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We’re sitting in Uncle Sam’s Subs, splitting a cheesesteak, when Shelley says: I think I should buy a gun. I look up at her puffy face, and she’s staring, her hands shaking. On medication for schizophrenia, she’s serious. I say,Tell me why you need a gun. Her voice getting louder:You know why. No, no I don’t, I say. In case I need it. I might need it to shoot somebody. I give her a hard look —You don’t need a gun. No one is after you.

Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that said low sodium and no preservatives, instead bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer— how could I have denied him his few final pleasures?— until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near the night stand, his stash— a half-used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress now stripped of stained sheets and studied that blue label with the girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt still falling from the sky.

A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave, How slow! but never once they slip the thread. Hither, upon the Georgian idler’s tread, Up spacious ways the lindens interleave, Clouding the royal air since yester-eve, Come men bereft of time and scant of bread, Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead, Thro’ the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve. What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so The clear Republic waits the general throe, Along her noonday mountains’ open range. God be with both! for one is young to know The other’s rote of evil and of change.

As Walter settled in to finish his coffee, he was struck by a phantom, peripheral visage, white as pins in flight, or bunny white, in haze — a visit from “The Agent,” in the nominal parlance of chemical memory, calling from a distant muddied element. Or was it merely the milk he’d spilled in a fatuous fit, hooking out to the Brooklyn back of his cup? All he could abide, he put his face down in the muck, and made off for The Dude’s abode. “These are purple times,” he thought, “when pseudo-pious cliques strike polyester poses while jockeying for pockets. And mocking fatuous Donny? That sweet prince, that palsied, hiccuping flake of bunny fluff?” Not for this aggression would he stand — not for that element. It required satisfaction, and of superior sort to parlance. Oh, but he would have his ear! Though for this spar: lance and blade, tooth and trigger — less to mind, and more, would he abide, in body to this immodest plum-clad receptacle. He popped a Velemint, and rang His Dudeness’s door. “Bolted,” Duder’s hand had struck in ink, “Out of cream. Gone to market. 8pm practice.” His buddy was benumbed: “Dash this dairy! You’ve become fat to us with cordials of coffee and curds. Oh, uncareful beverage! Such fatuous froth and foam will be your undoing!” Yet not undone, but in parlay with his special lady, laid up in zesty enterprise, coital as bunnies, making maudlin moan. The story is ludicrous. Though if one abides that one must “feed one’s monkey,” in manner most gutter-struck, and not with precious prandials, “Brie pour lui. Et pour elle, 
emmental,” one can dig El Duderino’s doings. All others are cowards — elements without sentiment, without Johnsons or ethos, foreign and fatuous, with lingonberries on leashes, and marmot marmalades struck onto pancakes. Neither good men nor thorough, poor in parlance and in practice, unable to fix cable or walk on water — though may abide it when seated, in slumber, in summer, with clouds above, as Bunny puffs on polish. The poor woman, helpless as a frail fawn beneath a nude sun. A trophy wife, atrophied, fallen in with the wrong element: known pornographers; sycophants; Aimee Mann. Difficult to abide, and not exactly lightweights, is she herself to blame for her fatuous caprices? Her husband’s lost legs? The Dude’s stained parlor rug — his only tether, the life and memory of it, dimmed when stricken? Oh, the little for which we are compensated. About the size of our abidance, and theirs: some Credence tapes; a can of ashes, released to the 
elements; specklike Brandt, crisp and shivering. A yet-to-be-dismantled toe, Bunny’s.

He was trying to teach me to economize with my language.Strindberg gray he said, instead of and I thought, sad stuff; plays. Okay: born, rented room, to Dad & Mom business & bar, how could you not? Or thought, I cannot be your Lithuania nor her other Armenia, emptied into river if not skein-tangled senseless. He won’t say her name and not a word of the thitherings. Only that she was lost. Don’t speak the heavy hinges, the crushed-bud breaking of taste from language. That sort of excess has no place in the new economy. Strindberg gray, say, when one thinks only January, January, January. Of the Occurrence as recurrent. A single gunshot in Dempster’s cistern, the echo chambers of sleep. The gray lot of days in low-light hospitals, Strindberg. I’ll call him gray, his sitting heavy. And her so Strindberg with veil and rose, her poised in shadow at the door. Funereal nails sunk into knees would be dripping were they not so goddamn gray. Excess was for days when my mother sat turning grape leaves with three sets of pockets: Turkish, English, & Armenian, plus lemon to dry it all out. By ten, they’d sewn up two; said one is more than enough. “English, only, Sanossian. You will speak what we speak.” I don’t know what it’s like to lose a language. Instead, Strindberg gray, I say, when I want to bring his lost girl back. Strindberg gray, though I cannot take from him January, July, or the months of coping between. When my mother leafs through me in her memory banks, bits of face are missing; sometimes I’m limbless or smear. Gray even scentless, and still all Strindberg. I tell him, I raise her: be darlings and come scream with me from all the pockets sewn over. Maybe by late summer we’ll be humming: Tennessee yellow; Tennessee, Tennessee.

