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That city will be no more, no halos of spring mornings when green hills tremble in the midst and rise like barrage balloons— and May won’t cross its streets with shrieking birds and summer’s promises. No breathless spells, no chilly ecstasies of spring water. Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor, and flawless views of leafy avenues fix no one’s eyes. And still we live on calmly, humbly—from suitcases, in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains, and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek the image, the final form of things between inexplicable fits of mute despair— as if vaguely remembering something that cannot be recalled, as if that submerged city were traveling with us, always asking questions, and always unhappy with our answers— exacting, and perfect in its way.

for Mark and Debra: Malleus Maleficarum The ground was never recovered, nor the legions, for their numbers were thought so ill omened that they never again appear in the army lists. —J. M. Roberts It begins with Diane—the gold shingles of her razored hair alight in the wind that whips the trees, the cotton slips pinned to nylon lines: these improbable ghosts. The first I ever loved can still incite such desperation. Betrayal lashes the careful stitches, the slight fabric; its design undone. She would take her switchblade and cut spiders in half— a quadrant of scars radiating from her wrists and elbows, she wrote my name in blood, let matches flare against the cuts small yellow head, searing. I used to operate on myself, she said. Separate a triangle of skin and place objects—silver pin heads, glass beads    close to the bone. A private surgical kit, embroidery scissors, alcohol, fine needles, and violet thread; silk, cat whiskers tied in complicated bows. She remembers this way, where things are where they are buried. We studied history together, this is how we met. Recovering the Roman Empire; she draws military disasters in her margins, mail clad horsemen pitching violently to the ground, the movement of the cavalry a swarm of locusts. Her silver compact slit open, because there are assassins in the narrow hallway; her fine pale feet turn to form an arabesque (a delicate design of flowers, leaves), furrows in the sheets and mattress, pearls. Ropes of black pearls and a black rubber dress—submerged in the green haze, the depths of a nightclub, listening. Submission; she hit his thighs with a chain, a hook in his mouth her lips were alluring. Red feather quills, bright red flies. I think of him, brought violently to the surface, his tensile body still below the thin edge of the filleting knife his slick flesh streaming as he surrenders—a ceremony of scales and gills, useless to him now, as he breathes in and out. She told me once that she was like a scorpion, and I did not listen. I let her creep between my fingers, and danger was exotic to me then. I lived somewhere deep beyond the coastline, in the crevices of rocks and wood planks, her gold hair spins like loose coins, strange and valuable. The currency of nightmares, where the sun burns the earth and empties the seas—there are skeletons, gingerly reaching for night night will fall in a rustle of wings, the gentle sweep of the legs of scorpions.

The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable. Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume. A cushion has that cover. Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clean that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange. Come to season that is there any extreme use in feather and cotton. Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them. A circle of fine card board and a chance to see a tassel. What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. The question does not come before there is a quotation. In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense. It shows what use there is in a whole piece if one uses it and it is extreme and very likely the little things could be dearer but in any case there is a bargain and if there is the best thing to do is to take it away and wear it and then be reckless be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude. Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable. Very likely there should not be a finer fancy present. Some increase means a calamity and this is the best preparation for three and more being together. A little calm is so ordinary and in any case there is sweetness and some of that. A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit. A closet, a closet does not connect under the bed. The band if it is white and black, the band has a green string. A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing. The disgrace is not in carelessness nor even in sewing it comes out out of the way. What is the sash like. The sash is not like anything mustard it is not like a same thing that has stripes, it is not even more hurt than that, it has a little top.

It doesn't matter to me if poems mean nothing: there's no floor to the universe and yet one walks the floor.

And the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense. . . . — Mamie Till, 1955 . . . with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. . . . —Look, January 1956 The sheriff says it wasn't Till we pulled from the river, that man was as white as I am, white as cotton blowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down, looked like he'd lain there weeks, not a kid at all. He was a stranger just out of Money, recalled by a store clerk, a hobo, and a crossroad guitarist. The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing. They say it's like the sheriff says, came up one night, headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down, right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says, a plague of starlings gathered into little boys those who fished and found the dead man's foot. The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes. He cannot find them, no matter where he looks.

There is far too much of the suburban classes Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses. Menacing the greatness of our beloved England, they lie Propagating their kind in an eightroomed stye. Now I have a plan which I will enfold (There’s this to be said for them, they do as they’re told) Then tell them their country’s in mortal peril They believed it before and again will not cavil Put it in caption form firm and slick If they see it in print it is bound to stick: ‘Your King and your Country need you Dead’ You see the idea? Well, let it spread. Have a suitable drug under string and label Free for every Registered Reader’s table. For the rest of the gang who are not patriotic I’ve another appeal they’ll discover hypnotic: Tell them it’s smart to be dead and won’t hurt And they’ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.

