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I see my mother in her laugh my father in her stubbornness myself in her worry her mother in the way she holds her hands she is made of all of us and somehow entirely herself that's the whole thing that's the miracle part

Sunday morning and everyone is somewhere else now the house is quiet in a way it wasn't for twenty years i make one cup of coffee and drink it slow which is also something

Onward is not a victory it's just: still going which is what it looks like most of the time still going not fine necessarily but still going

These people have watched me grieve and celebrate and doubt and come back that's what a church is not the building the watching the coming back

The void between galaxies is not actually empty it's full of dark matter of things we can't see but know are there the void is not nothing the void is a kind of full we don't have the instruments for yet

We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge of a trembling nation when it went down. Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed by a fire dragon, by oil and fear. Eaten whole. It was coming. We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen. We saw it from the kitchen window over the sink as we made coffee, cooked rice and potatoes, enough for an army. We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed the babies. We saw it, through the branches of the knowledgeable tree through the snags of stars, through the sun and storms from our knees as we bathed and washed the floors. The conference of the birds warned us, as they flew over destroyers in the harbor, parked there since the first takeover. It was by their song and talk we knew when to rise when to look out the window to the commotion going on— the magnetic field thrown off by grief. We heard it. The racket in every corner of the world. As the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything else that moved about the earth, inside the earth and above it. We knew it was coming, tasted the winds who gathered intelligence from each leaf and flower, from every mountain, sea and desert, from every prayer and song all over this tiny universe floating in the skies of infinite being. And then it was over, this world we had grown to love for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities while dreaming. But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies who needed milk and comforting, and someone picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble and began to sing about the light flutter the kick beneath the skin of the earth we felt there, beneath us a warm animal a song being born between the legs of her; a poem.

We pass the straits of the Cape where grazing whales gather, though they’re not, I’m told, social creatures by nature. Alice asks how they can sleep if they must think to breathe. Cranial hemispheres wink and wake and alternate, so whales are half-awake and half-asleep, balanced between each of our states through dive and breach. Once on the kitchen wall of a dune shack I saw, like a headdress, the baleen of a whale— frayed filaments run from a thin, curled, rib-like bone: sieves for the sea. Like this sickle-moon fin “negatively buoyant” I sink in sleep, but end, I think, where I begin. Following one as it leaves two other whales we see suddenly not what we’re heading for but the asymmetrically colored snout of a fin whale as it rises parallel within a stone’s throw of the boat, the great eye set back water crashing rushing to let me see where it ought to be. I lose track, the mottled chin’s marble veined, swirling through its green veil, which the top jaw slits. And then, that’s it, I think. Nights I’m thrown upright from my rest. Brine thumps my chest.

I He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’ speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman. My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies. We saw is so and it was not so, the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue. (—A blazing parchment, Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.) It was not so, scratched on black by God knows who, by God, by God knows who. In the dark in fetters on bended elbows I supported my weak back hulloing to muffled walls blank again unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent. My soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible I stammer to my ear: Naked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold! Wrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric, wrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair. What trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor with magic in darkness, I unforewained. The golden hands are not in Averrhoes, eyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water makes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me! To the right was darkness and to the left hardness below hardness darkness above at the feet darkness at the head partial hardness with equal intervals without to the left moaning and beyond a scurry. In those days rode the good Lorraine whom English burned at Rouen, the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust. Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands, the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate. White gobs spitten for mockery; and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me. Remember, imbeciles and wits, sots and ascetics, fair and foul, young girls with little tender tits, that DEATH is written over all. Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul they are so rotten, old and thin, or firm and soft and warm and full— fellmonger Death gets every skin. All that is piteous, all that’s fair, all that is fat and scant of breath, Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, is Death’s collateral: Three score and ten years after sight of this pay me your pulse and breath value received. And who dare cite, as we forgive our debtors, Death? Abelard and Eloise, Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne, Genée, Lopokova, all these die, die in pain. And General Grant and General Lee, Patti and Florence Nightingale, like Tyro and Antiope drift among ghosts in Hell, know nothing, are nothing, save a fume driving across a mind preoccupied with this: our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought. The Emperor with the Golden Hands is still a word, a tint, a tone, insubstantial-glorious, when we ourselves are dead and gone and the green grass growing over us. II Let his days be few and let his bishoprick pass to another, for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust, mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited, I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave, fettered to a post in the damp cellarage. Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor, there are no dancers, no somersaulters now, only bricks and bleak black cement and bricks, only the military tread and the snap of the locks. Mine was a threeplank bed whereon I lay and cursed the weary sun. They took away the prison clothes and on the frosty nights I froze. I had a Bible where I read that Jesus came to raise the dead— I kept myself from going mad by singing an old bawdy ballad and birds sang on my windowsill and tortured me till I was ill, but Archipiada came to me and comforted my cold body and Circe excellent utterer of her mind lay with me in that dungeon for a year making a silk purse from an old sow’s ear till Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue. Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars, trodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule, Joshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad. They have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds, hunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo, they have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada: What is your name? Your maiden name? Go in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name. Distinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!) Now the thumbprints for filing. Colour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon! How many golden prints on the smudgy page? Homer? Adest. Dante? Adest. Adsunt omnes, omnes et Villon. Villon? Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain, hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies. III Under the olive trees walking alone on the green terraces very seldom over the sea seldom where it ravelled and spun blue tapestries white and green gravecloths of men Romans and modern men and the men of the sea who have neither nation nor time on the mountains seldom the white mountains beyond or the brown mountains between and their drifting echoes in the clouds and over the sea in shrines on their ridges the goddess of the country silverplated in silk and embroidery with offerings of pictures little ships and arms below me the ports with naked breasts shipless spoiled sacked because of the beauty of Helen precision clarifying vagueness; boundary to a wilderness of detail; chisel voice smoothing the flanks of noise; catalytic making whisper and whisper run together like two drops of quicksilver; factor that resolves unnoted harmonies; name of the nameless; stuff that clings to frigid limbs more marble hard than girls imagined by Mantegna ... The sea has no renewal, no forgetting, no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note. How can I sing with my love in my bosom? Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.

How do they survive, riven as they are, the one undoing the other's desire? Tell the body to outrun the mind, and the mind smirks, whispering too loudly this way   this way, blocking all the exits. And the body, luxurious sensualist by pool side or in bed, doesn't it hear the mind's impatient machinery ticking it's time   it's time? And only in our mind's eye, as we're fond of saying, someone else's body leaping nimbly in jetés of thought, or revealing to us Act V, scene iii in one gestural flourish, body and mind beautifully synchronous. Oh, the mind is eely, slipping out of its puzzle boxes, loving its own wit. And the earnest body: speak of it with the least irony, and already you've begun to unnerve it. Better to let them have their way, forgetting about them both until they meet again sometime as if for the first time in library or steam room ready to shake hello or lead you to whatever door there is and always the two sets of stairs.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.