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And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally— it is only the force we exert all our lives to exclude death from our thoughts that confronts us, when it does arrive, as the horror of being excluded— . . . something like that, the Canadian wind coming in off Lake Erie rattling the windows, horizontal snow appearing out of nowhere across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.

I hate the travel logs that tell you more about the pain than the place, yet here I am again, narrating the same old story to myself time after time. The papers circling in an alley, watched by a hunchback, mimic my plans and their preventer; when an old man treats the drycleaner to a lengthy sermon on spotting, I collect it; bloated clouds spell messages that people stopped hearing long ago, and as for the hag who runs at me, arms open, mouth bleeding? She’s my future, my terrible double. Always I head out, hot for details, and always the details start revolving around brave ingénues who put their innocent hands in wicked bonfires. I could never go for ten minutes without seeing fissures as faces, and I confess a hopeless weakness for the types who come back from travels, gather their fans around and tell them stories of order or of wonder: seashores and meadows sometimes get so muffled and many-voiced that tourists storm in and do their talking for them— It’s addictive, magical, vital. But I’ve observed how, more and more, these promising outings are becoming meta-walks and mechanized phrases: “When I ventured into the outback, how it blared back echoes of me, my bright dreams and tragic uniqueness.” Meanwhile forces of good and evil squirm and flourish under the carpet, mocking the visionary moment’s sweeping appeal. I’ll go on going out for scenes of horror and pleasure, but I’ll start pursuing clues leading to the return of that enormous, fertile ground between shouting and silence.

A thousand martyrs I have made, All sacrificed to my desire; A thousand beauties have betrayed, That languish in resistless fire. The untamed heart to hand I brought, And fixed the wild and wandering thought. I never vowed nor sighed in vain But both, though false, were well received. The fair are pleased to give us pain, And what they wish is soon believed. And though I talked of wounds and smart, Love’s pleasures only touched my heart. Alone the glory and the spoil I always laughing bore away; The triumphs, without pain or toil, Without the hell, the heav’n of joy. And while I thus at random rove Despise the fools that whine for love.