Glued-on trees alternating with strips of bricks and little pieces of song taped up everywhere as green and pink diamonds in a woods in a box when the room of the mind has an easy chair and 3 large trees. A 3-sided woods with a divan at the back, an argyle of bird song on top of a syncopation of stapled trees, concrete strips and birches tacked up for reflection, digression, analysis if the room in the mind means 3 large people conferring in a box of woods with a love seat out front. Bands of fluorescence and poplar and a tempo of tacked-up trees a needlepoint of bird song, home-sweet-home, where a sapling on an end table is lit stage right beside the wicker chair as well as the leather chair in the boxed woods. A gray-haired woman sits on the floor to read stacks of old journals out of a crate, a flaxen girl in a Scotch-plaid holiday dress who rolls in stage left. Pulses of gold and lamé trees in French and a disco ball in the boxed-in woods, if the many-roomed mind comes with a futon. The off-kilter, out-of-sync, the irregular pace of, the size 3 of, until a (Do Not) diagonal across the mountain range at the back of the mind, sound-split poles, stubs but glued-on, syncopation, many stapled, love lit: one by one, the leaves again taped up.

Driving through this part of Louisiana you can pass four prisons in less than an hour. "The spirit of every age," writes Eric Schlosser, "is manifest in its public works." So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed. This is the spirit of our age. "You won't be back will you," asked the inmate who told me he wanted to be a success. + + + Try to remember it the way it was. Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisons. Trying to remember how tall was my boy then. What books I was teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration. Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing, notwithstanding top-notch examples to the contrary: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Wilde, Valéry, Celan, Desnos, et al. After all, I am not them. She asked me to come down, my friend the photographer and I went, and then I wanted to see whether my art could handle that hoe. Trying to remember how my skin felt when I opened an envelope of proofs of Deborah Luster's intimate aluminum portraits of the inmates at Transylvania (the site of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, a minimum-security male prison, now closed); then Angola (the site of Louisiana State Penitentiary, maximum security, ever-growing); then St. Gabriel (the site of the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women, the LCIW). I was electrified by the first face—a young, handsome man blowing smoke out of his nose. Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. On the phone my friend had described to me the rich Delta grounds of Angola, 18,000 acres. Angola, where the topsoil is measured not in inches but feet. The former sugarcane plantation lies at the confluence of rivers and borderland of the vermin-and-vine-choked Tunica Hills. Grey pelicans nest on the two prison lakes; alongside the airstrip are the grading sheds, the endless fields of okra and corn. Then there's the prison museum, the prison radio station, the prison monthly magazine; the tracking horses and tracking dogs trained by inmates... and the tree-lined neighborhood of free-world residents, their children bused outside the fence to school. Then the immaculate cinderblock buildings that house the inmates, the administration building, and the death house; the greenhouse and extensive flower beds—take away the fencing and it resembles nothing so much as a college campus. The men in maximum number more than the men who lived in my hometown. Then there's the geriatric unit, the award-winning hospice program; the caisson the inmates built to bear the dead in the hand-built coffins to one of the two graveyards inside the prison. In the old burial ground most graves are not identified by name. The caisson is pulled by draft horses, French Quarter style. When the champion of the prison rodeo had a heart attack in the fields, a riderless horse led the final procession. The celebrated inmate's uniform was "retired" to the prison museum. Everything about Louisiana seems to constitute itself differently from everywhere else in the Union: the food, the idiom, the stuff in the trees, the critters in the water, and the laws, Napoleonic, not mother-country common law. The prisons inevitably mirror differences found in the free world. Where they came up with their mirrors is another mystery. (In maximum, they are made of metal.) The definition of the face is a memory. Vivid to me is Debbie saying that at the trial of her mother's murderer, she looked around and saw the people sitting on separate sides of the courtroom, the way they do at a wedding, the bride's people, the groom's people, and she tried to take in the damage radiating through the distinct lines—the perpetrator's side, the victim's side. Vivid to me is leaving Angola after the first visit and Debbie asking what I thought, and I said (too fast) I thought those were the nicest people I had ever met, and the ironic laughter it provoked in us both, the car yawing. The obvious truth, people are people. Equally, the damage is never limited to perpetrator and victim. Also, that the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts. I remember an afternoon at the iron pile at Transylvania watching the men quietly plait each other's hair between sets at the weight bench. When I asked about a man whose face was severely scarred, a very specific face, with large, direct aquamarine eyes, a guard told me that the man's brother had thrown a tire over his head and set it on fire. This I did not know how to absorb. It was a steaming day; the men were lifting weights and plaiting their hair. I remember Easter