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Before it disappears on the sand his long white      beard before it disappears The face of the man in the waves I ask her does she see it ask her does The old man in the waves      as the waves crest she see it does she see the old man his White     his face crumbling face it looks as old as he’s as old as The ocean looks and for a moment almost looks His face like it’s     all the way him As never such old skin looks my / Daughter age four She thinks it might he might be real she shouts Hello And after there’s no answer answers No

We can't remember her name, but we remember where we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds. The illiterate owls interrogate us from the trees, and we answer, We don't know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother, meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest. Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour, we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja, meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us, which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.

The last snow is baited. Where the future shatters it unbends. The dry bed of entirety, where the sun bends, shatters. I was not afraid to tell you: unobscene at the first and then the third horizon, a copse-mountain opened so near to me I weighed nothing, and you laid the flower in my mouth. These are not animals. These are the partial genocides deeply uncompensated. Under the grass there is nothing but water and two wings.

Somebody been giving you Stink Eye? Let me tell you about Stink Eye. Stink Eye no mean nothing when you owe somebody money. Pay up, girl. No be in debt. But Stink Eye means something when you owe somebody nothing. Remember when Connie Mamazuka, the girl with the mustache, grabbed your lipstick in the PE locker room and smeared it all over her big fat lips? Wasn’t ’cause she like your lipstick. Was ’cause you was one cute skinny chick. She was giving you Stink Eye all along and you never even know it. Now you know it and now you watch for it. You was always catching Stink Eye, always crying to your mother about somebody icing you out. When Stink Eye is cold, it is fucking freezing, it can make you shiver and cry, “But Mommy, Mommy, what did I do?” Took you long time to know you never do nothing but you was good at something, something Stink Eye like try steal not ’cause Stink Eye going use it. Stink Eye just no like you use it ’cause if you use it only going make Stink Eye feel more ugly, feel more stupid. Easy for spot Stink Eye coming from one mousy thing. More tricky for spot Stink Eye coming from some of the friendliest faces. And you the dumb one, left dazed and hurt. “But she seemed so sympathetic.” Yeah, right. Stink Eye sideswipes into you out of nowhere where somebody been thinking evil thoughts about you, wishing bad luck to blow bad breath upon you, knock you down, forget your words, drop your tools, make you sputter and drool. Under the bed, in Stink Eye’s room, get one picture of you stabbed like one pin cushion with so many needles, stabbed like one cactus, stabbed like one porcupine. Stink Eye even dreams about you. Careful of that coat you wear, the one you blossom in, feel loved in, the one that keeps you warm. Stink Eye like snatch it right off you ’cause Stink Eye just no can stand to see you look so cool. Stink Eye wants a piece of you. So choose to be naive, girl, or wake up ’cause Stink Eye been waiting to sit on your chest, pounce on your flesh, squeeze the living air right out of you, watch you flatten like one used-up tube of toothpaste. Suck up your goodies, Glutton-of-Stink-Eye, ready to gorge on your talents, feast on your fears. So girl, run fast, spell good, write well, add up, think quick, talk sharp, walk pretty, jump high, throw hard, sing sweet, leap far. Now you know it and now you watch for it ’cause Stink Eye gets bigger and meaner and stronger as you get better and smarter and stronger. Scary thing about Stink Eye, Stink Eye always looking for more— as much as you willing to give.

I’d often seen the runway kissed by refugees and bought-out hostages, an odd drunk and those renouncing the flying for good, and thought that surely there must be worse places to touch freedom. Between the tailfins and the gray town in the distance, gravity cropped up only at a newsstand, and fizzled out with the first bite of the octane damp, the view of the parking bunkers and stacked hovels by the motorway. Everything else, before and after, could have fitted into half a cigarette, the sickly sunshine and endless nights, the flags and oaths (the very language I wanted to forget), the Celts, the Saxons, the housebroken Vikings in crowded trains, hopping frozen behind stalls selling tat to tourists. Not enough time for loving because of other loves, nor codebooks nor guides except the perennial A to Z of not giving offense. The words were always there, smooth like pebbles (soap on the tongue), and sometimes the mockery of a commonplace, like that time when we put up a blackened Union Jack instead of curtains between us and the Poles on the scaffolding across the road. On occasions it seemed good enough to be happy or scared with the rest, to bring home from the terraces and parades that sly acceptance, to sit in the shadow of atavism as under a palm tree, and chew blissfully on the sweet dirt, the taste of the crowd. Or for an evening make a shortcut through someone else’s work, an incomer’s story of a homeland gained not lost, a fat compendium of patriotic verse; in essence, cheat again. In other words — never spend too much on a suit rarely worn    ...    if there had been loyalty at all, it fell on faces and disappeared with them, on promises and smiles, crazy schemes for finding undiscovered shores. The world, I thought, could be unfolded anywhere, if only you could fit it into a travel bag, into a clear, irrevocable word. It is strange perhaps that even today I think the same, still in the same place, buried firmly like a rock in a graveyard, as heavy, and as pointlessly decorated by lightness. The vows of yesterday skim the heights like animal shapes we recognize in passing clouds; postcards sleep in the unread books. Just like the nomadic tribes used to, I learn of myself only with my feet now, from the single map that remained. And when streets bring the shortened future a bit nearer, with open palm I seek the roughness of the facades, and in the friendly pain I find the coarse, unperfected truth of things. This, I think then, must be what it’s like in the bellies of gigantic animals: wet and quiet, almost pleasant, once you get used to the smell of those who passed through before you, and the immutable truth that there is no going forward or anywhere else    ... Translated from the Bosnian

