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Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname: there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex, and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra, two sisters, Swing and Sway. Swing jitterbugged, hopping around on the dance floor, working up a sweat. Sway was beautiful. My heart went out to her when she lifted her heavy rack of dishes and passed through the swinging door. She was engaged, to an enlisted man who was stationed at Fort Dix. He came once or twice on weekends to see her. I tried talking to him, but he didn’t answer ... out of stupidity or dislike, I could not tell which. In real life he was a furniture salesman. This was the hero on whom she had chosen to bestow her affections. I told her of my ambition: to write novels conveying the excitement of life ... the main building lit up like a liner on Saturday night; the sound of the band ... clarinet, saxophone, snare drum, piano. He who would know your heart (America) must seek it in your songs. And the contents of your purse ... among Kleenex, aspirin, chewing gum wrappers, combs, et cetera. “Don’t stop,” she said, “I’m listening. Here it is!” flourishing her lighter. * In the afternoon when the dishes were washed and tables wiped, we rowed out on the lake. I read aloud ...The Duino Elegies, while she reclined, one shapely knee up, trailing a hand in the water. She had chestnut-colored hair. Her eyes were changing like the surface with ripples and the shadows of clouds. “Beauty,” I read to her, “is nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear.” * She came from Jersey, the industrial wasteland behind which Manhattan suddenly rises. I could visualize the street where she lived, and see her muffled against the cold, in galoshes, trudging to school. Running about in tennis shoes all through the summer ... I could hear the porch swing squeak and see into the parlor. It was divided by a curtain or screen ... “That’s it,” she said, “all but the screen. There isn’t any.” When she or her sister had a boyfriend their mother used to stay in the parlor, pretending to sew, and keeping an eye on them like Fate. At night she would lie awake looking at the sky, spangled over. Her thoughts were as deep and wide as the sky. As time went by she had a feeling of missing out ... that everything was happening somewhere else. Some of the kids she grew up with went crazy ... like a car turning over and over. One of her friends had been beaten by the police. Some vital fluid seemed to have gone out of him. His arms and legs shook. Busted springs. * She said, “When you’re a famous novelist will you write about me?” I promised ... and tried to keep my promise. Recently, looking for a toolbox, I came upon some typewritten pages, all about her. There she is in a canoe ... a gust of wind rustling the leaves along the shore. Playing tennis, running up and down the baseline. Down by the boathouse, listening to the orchestra playing “Sleepy Lagoon.” Then the trouble begins. I can never think of anything to make the characters do. We are still sitting in the moonlight while she finishes her cigarette. Two people go by, talking in low voices. A car door slams. Driving off ... “I suppose we ought to go,” I say. And she says, “Not yet.”

The cruelest thing I did to my dog wasn’t to ignore his barking for water when his tongue hung like a deflated balloon or to disregard his chronic need for a belly rub but to teach him to shake hands, a trick that took weeks of treats, his dark eyes like Greek olives, moist with desire. I made him sit, another injustice, and allowed him to want the nuggets enough to please me.Shake, I said.Shake? touching the back of his right leg until he lifted it, his saliva trickling from soft jowls, my hand wet with his hunger. Mistress of the biscuit, I ruffled his ears and said good dog until he got it. Before long, he raised his paw, shook me until he got the treat, the rub, the water in a chilled silver bowl, the wilderness in him gone, his eyes still lit with longing.

Facing the wind of the avenues one spring evening in New York, I wore under my thin jacket a sweater given me by the wife of a genial Manchurian. The warmth in that sweater changed the indifferent city block by block. The buildings were mountains that fled as I approached them. The traffic became sheep and cattle milling in muddy pastures. I could feel around me the large movements of men and horses. It was spring in Siberia or Mongolia, wherever I happened to be. Rough but honest voices called to me out of that solitude: they told me we are all tired of this coiling weight, the oppression of a long winter; that it was time to renew our life, burn the expired contracts, elect new governments. The old Imperial sun has set, and I must write a poem to the Emperor. I shall speak it like the man I should be, an inhabitant of the frontier, clad in sweat-darkened wool, my face stained by wind and smoke. Surely the Emperor and his court will want to know what a fine and generous revolution begins tomorrow in one of his remote provinces... (1967)

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small. I acknowledge there is no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain, no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet .... Tonight a friend called to say his lover was killed in a car he was driving. His voice was low and guttural, he repeated what he needed to repeat, and I repeated the one or two words we have for such grief until we were speaking only in tones. Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source. As for me, I don’t care where it’s been, or what bitter road it’s traveled to come so far, to taste so good.

