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"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with only half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel,My Darling on its collar, from Mother's childhood in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack my brother and I fought over, pulling limb from limb. Mother drew it together again with thread while I watched, feeling depraved at the age of ten. With something more than caution I handle them, and the lights, with their tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along from house to house, their pasteboard toy suitcases increasingly flimsy. Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop. By suppertime all that remains is the scent of balsam fir. If it's darkness we're having, let it be extravagant.

The problems of a working girl Are more than meet the naked eye; And life becomes a dizzy whirl At times—and dizzy, too, am I. I have not found the answer yet, And this is just a working plan: I shove along and do not fret, Nor yet depend on any man. To be a mother and a wife, I'm often urged by all my kith And kin—but as for husbands, life Is easier without than with.

I take off my shirt, I show you. I shaved the hair out under my arms. I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair on my legs with a knife, getting white. My hair is the color of chopped maples. My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south. (Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills) Skin polished as a Ming bowl showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet. In the night I come to you and it seems a shame to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man. You recognize strangers, think you lived through destruction. You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory. You want to know what I know? Your own hands are lying.

We practiced together, sweat and stained. We pummeled each other and laughed off pain. Teams may disagree, may tease, may blame. Teams may bicker and whine, but get down for the game. You had my back. We fought the fight. And though our score was less last night, we're walking tall. Our team came through and stuck together like Crazy Glue. I'm proud to say I lost with you.

Once we liked the conspicuous but constrained, the push-up bra under the shirt-waist, a small bow at the throat, the appearance of a struggle toward the diminutive, the punctum. • The slender second hand jerking forward as if helpless, making its same sound. • We might stand in a thicket where a battle had taken place and be thrilled by the far-off roar of traffic

I plan to be the world authority on peafowl. Believe I'll be offered a chair someday at the chicken college. —Flannery O'Connor Certainly are nice to want to give me that dog. I raise peacocks— you can't keep dogs and them on the same place. People come here have to leave the dog in the car else the peachickens take to the trees with nervous prostrations. I have twenty-seven. Place sounds like a jungle at night. They yell and scream at the least atmospheric disturbance or mechanical noise. Sitting on the back steps, I spend days studying how they could decorate the lawn to advantage. They prefer to sit on the tractors, the top of the chicken house or garbage can lid. I adjust to their taste, which is anti-dog. Thanks but I'll take the thought for the dog. Appreciate you wanting to give it. Come visit. Nothing to do here but sit, walk, collect red bug bites, show you a peacock before his tail gets ratty.

If walking, like wine, only abets a sad mood let’s try it, I said, and I did: over these hills that have never known sorrow no thoughtful moon passes. Dig until a hill is level, and unearth only earth. Take pride in knowing the chemical makeup of rain, the sum total of harmful vapors in any sunset. For if you must drag in the old lines about suicidal willows, star’s stacked for or against you, you clutter a limitless, soaring landscape with your own baggage. Night of love, day of omens of night, great mountain of realized hopes, valley where bitter winds blow the dispossessed into raving lunatics— what are they but shady projections of passing whims, vastly oversimplified versions of something infinitely greater? This vision before you is nothing but a triad of trees, hills, river, steadfast and eternal. But soon you start to feel restless and when, setting out to take a roll of photos, you note the disturbing absence of a road, your suavity crumbles: you deafen the sky and serenade the moon, fall prostrate before pines saying oh, come back, spirit of the place which, lifeless without you, blossoms into something sumptuously more than mediating madness; come back, massive oaks that await our coming; to carve initials is to be truly human; the days are dappled with our passions, the mountains rise and fall with our glories and follies.

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: the emptiness there. Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry of the emptiness there. Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: I can no longer stand the world’s greed or mine. There, in the Taklamakan Desert, the silence of a thousand-year-old skull. Translated from the Korean

I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-’i/ FIRST CHEROKEE LESSON: MOURNING Find a flint blade Use your teeth as a whetstone Cut your hair Talk to shadows and crows Cry your red throat raw Learn to translate the words you miss most: dust                     love                    poetry Learn to say home My cracked earth lips drip words not sung as lullabies to my infant ears not laughed over dinner or choked on in despair No They played dead until the soldiers passed covered the fields like corpses and escaped into the mountains When it’s safe we’ll find you they promised But we were already gone before sunrise I crawl through a field of twisted bodies to find them I do everything Beginning Cherokee tells me Train my tongue to lie still Keep teeth tight against lips Listen to instruction tapes Study flash cards How can I greet my ancestors in a language they don’t understand My tear ducts fill with milk because what I most love was lost at birth My blood roars skin to blisters weeps haunted calls of owls bones splinter jut through skin until all of me is wounded as this tongue Ta-li-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-ni-s-gi-li/ SECOND CHEROKEE LESSON: GHOSTS Leave your hair at the foot of your bed Scratch your tongue with a cricket’s claw to speak again Stop the blood with cornmeal Your ancestors will surround you as you sleep keep away ghosts of generals presidents       priests who hunger for your rare and tender tongue They will keep away ghosts so you have strength to battle the living Stories float through lives with an owl’s sudden swooping I knew some Cherokee when I was little My cousins taught me

‘Talbingo River’—as one says of bones: ‘Captain’ or ‘Commodore’ that smelt gunpowder In old engagements no one quite believes Or understands. Talbingo had its blood As they did, ran with waters huge and clear Lopping down mountains, Turning crags to banks. Now it’s a sort of aching valley, Basalt shaggy with scales, A funnel of tobacco-coloured clay, Smoulders of puffed earth And pebbles and shell-bodied flies And water thickening to stone in pocks. That’s what we’re like out here, Beds of dried-up passions.