Twilight folds over houses on our street; its hazy gold is gilding our front lawns, delineating asphalt and concrete driveways with shadows. Evening is coming on, quietly, like a second drink, the beers men hold while rising from their plastic chairs to stand above their sprinklers, and approve. Soon the fireflies will rise in lucent droves— for now, however, everything seems content to settle into archetypal grooves: the toddler's portraits chalked out on cement, mothers in windows, finishing the dishes. Chuck Connelly's cigarette has burned to ashes; he talks politics to Roger in the drive. "It's all someone can do just to survive," he says, and nods—both nod—and pops another beer from the cooler. "No rain. Would you believe—" says Chuck, checking the paper for the weather. At least a man can keep his yard in shape. Somewhere beyond this plotted cityscape their sons drive back and forth in borrowed cars: how small their city seems now, and how far away they feel from last year, when they rode their bikes to other neighborhoods, to score a smoke or cop a feel in some girl's bed. They tune the radio to this summer's song and cruise into the yet-to-exhale lung of August night. Nothing to do but this. These are the times they'd never dream they'll miss— the hour spent chasing a party long burned out, graphic imagined intercourse with Denise. This is all they can even think about, and thankfully, since what good would it do to choke on madeleines of temps perdu when so much time is set aside for that? Not that their fathers weaken with regret as nighttime settles in—no, their wives are on the phone, the cooler has Labatt to spare; at nine the Giants play the Braves. There may be something to romanticize about their own first cars, the truths and lies they told their friends about some summer fling, but what good is it now, when anything recalled is two parts true and one part false? When no one can remember just who sang that song that everybody loved? What else? It doesn't come to mind. The sprinkler spits in metronome; they're out of cigarettes. Roger folds up his chair, calls it a day. The stars come out in cosmic disarray, and windows flash with television blues. The husbands come to bed, nothing to say but 'night . Two hours late—with some excuse— their sons come home, too full of songs and girls to notice dew perfect its muted pearls or countless crickets singing for a mate.

The station platform, clean and broad, his stage for push-ups, sit-ups, hamstring stretch, as he laid aside his back pack, from which his necessaries bulged, as he bulged through jeans torn at butt, knee and thigh, in deep palaver with himself—sigh, chatter, groan.  Deranged but common. We sat at a careful distance to spy on his performance, beside a woman in her thirties, dressed as in her teens— this is L.A.—singing to herself. How composed, complete and sane she seemed.  A book by the Dalai Lama in her hands, her face where pain and wrong were etched, here becalmed, with faint chirps leaking from the headphones of her walkman. Not talking.  Singing, lost in song.

The train moved me, clothes kept me seated. I watched the tunnel walls blur and my face appear, nicer on black plexiglass. The people carried off like I almost was in the old childhood dream, my mother’s hand, the tornado in the parking lot. Flooring soda and rain, a humble poser, a composed consumer. Come back to me, I whispered to the purifying wind in a country I’d visited years earlier. Come get me, I said to imaginary John Lennon in the passenger seat of my 1984 Volvo. Nothing grows anywhere, I noted in the slick urine grime connecting two underground stations. As for my wallet, it was light in my hand, fictitious, I didn’t deserve it — I held it up in the crowded terminal like a magician’s pigeon. Or I hid it between my knees on the jerking seat. Nobody wanted to touch me, or nobody who wanted to could reach me here, shaken like a screaming child under wet stairs.

What could have been the big to-do that caused him to push me aside on that platform? Was a woman who knew there must be some good even inside an ass like him on board that train? Charity? Frances? His last chance in a ratty string of last chances? Jane? Surely in all of us is some good. Better love thy neighbor, buddy, lest she shove back . Maybe I should. It's probably just a cruddy downtown interview leading to some cheap-tie, careerist, dull cul-de-sac he's speeding to. Can he catch up with his soul? Really, what was the freaking crisis? Did he need to know before me if the lights searching the crowd's eyes were those of our train, or maybe the train of who he might have been, the person his own-heart-numbing, me-shoving anxiety about being prevents him from ever becoming? How has his thoughtlessness defiled who I was before he shoved me? How might I be smiling now if he'd smiled, hanging back, as though he might have loved me?