Ce qui est beau à Leningrad, c’est Saint Petersbourg. What fellow traveller returned from the U.S.S.R., Burdened with souvenirs in the form of second thoughts, said That, rephrasing the Slavic platitude as a reactionary epigram? Thence One must count oneself privileged to have escaped empty-handed, Frisked in exit by the incompetent customs of the country Who got everything backwards, inspecting my papers with a glass: Bourgeois formalism apart, my handwriting looks like a decadent cipher. “Chto eto?” The pocket epic or this wordy verse?“Poezia.” Insisting it scans as prose they confiscate War and Peace: The classic comeback: loved her, hated him, your eponymous warhead In gremium qui saepe se reicit aeterno devictus vulnere amoris: Even apologists for free love must confess this pair legally Wed, a union no sentimental do-gooder likes to solemnize. V., I’m afraid the authorities took away your name Which they found in my notebook. Asked who you were, I said, “Someone I met in a restaurant.” Not so: You were a pick-up of sorts on Nevsky Prospekt Where as I puzzled over a plan filched from Intourist That first evening you appeared eager to be of help. In exchange for a few verbatim tips on English idiom (“Tell me, please, is it better, ‘Here you are!’ or ‘There it is!’ ”) you afforded me a smattering of Russian— Dom, dub, tsat, eima dvorets, knigi, mir, ya ne ponemayu, House—oak—garden—winter-palace—books—world—I don’t understand— And your jealous services as a guide to the environs When you were “free from class”. Unlike the other touts, Official and unofficial, who besieged the foreigners’ hotel, you never Asked for cigarettes or dollars nor offered girls or watches, But wanted books and talk. Whether you were an agent I am not absolute. If so, it doesn’t figure. Who sold me “art treasures” to take out, a nickel Samovar and the biscuit bust of Pushkin, price two rubles, From that popular Thrift Shop where one bought antiques, the Only place in Leningrad to find silverware, glass, or china, As department stores seemed to stock nothing but plastic gimcracks? Enough economics—unless I just mention in passing the maids At the hotel, patriots whom I detected to be helping Themselves to my dwindling whisky. When I locked it up One morning, on my return I found the bed unmade. Still there are things I want to ask you, V. Are you in prison or power? Were you really interrogated As you foretold if you were seen with me? Paranoid Melodrama I supposed, yet daily life in never-never land. You warned me one was followed, watched, suspected, bugged, betrayed As a matter of course, and there were certain places We mustn’t be seen together in public, like divorcées. Out of bounds to you the doldrums of the Europa. Every day you used to suggest some novel rendezvous Where until you materialized no one was in evidence. Dialectics make impossible bedfellows. Are you today the interrogator You once were, inexhaustible in futile questions of American usage? Following a call at the single synagogue, where we tapped The anti-semitic party line, you invited me back for A supper of black bread, sausage, and sweet white wine. No English on the stair or in the common hallway You cautioned, but your student’s room itself was an asylum, With an encyclopaedia, your father’s paintings, a dusty grand piano (“I was used to play.”), and the telephone. “Talk now!” The couple embracing in the entrance, were they also spies? What circuitous routes we pursued in our innocent sight-seeing, How vast the meander of the stone Hermitage which holds A pictorial history of pillaged Europe, where the fat, satisfied Intelligent bust of the Holstein Messalina smirks from its pedestal, As at Tsarskoe Selo, which the present regime calls Pushkin. There, amid monumental, autumnal ruin, in a neo-gothic folly, Lunching on lard, I learned the Russian word for cosy, Oiutny: neither Pavlovsk, that meticulously restored memorial to filial resentment Nor Peterhof’s post-war proletarian Renaissance trick pavilions quite qualify. I go on like a guidebook, there being none such. Nowhere could we find a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary Or maps less rudimentary than those of a vanished century. Lies appropriately describe this sequestrated Czarist capital founded on water, Edifice of pure will and an idea, double-glazed window Closed on the West. The past lingers along the Neva Like a revisionist prince: pink, green, ochre, robin’s-egg-blue Italianate confectionery on a Scythian scale. You wanted to know Why all foreigners are so fascinated by palaces and churches Used as cinemas and baths? Our taste is counter-revolutionary. Just fancy playing Soviet monopoly or enduring social-realist monotony! And having nothing to read but Lenin and Jack London Unless in samizdat! I am unable to appreciate a solitary Line of Russian verse in translation, from Bogan to Brodski. Although, like Leningrad at the same time fantastic and prosaic, Your novels form a sort of exotic province of English, I don’t know why, inimitable Pushkin is a noted bore. But who came here to talk about literature? The night Before leaving I invited you to squander my last vouchers Somewhere they, and we, would be accepted at face value: After two helpings of chicken you ordered another, of veal. Russkaya dusha! What if we were brothers? Haven’t men More in common than their wants, such as language, a Skeleton key rattled in so many locks? With all utopias, The farther from perfection the better; this future that works Looks so old-fashioned and unkind. Although the masses may Be content, unhappy, or indifferent, excellence is an individual gesture. Malice, too, is personal. The destroyer Aurora opposite Intourist’s incongruous Glass prison, her heroes liquidated, will she ever lift anchor For the free world? Here, perhaps better dead than read, Instead of the Concise Oxford Dictionary you wanted, this letter.

this is true a man in an alley grabbed my arm this is true someone called me and left the phone dangling at the post office this is true a man stalked me someone tells a story someone tells a story to another person another person says I don't believe this someone tells the story again in an attempt to convince someone tells as disbelief is easy belief is difficult, supported by constraint but a woman knows a man stalked her knows this is true a woman knows her own address her own body her lost domain, her desires, her confusions someone tells a story there are things people can do to themselves they are: leave molotov cocktail on own yard set fire to own house leave a glass of urine on own porch leave envelope of feces outside own door send a butcher knife to self at work send letter to health department that self is spreading VD stab own back someone tells this story says this is true self turns on self the knife enters at a point that the self could not have reached but did someone tells and then repeats and she stalks herself several times to convince someone tries to enter into the information to pass words back and forth that have meaning fails, resorts to this is true this is true a woman calls her stalker The Poet this is true a woman describes a stalker in terms that describe herself this is true a woman stalked herself to kill herself this is true a woman is at times a man when a fish is hooked other fish don't see the hook thrashing seems crazy the hook could be the branding of a woman at a young age by a man or an older male neighbor spending too much time with a child or the boring nature of life in the story the hook is the artist's rendering of the stalker as described by the woman it is the woman in a man's face she does not know this man thrashing seems crazy later she realizes it is herself her knife her hook her own face she was always drawing male this is true as thrashing is not crazy when one is on the hook

Threadsuns above the grayblack wastes. A tree- high thought grasps the light-tone: there are still songs to sing beyond mankind.