I think of the man who sat behind my grandmother’s sister in church and told her the percentage of Indian in her blood, calling it out over the white pews. I wonder what made him want to count it like coins or a grade. I wish I could hear him now when I think of her saying that all the Wampanoag blood in her body would fit in one finger, discounting the percentage it seemed, but why was she such a historian, tracing the genealogy of the last Wampanoag up to her own children, typing it all on see-through paper? Maybe like me she felt a little self-conscious caring about what we’re made of instead of simply being satisfied dressing our bodies and driving them around. Maybe she felt shy for loving someone she’d never met, I mean I do. I think of the knife cutting into flesh and the fork carrying it

Most of the past is lost, and I’m glad mine has vanished into blackness or space or whatever nowhere what we feel and do goes, but there were a few cool Sunday afternoons when my father wasn’t sick with hangover and the air in the house wasn’t foul with anger and the best china had been cleared after the week’s best meal so he could place on the table his violins to polish with their special cloth and oil. Three violins he’d arrange side by side in their velvet-lined cases with enough room between for the lids to lie open. They looked like children in coffins, three infant sisters whose hearts had stopped for no reason, but after he rubbed up their scrolls and waists along the lines of the grain to the highest sheen, they took on the knowing postures of women in silk gowns in magazine ads for new cars and ocean voyages, and, as if a violin were a car in storage that needed a spin around the block every so often, for fifteen minutes he’d play each one— though not until each horsehair bow was precisely tightened, and coated with rosin, and we had undergone an eon of tuning. When he played, no one was allowed to speak to him. He seemed to see something drastic across the room or feel it through his handkerchief padding the chin board. So we’d hop in front of him waving or making pig noses the way kids do to guards at Buckingham Palace, and after he had finished playing and had returned to himself, he’d softly curse the idiocy of his children beneath my mother’s voice yelling to him from the kitchen That was beautiful, Paul, play it again. He never did, and I always hoped he wouldn’t, because the whole time I was waiting for his switchblade to appear, and the new stories he’d tell me for the scar thin as a seam up the white underside of his forearm, for the chunks of proud flesh on his back and belly, scarlet souvenirs of East St. Louis dance halls in the Twenties, cornered in men’s rooms, ganged in blind alleys, always slashing out alone with this knife. First the violins had to be snug again inside their black cases for who knew how many more months or years or lifetimes; then he had to pretend to have forgotten why I was sitting there wide-eyed across from him long after my sister and brother had gone off with friends. Every time, as if only an afterthought, He’d sneak into his pocket and ease the switchblade onto the bare table between us, its thumb-button jutting from the pearl-and-silver plating like the eye of some sleek prehistoric fish. I must have known it wouldn’t come to life and slither toward me by itself, but when he’d finally nod to me to take it its touch was still warm with his body heat and I could feel the blade inside aching to flash open with the terrible click that sounds now like just a tsk of disappointment, it has become so sweet and quiet.

The wind that makes your hair grow faster opens a child’s mouth full of strawberry and sand. Slow and sure on the scales of the ocean the child’s head outweighs the sun. Inside of the wind— a blister of a church, its walls thicker than the space from wall to wall where the wind shifts shade and light like two rival chess pieces or two unmatched pieces of furniture. Inside of the church—such a stillness that when a feather floats down in a fist of dust it becomes a rock by the time it hits the ground. Organ pipes glint like a cold radiator, contained in a case of a carved tree, its branches tied up with a snake. Organ pedals, golden and plump, are the tree’s only fruit. It is all about the release of weight: the player crushes the pedals like grapes underneath his feet. My body, like an inaccurate cashier, adds your weight to itself. Your name, called into the wind, slows the wind down. When a body is ripe, it falls and rots from the softest spot. Only when a child slips and drops off a tree, the tree suddenly learns that it is barren.