weekend at the women's prison. The day before, a long line formed outside the prison-run beauty shop. Inside, the women having their hair fixed were talking back to a soap opera on the small snowy screen. By visiting day the inner courtyard had been transformed into a theme park for the children. A trampoline had been rented, a cotton-candy machine; someone dressed in a bunny suit was organizing an egg hunt. The girls wore starched, flouncy dresses, and the boys white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties. The women were dressed up, too, even the ones shackled at ankle and waist. Deborah photographed all day, nonstop. Identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication, but people wanted a keepsake. We left before visiting hours ended. It wasn't our place to be there. It wasn't really in us to be there. Remember sitting in the frigid Holiday Inn bar near St. Gabriel, at the end of one visit to the women's prison, staring at the aquarium, not talking. Talking to a man who says he has done a lot of time. Lot of time. He should write a book, he says. He wants to be a success. "Hollywood, huh, here I come." Talking to a woman who says the one time her dad visited her from the Midwest, she asked him to look at her eyes. There was a look she didn't want to get, a faraway look. Her father pretended to examine her eyes, then told her they looked like the same old peepers to him. She passed her time reading. Same way she passed her childhood. She thought she was going to be an astronomer when she grew up. Not a felon. Both parents are dead now. Of her three sons, one disappeared, one died of suicide, and the third severed contact. One of the inmates at St. Gabriel informed me she wouldn't be around for visiting hours tomorrow because she was on the drill team. Also, her ex-husband would not be bringing her baby boy to see her. Not tomorrow, not ever. The grease burns, I am told by another inmate, are courtesy of her sister. Don't Walk On The Grass, says the sign posted in the inner yard. Then there's the bus that leaves from Monroe taking visitors to one of four neighboring pens, Al Derry's Prison Transport and Popcorn Balls. Evidently, the popcorn balls make it the competitive ride. Only in Louisiana. After a time. A lot of time. They stop coming. The free-worlders. They are too poor or too busy working or are already looking after others on the outside or their car is broken or they are too worn down or they move too far off or they get old, sick, and die. So the inmates wait for their turn. They aren't going anywhere. They have all the time there is. "The only continuity of our lives," wrote Malcolm Braly, American writer, American lifer, "was that we had none." "Waiting," goes the motto at St. Gabriel, "it's the LCIW way." I wrote a woman and asked whether she ever had any pets. She wrote back: Bandit, Baby, Snobby, Elsie, Bear (those were the dogs). Tiger and Fuzzball (the cats), Jill, Ben, and Junior (the coons). And a lot of unnamed fish, hamsters, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea pigs, "and a deer, not really a pet but I finally coaxed to the point she would eat out of my hand." Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time. I wanted it given to understand that when you pass four prisons in less than an hour, the countryside's apparent emptiness is more legible. It is an open, running comment when the only spike in employment statistics is being created by the supply of people crossing the line. I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech to cut through the mass-media myopia. I wanted the heat, the humidity, the fecundity of Louisiana to travel right up the body. What I wanted was to convey the sense of normalcy for which humans strive under conditions that are anything but what we in the free world call normal, no matter what we may have done for which we were never charged. The world of the prison system springs up adjacent to the free world. As the towns decline, the prisons grow. As industries disappear, prisons proliferate, state-funded prison-building surges are complemented by private-investment promising "to be an integral component of your corrections strategy," according to an industry founder. The interrelation of poverty, illiteracy, substance and physical abuse, mental illness, race, and gender to the prison population is blaring to the naked eye and borne out by the statistics. Of the developed nations, only Russia aspires to our rate of incarceration. And the Big Bear is a distant second. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the warp in the mirror is of our making. The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept—whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily set aside—that the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least our minds, we are more likely to register the implications. + + + I am going to prison. I am going to visit three prisons in Louisiana. I am going on the heels of my longtime friend Deborah Luster, a photographer. It is a summons. All roads are turning into prison roads. I already feel guilty. I haven't done anything. But I allow the mental pull in both directions. I am going to prison in order to write about it. Like a nineteenth-century traveler. Kafka put it this way, "Guilt is never to be doubted." Also: behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. Also: there are more than two million individuals, in this country, whose sentences have rendered them more or less invisible. Many of them permanently. First to Transylvania. Then Angola. Then St. Gabriel. These are their place-names Over the next year and a half Deborah Luster will photograph upwards of 1,500 inmates. I will make three trips. It is an almost imperceptible gesture, a flick of the conscience, to go, to see, but I will be wakeful. It is a summons.

