, and shadows green. But soon these flames do lose their light, Like meteors of a summer’s night: Nor can they to that region climb, To make impression upon time. ’Twas in a shipwreck, when the seas Ruled, and the winds did what they please, That my poor lover floating lay, And, ere brought forth, was cast away: Till at the last the master-wave Upon the rock his mother drave; And there she split against the stone, In a Caesarean sectión. The sea him lent those bitter tears Which at his eyes he always wears; And from the winds the sighs he bore, Which through his surging breast do roar. No day he saw but that which breaks Through frighted clouds in forkèd streaks, While round the rattling thunder hurled, As at the funeral of the world. While Nature to his birth presents This masque of quarrelling elements, A numerous fleet of cormorants black, That sailed insulting o’er the wrack, Received into their cruel care Th’ unfortunate and abject heir: Guardians most fit to entertain The orphan of the hurricane. They fed him up with hopes and air, Which soon digested to despair, And as one cormorant fed him, still Another on his heart did bill, Thus while they famish him, and feast, He both consumèd, and increased: And languishèd with doubtful breath, The amphibíum of life and death. And now, when angry heaven would Behold a spectacle of blood, Fortune and he are called to play At sharp before it all the day: And tyrant Love his breast does ply With all his winged artillery, Whilst he, betwixt the flames and waves, Like Ajax, the mad tempest braves. See how he nak’d and fierce does stand, Cuffing the thunder with one hand, While with the other he does lock, And grapple, with the stubborn rock: From which he with each wave rebounds, Torn into flames, and ragg’d with wounds, And all he ’says, a lover dressed In his own blood does relish best. This is the only banneret That ever Love created yet: Who though, by the malignant stars, Forcèd to live in storms and wars, Yet dying leaves a perfume here, And music within every ear: And he in story only rules, In a field sable a lover gules.

The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about space flight, so we got sent to the back of the class. I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee & everyday Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal— were winners. American, because a few days before, a failed songwriter put a bullet in the president in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when it finally landed, the class broke into applause & the teacher snatched a thinning American flag from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor of our wounded president & those astronauts.

One thing I’m not doing in my poems: reporting on anything that really happened. When I say I’m from New York, Glaswegians say, “Oh, I love Woody Allen.” They cannot construe how large a state can be. I just happen to actually be from Manhattan. How impractical, to imagine that a structure like a government would be responsive to the needs of such a lot of people. Held like in a holding pen. In the early 1990s I saw a yellow Indian drunk in a tattoo parlor in Seattle. He literally said he could literally see right through me. If he said it figuratively I took it literally. A lot of people in America do not want regulation from the government. In principle: our forefathers, our persecution. Ideally we wouldn’t need industries and individual actions to be regulated. We wouldn’t even need laws. People, including people who run corporations or work for them, would just behave responsibly. Corporations would take the responsibility of personhood seriously. My mother cannot be trusted to restrict me from buying R-rated videogames at the porn store. My mother struggled to love me—the firstborn had been so tractable—she still struggles to love me—can she be commanded to love me? Now I see what those commandments are about. There must be a God. Objectively we could expect that our family members would go out of their way to behave toward us with extra care, concern, and with love. Sometimes there is a harsh disjunction between what objective perception would suggest to us we might expect and what really takes place, or “occurs,” within the framework of what we call “our lives.” I really saw the other day for the first time that my mother did not naturally take to me—I am not much like her. It would take an effort for her to understand what matters to me. (Her love will come around.) My own daughter is quite different from me—I think—it’s hard to tell, she is only five years old. But she looks different — t akes after her father, as I took after mine—and so far her concerns are not my own. She loves pink. I hate pink. (My love moves faster.) Where would that moral activity come from, to behave responsibly toward others? Not to overcharge, not to seek loopholes, not to dominate, not to oppress. Does anyone consciously oppress? I guess some spousal abuse comes from the pure urge to dominate, and the ire that results when that domination is resisted, or thwarted . . . But is it a pure urge or is it coming from an inscribed narrative of gendered hierarchy? Like a man wearing a wife-beater has been told too many times that his wife is supposed to listen to him and obey him. Now if he can be told by the government that “My Strength Is Not for Hurting,” a local billboard campaign, maybe that will ring in his ears when he lifts his fist. If the government doesn’t do it, who will do it? The church used to do it, and still does. The one time I went to church, with my mother, in Tennessee, when we were at a family reunion and the whole family had certain activities, and one of them was “church on Sunday,” I was brought to tears by the simple goodness of the message that the pastor, or reverend —minister?—this was a Methodist church—was preaching. It was Father’s Day, actually, and he talked about how fathers ought to make sure to spend time with their kids. Turn off the TV, he said, and spend some time with your kids. I was crying because I am not used to an experience of shared instruction in goodness. It was very moving to be in a room with real people all receiving the same instruction.