If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death, nor Will you feel the tulip’s skin, nor the soft gravel Of childhood under cheek. You will have writhed Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, ass High as any downward dog, and cutlass arms Lashing any mother who tries to pass: Let’s be frank About the cost of spurs, mothers like peonies Whirling in storm drains, families sunk before Reaching open water. The empty boudoir Will haunt, but not how you imagine it will. Nothing, not even death frees mothers From the cutting board, the balloons, their Lack of resistance, thoughts, he said, quick As tulips staggering across the quad. She heard, I like my women splayed Out, red. Read swollen, domesticated, Wanting out. The tulips were never warm My loves, they never smelled of spring, They never marked the path out of loneliness, Never led me home, nor to me, nor away From what spring, or red, or tulips Could never be.

I know what the caged bird feels, alas! When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass, And the river flows like a stream of glass; When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, And the faint perfume from its chalice steals— I know what the caged bird feels! I know why the caged bird beats his wing Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; For he must fly back to his perch and cling When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars And they pulse again with a keener sting— I know why he beats his wing! I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings!

1 She pressed her ear against the shell: she wanted to hear everything he never told her. 2 A single inch separates their two bodies facing one another in the picture: a framed smile buried beneath the rubble. 3 Whenever you throw stones into the sea it sends ripples through me. 4 My heart’s quite small: that’s why it fills so quickly. 5 Water needs no wars to mix with water and fill up spaces. 6 The tree doesn’t ask why it’s not moving to some other forest nor any other pointless questions. 7 He watches tv while she holds a novel. On the novel’s cover there’s a man watching tv and a woman holding a novel. 8 On the first morning of the new year all of us will look up at the same sun. 9 She raised his head to her chest. He did not respond: he was dead. 10 The person who gazed at me for so long, and whose gaze I returned for just as long . . . That man who never once embraced me, and whom I never once embraced  . . . The rain wrecked the colors around him on that old canvas. 11 He was not with the husbands who were lost and then found; he did not come with the prisoners of war, nor with the kite that took her, in her dream, to some other place, while she stood before the camera to have her smile glued into the passport. 12 Dates piled high beside the road: your way of  kissing me. 13 Rapunzel’s hair reaching down from the window to the earth is how we wait. 14 The shadows the prisoners left on the wall surrounded the jailer and cast light on his loneliness. 15 Homeland, I am not your mother, so why do you weep in my lap like this every time something hurts you? 16 Never mind this bird: it comes every day and stops at the branch’s edge to sing for an hour or two. That’s all it does: nothing makes it happier. 17 House keys, identity cards, faded pictures among the bones . . . All of these are scattered in a single mass grave. 18 The Arabic language loves long sentences and long wars. It loves never-ending songs and late nights and weeping over ruins. It loves working for a long life and a long death. 19 Far away from home — that’s all that changed in us. 20 Cinderella left her slipper in Iraq along with the smell of cardamom wafting from the teapot, and that huge flower, its mouth gaping like death. 21 Instant messages ignite revolutions. They spark new lives waiting for a country to download, a land that’s little more than a handful of dust when faced with these words: “There are no results that match your search.” 22 The dog’s excitement as she brings the stick to her owner is the moment of opening the letter. 23 We cross borders lightly like clouds. Nothing carries us, but as we move on we carry rain, and an accent, and a memory of another place. 24 How thrilling to appear in his eyes. She can’t understand what he’s saying: she’s too busy chewing his voice. She looks at the mouth she’ll never kiss, at the shoulder she’ll never cry on, at the hand she’ll never hold, and at the ground where their shadows meet.