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My mother and I sit on the back porch, bare feet in summer grass as we take the upright down to pieces, breeze humming through its strings. I extract each melodic tooth and sort them in octaves for rinsing, tidy enclosure in boxes, remembering in each how my young fingers rioted over them searching for sound and the way it grows like its own unruly animal. The old piano lies open to Sunday morning sun, swallowing blossoms that drift over like stars from the apple tree I climbed as a girl. My mother and I sit here in a quiet usually reserved for churches, hands moving slowly over what we gather —piles of soft hammers, odd coils of wire. We take up wet rags and wash each wooden key down its surface, wet music pooling onto our skin.

Imagine that — my last words might have been spoken to the dog, she who saved my life, it has been said, spoken with no thought of reply nor of understanding, a genial insult maybe, a philosophical conundrum posed aeons before any household pet ever turned an ear. In the ambulance I made no remark about trees nor how tired I was of them, and in the second ambulance our dog’s heart beat hard with terror.

‘Mamma! mamma!’ two eaglets cried, ‘To let us fly you’ve never tried. We want to go outside and play; We’ll promise not to go away.’ The mother wisely shook her head: ‘No, no, my dears. Not yet,’ she said. ‘But, mother dear,’ they called again, ‘We want to see those things called men, And all the world so grand and gay, Papa described the other day. And – don’t you know? – he told you then About a little tiny wren, That flew about so brave and bold, When it was scarcely four weeks old?’ But still the mother shook her head; ‘No, no, my dears, not yet,’ she said. ‘Before you see the world below, Far bigger you will have to grow. There’s time enough to look for men; And as for wrens – a wren’s a wren. What if your freedom does come late? An eaglet can afford to wait.’

don’t talk to stranglers when yr wasted do talk to swingers don’t talk to swindlers if you can tell them apart from the strangers who are just strangers no stranger than you alone and afraid to be alone cuz they might want to touch your throat

You might as well take a razor to your pecker as let a woman in your heart. First they do the wash and then they kill you. They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke. They bring it to you folded—if you see her stepping between the coin laundry and your building over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam, you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you. It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter, the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me when I was changing him—that one got a laugh from the characters I wasted all my chances with at Popeye’s establishment when it was over by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed now and I understand one of those shopping malls that are like great monuments of blindness and folly stands there. And next door, the grimy restaurants of men with movies where they used to wear human faces, the sad people from space. But that was never me, because everything in those days depended on my work. “Listen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say, and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform of Texaco and wade into my life. I felt like a man of honor and substance, but the situation was dancing underneath me— once I walked into the living room at my sister’s and saw that the two of them, her and my sister, had turned sometime behind my back not exactly fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons moving across the television in front of them, surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas standing up next to the iron on the board. I stepped out into the yard of bricks and trash and watched the light light up the blood inside each leaf, and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm on this mother? Where do you turn it on? I think you understand how I felt. I’m not saying everything changed in the space of one second of seeing two women, but I did start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted she be sexy. I just wanted to live. And I did: some nights were so sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers— but the strategies of others broke my promise. At closing time once, she kept talking to a man when I was trying to catch her attention to leave. It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines and black masses and black hydrants filled with black water. When the lights came on you could see all kinds of intentions in the air. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass, but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are, motherfucker, nigger, here they are.” There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on. At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me from the end of the world where I saw her standing, and the way the sacred light played across her face all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end my life pours into one ocean: into this prison with its empty ballfield and its empty preparations for Never Happen. If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her, I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing. I’m just an alien from another planet. I am not happy. Disappointment lights its stupid fire in my heart, but two days a week I staff the Max Security laundry above the world on the seventh level, looking at two long roads out there that go to a couple of towns. Young girls accelerating through the intersection make me want to live forever, they make me think of the grand things, of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies. Sometimes I stand against the window for hours tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body. Jesus Christ, your doors close and open, you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters, I could say a million things about you and never get that silence out of time that happens when the blank muscle hangs between its beats—that is what I mean by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth, where nothing bad has happened. I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told when you will come to save us. I have written several poems and several hymns, and one has been performed on the religious ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.