Know this: I live beast days. I am a water hour. At night my eyelids droop like forest and sky. My love knows few words: I like it in your blood.

Our cabdriver tells us how Somalia is better than here because in Islam we execute murderers. So, fewer murders.But isn't there civil war there now? Aren't there a lot of murders? Yes, but in general it's better. Not now, but most of the time. He tells us about how smart the system is, how it's hard to bear false witness. We nod. We're learning a lot. I say—once we are close to the house—I say,What about us? Two women, married to each other. Don't be offended, he says, gravely.But a man with a man, a woman with a woman: it would be a public execution. We nod. A little silence along the Southeast Corridor. Then I say,Yeah, I love my country. This makes him laugh; we all laugh. We aren't offended, says Josey.We love you. Sometimes I feel like we're proselytizing, spreading the Word of Gay. The cab is shaking with laughter, the poor man relieved we're not mad he sort of wants us dead. The two of us soothing him, wanting him comfortable, wanting him to laugh.We love our country, we tell him. And Josey tips him. She tips him well.

1642 Argonne Place, NW Alley of giant air conditioners, you roared your ill wind our way day and night. We burned you down, little house, but you rose right up again. We played guitars by candlelight and sang songs to the cat. We stole each other’s cake and dope, dancing all night, sleeping late, driving down Columbia Road to the Omega for Mexican-style chicken, which two lovers could live on for an entire day. We threatened you with a sledgehammer if you wouldn’t let us go. Enough, you finally stammered, be gone from Argonne! 1920 S St. NW: The Chateau Thierry If you opened the door without thinking, the entire neighborhood gushed into the apartment like an open hydrant.  We gathered around the black and white tv  like it was a tabernacle containing the secrets we yearned to know.  The first Gay Pride Day made the building tremble so violently the roaches scurried from the cracks and crevices looking for safer quarters.  Theodore, Edward, and Al ran the only manual elevator still going in our part of town. Casey, violent and crazy, dealt coke out of his first floor apartment.  Mara owned a dozen petite dogs to be avoided at all costs. Zoltan Farkas wrote The Baltimore Poems and disappeared completely from the landscape. I had a brass bed, my altar of love, and a cat named Spooky.  People yelled my name up the side of the building, I threw them a key out the window, and they rose up to the fifth floor and through that open door into my abode of bliss, which I still miss. 3701 Massachusetts Ave. NW: Cathedral Court They told me I was moving to the geriatric district. No Metro up there, they warned.  But I was now on top of the hill, across the street from one of God’s most prestigious addresses. I would stare at the naked bodies carved above the Cathedral entrance, like a page torn from the Playboy version of Genesis, thinking yes—this is the way religion should be. A bus took me back to Dupont Circle in three minutes.  At night I’d walk home up Mass Ave, past all the embassies, loving to touch down momentarily on Irish soil, salute the statue of Gibran, great poet of wedding-vow love, hail Mary and Tom and Cyn and Steve.  Pick up the mail. Waltz with Susan in the enormous living room, then lie in bed at night, by the window, hypnotized by the big cake of a church bathed in its rosy blush of light, fireworks erupting somewhere in the city’s distant dark.

Three ants met on the nose of a man who was asleep in the sun.  And after they had saluted one another, each according to the custom of his tribe, they stood there conversing. The first ant said, “These hills and plains are the most barren I have known.  I have searched all day for a grain of some sort, and there is none to be found.” Said the second ant, “I too have found nothing, though I have visited every nook and glade.  This is, I believe, what my people call the soft, moving land where nothing grows.” Then the third ant raised his head and said, “My friends, we are standing now on the nose of the Supreme Ant, the mighty and infinite Ant, whose body is so great that we cannot see it, whose shadow is so vast that we cannot trace it, whose voice is so loud that we cannot hear it; and He is omnipresent.” When the third ant spoke thus the other ants looked at each other and laughed. At that moment the man moved and in his sleep raised his hand and scratched his nose, and the three ants were crushed.