1. FIELD Truck a passel (a poke) of wildling boys We call ourselves (our pack) the orphan-slaves

There’s something in me that likes to imagine the things I’m afraid of, for example, the future. I don’t mean the celestial fireworks from melting reactors, or New York under six feet of sea water, but the future in its most intimate, most probable forms—vignettes subversive enough to slip through the radar. That’s how I come to be crouched behind a stripped car wondering would it be too dangerous to piss in the street? It would, I’m a woman. So I go on holding it, distracting myself by trying to remember every fruit I’ve ever eaten, their exact textures and flavors. So far the most exotic is the custard apple. I use up a whole hour of daylight and then another—apricot, blueberry, plum— calves cramping from having to stay low, waiting behind a car pitted with the acne of automatic fire. There are still too many guns walking around out there, and no one I know, so I’m waiting for twilight at least. Is everyone alone now? The wind says so. It says a winter is coming without oil. It bites to get my attention and scatters a few leaflets, pictures of a blackened car, a city that seems to catch on fire every sunset, though there’s little enough to burn. Stone only chars. This isn’t a likeness of the future, is it? Every person in the street a stranger? Will a word like ‘neighbor’ survive this? I fired a gun once. It smelled rancid, sour, like bad food. It hurt my shoulder and left a wound of oil on my shirt. My mind is thinking of sleep again. Sleep lets things escape—my pocket-knife vanished through a knife-sized hole. There’s nothing to cut, no guava, nectarine, winter pear, and nothing left of the car at all, not even the rear-view mirror I was counting on, hoping my face could tell me it was safe to go home, and where is that? A place with a bed and a desk where I sit and plot next year’s garden on graph paper. The skin of a tangelo is faintly pebbly, easy to peel, but the sweetest citrus is the satsuma, then the clementine. If I had to choose between natural disaster and a firing squad, I’d take the river of lava any day. Hurricane, tidal wave, tornado, drought. I want the earth, which is waiting under the sidewalk, to be the one. Not any of these human shadows sporting their silhouetted guns. There were gun shadows before, but the two worlds overlapped, guns and the amber waves of grain. It’s hard to say whether bramble fruits actually have skins. Does a raspberry? Does each tiny globe have its own? How will I live without the earth? In a stripped car, unable to piss when I want to, all the time cold? Maybe weapons interbred with humans, and a strain of hybrids was born, half metal, half flesh. I know there’s an enemy— look at all the damage it’s doing. Maybe it’s still a baby, its weak neck wobbling as its carriage lurches over the broken pavement. But probably by now it’s a sulking adolescent starting to look like serious trouble, with a silky little shadow-moustache and a gun. Who’ll kill it? Will I? What if it doesn’t look like the enemy? What if it comes disguised as a savior, or resembles nothing so much as hunger, so that everyone has his own private piece to kill? Will we do it?

For RLB Pass by the showy rose, blabbing open, suckling a shiny beetle; pass by the changeless diamond that falls asleep in shadow— this love is a lichen, alga and fungus made one fleck, feeding on what it feeds, growing slightly faster than stone into a patch of gray lace, a double thumbprint, its bloom distinguishable, with practice, from its dormant phase, crocheting its singular habit over time, a faithful stain bound to its home, etching on the unmoved rock the only rune it knows.