For some semitropical reason when the rains fall relentlessly they fall into swimming pools, these otherwise bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but if you want their favor, if you believe there is justice, a reward for not loving the death of ugly and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake, rats) creatures, if you believe these things, then you would leave a lifebuoy or two in your swimming pool at night. And in the morning you would haul ashore the huddled, hairy survivors and escort them back to the bush, and know, be assured that at least these saved, as individuals, would not turn up again someday in your hat, drawer, or the tangled underworld of your socks, and that even— when your belief in justice merges with your belief in dreams— they may tell the others in a sign language four times as subtle and complicated as man’s that you are good, that you love them, that you would save them again.

(excerpt) Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere, And that my raptures are not conjur’d up To serve occasions of poetic pomp, But genuine, and art partner of them all. How oft upon yon eminence our pace Has slacken’d to a pause, and we have borne The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew, While admiration, feeding at the eye, And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene. Thence with what pleasure have we just discern’d The distant plough slow-moving, and beside His lab’ring team, that swerv’d not from the track, The sturdy swain diminish’d to a boy! Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er, Conducts the eye along its sinuous course Delighted.  There, fast rooted in his bank, Stand, never overlook’d, our fav’rite elms, That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut; While far beyond, and overthwart the stream That as with molten glass inlays the vale, The sloping land recedes into the clouds; Displaying on its varied side the grace Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tow’r, Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells Just undulates upon the list’ning ear, Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote. Scenes must be beautiful which daily view’d Please daily, and whose novelty survives Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years. Praise justly due to those that I describe. . . . But though true worth and virtue, in the mild And genial soil of cultivated life Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there, Yet not in cities oft.  In proud and gay And gain-devoted cities; thither flow, As to a common and most noisome sewer, The dregs and fæculence of ev’ry land. In cities foul example on most minds Begets its likeness.  Rank abundance breeds In gross and pamper’d cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden with most ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there Beyond th’ atchievement of successful flight. I do confess them nurs’ries of the arts, In which they flourish most: where, in the beams Of warm encouragement, and in the eye Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaim’d The fairest capital of all the world, By riot and incontinence the worst. There, touch’d by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes A lucid mirror, in which Nature sees All her reflected features.  Bacon there Gives more than female beauty to a stone, And Chatham’s eloquence to marble lips. . . . God made the country, and man made the town: What wonder then, that health and virtue, gifts That can alone make sweet the bitter draught That life holds out to all, should most abound And least be threaten’d in the fields and groves? Possess ye therefore, ye who, borne about In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue But that of idleness, and taste no scenes But such as art contrives, possess ye still Your element; there only ye can shine, There only minds like yours can do no harm. Our groves were planted to console at noon The pensive wand’rer in their shades.  At eve The moon-beam, sliding softly in between The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish, Birds warbling all the music.  We can spare The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse Our softer satellite. Your songs confound Our more harmonious notes: the thrush departs Scar’d, and th’ offended nightingale is mute. There is a public mischief in your mirth, It plagues your country.  Folly such as your’s, Grac’d with a sword, and worthier of a fan, Has made, which enemies could ne’er have done, Our arch of empire, steadfast but for you, A mutilated structure, soon to fall.

A spirit came down and whispered in our drunk ears mark your wombs with wild roses and between beers I dreamed that we were soldiers missing our mothers which explains why we are seventeen and in a tattoo parlor that smells of ships and motorcycles, of leather and ocean, of marijuana and sad men’s blood. We each ask for a single rose with a ribbon around the stem, for a word, some power. We want to be fire. The artist changes channels. We watch Looney Tunes as his needles start. When we stop at the liquor store, our roses, orange and violet, bleeding through the bandages, I want to tell you that if we ever find ourselves blindfolded in a war, or in an apple metaphor, accused of ruining it for everybody with hunger, or knowledge, I would not insist on how sacred is the tree or the light, or how sacred is what moves us— I’d become a storyteller. And out of our inevitable estrangement I’d make us up again and again.

When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

In the first taxi he was alone tra-la, No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride. In the second taxi he was alone tra-la But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure You have left nothing behind tra-la between you’. In the third taxi he was alone tra-la But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes. As for the fourth taxi, he was alone Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take So many people, not to speak of the dog.’