Flags of all sorts. The literary life. Each time we dreamt we’d done the gentlemanly thing, covering our causes in closets full of bones to remove ourselves forever from dearest possibilities, the old weapons re-injured us, the old armies conscripted us, and we gave in to getting even, a little less like us if a lot less like others. Many, thus, gained fame in the way of great plunderers, retiring to the university to cultivate grand plunder-gardens in the service of literature, the young and no more wars. Their continuing tributes make them our greatest saviors, whose many fortunes are followed by the many who have not one.

When despair— you who enjoyed great triumphs and walked with confidence and the memory of many gifts of delirium and dawns and unexpected turns— when despair wants you in its grip, and threatens you from some unfathomable depth with destruction and the guttering out of your flame: then think of the unsatisfied ones, with their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions, loyal to a few memories that held out little hope, who still bought flowers, and with a smile of not much luminosity confided secret desires to their small-scale heavens that were soon to be extinguished.

In the beginning we could hear their swords cutting jewels From the protected orchard while our children heard fine teeth Dragging along empty granary floors. Between us and them Stands the great wound, swallowing all tears, all voices. Transfixed or transformed by this pain? We never know because Who can slip through the gate without throwing a shadow Toward both the past and present? Fire, flood, famine— All we've wished upon them a thousand times, still they inch Back and taunt us with their persistence. We track them down To a quick end. More come. And the old memories grow new. The future seems already written with a pen of iron. The book Unreadable, immense. The enemy has become our masterpiece.

—For Dioniso D. Martínez Take Detroit, where boys are manufactured into men, where you learn to think in American. You speak to no one unless someone speaks to you. Everyone is suspect: baldheaded carriers from the post office; old Polish ladies who swear to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary; your brother, especially your brother, waiting in a long line for work. There’s always a flip side. No matter what happens, tomorrow is a day away, or a gin bottle if you can’t sleep, and if you stopped drinking, a pack of cigarettes. After that, you’re on your own, you pack up and leave. You still call the city beside the strait home. Make no mistake, it’s miserable. After all, you bought a one-way Greyhound ticket, cursed each and every pothole on the road out. But that’s where you stood before a  mirror in the dark, where you were too tired to complain. You never go back. Things could be worse. Maybe. Detroit is a shithole, it’s where you were pulled from the womb into the streets. Listen, when I say Detroit, I mean any place. By thinking American, I mean made.

Were it not for that photograph, disaster in its final stages, matchbox houses coming down, rubble of streets, uprooted trees, lives we somehow could not envision, removed from us and not our own, on distant coasts the fall of night, we might never have thought of Darwin, remembered what we had forgotten, nothing but desert at our backs, somewhere the light gone grey, gone green, the very texture of the air evoking strangeness in us, distance, deepwater harbor on the rim of an island whose aspirations, despite itself, assume proportions hemispheric, continental, set adrift in uncharted waters where a wind from the Timor Sea smacks of Celebes, of Java, celebrates archipelagoes for which no names have been devised, where rain runs green, and rocks dream gold, where every morning, on our tongues, we taste the raging of the dust gathering at abandoned stations and know, or come to know, the life, the littoral on which we wait, though not yet clearly its true name, not precisely its purpose with us; where, naked, night to night, inventing names for our nakedness, we lie suspended under the Equator between the wastes of self and weather, trying to learn ourselves, our names, what to make of this emptiness, this sense of absence which afflicts us, forgetting what we must remember, the great Australian coast spun out beyond our scrutiny in shales, corals, limestones, salt scrub, sand, discovery at every turn and, this far south, no turning back, latitudes of impossible dimensions bleaching the horizon, mapping what will not quite stay mapped, nothing but desert at our backs, nothing but darkness to advance on, night on the routes that enter strangeness more dangerously, in the evening, than we can bring ourselves to say, darkness and an interior for which, of course, there is no name except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.