All winter long you listened for the boom Of distant cannon wheeled into their place. Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace Their careful webs against the boding sky, While miles away on Munich’s vacant square The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear. And might have turned your eyes upon the gleam Of a thousand years of snow, where near the clouds The Alps ride massive to their full extreme, And season after season glacier crowds The dark, persistent smudge of conifers. Or seen beyond the hedge and through the trees The shadowy forms of cattle on the furze, Their dim coats white with mist against the freeze. Or thought instead of other times than these, Of other countries and of other sights: Eternal Venice sinking by degrees Into the very water that she lights; Reflected in canals, the lucid dome Of Maria della Salute at your feet, Her triple spires disfigured by the foam. Remembered in Berlin the parks, the neat Footpaths and lawns, the clean spring foliage, Where just short weeks before, a bomb, unaimed, Released a frightened lion from its cage, Which in the mottled dark that trees enflamed Killed one who hurried homeward from the raid. And by yourself there standing in the chill You must, with so much known, have been afraid And chosen such a mind of constant will, Which, though all time corrode with constant hurt, Remains, until it occupies no space, That which it is; and passionless, inert, Becomes at last no meaning and no place.

My sweet did sweetly sleep, And on her rosy face Stood tears of pearl, which beauty’s self did weep; I, wond’ring at her grace, Did all amaz’d remain, When Love said, “Fool, can looks thy wishes crown? Time past comes not again.” Then did I me bow down, And kissing her fair breast, lips, cheeks, and eyes Prov’d here on earth the joys of paradise.

We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals. —James Deetz 1 Yes. So we must reconnect ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,” and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with oyster peeces in barley beer & wheet, chopt cod & venyson seethed in a blood broth, hominy pottage,also squirell. Their heads might well have brimmed with heaven and its airborne personnel, but still their mouths were a mash of white meat[cheese]and a motley collation of eel leavings,a fine samp,and a roast Fowl. Worshipp first,then after—butter Biskuits! David Ignatow: “seeking transcendence but loving bread” 2 And it is too easy to get lost in abstraction, as if smoke, and dream, and quantum ersatz-states are our proper environment... it’s easy to conceptualize in “politics” and not in the clack of the black or white dried bean we drop in the voting bowl. In some tribes, there’s a designated “reminderer,” and when the shaman novitiate—or sometimes simply a mournful family member—follows the star trail into the country of ghosts, and lingers there, this person tugs the wanderer back home: perhaps a light thwack with a broom-shock, or the rising steam of a broth that one can hungrily shinny down to Earth like a rope. In the Mesopotamian Inanna myth, it’s water and bread that resurrect the goddess and allow her to begin the long ascent out from the craters of Hell. We can spend all day, and many days, and years, in theorizing. “A Computer Recreation of Proto-Hominid Dietary Intake: An Analysis” ... we’ll float off, through these foggy lands of argot, in the way that someone else might dissolve in the blue cloud of an opium den... no wonder there’s such pleasure in uncovering the solid fossil record of those appetites, and in emptying out its evidence grain by grain, a stone piñata. How often the stories bring us back to that grounding! In 1620, a first exploratory party from the Mayflower went ashore on the northern Cape Cod coast. The weather was bad and disorienting: a half a foot of snow, in air so thick as to be directionless. But we sense they recouped their spirits that night, from three fat Geese and six Ducks whitch we ate with Soldiers stomackes. 3 And it is too easy to lose ourselves in cyberthink, untethered from the touchable, from even the cohesive force suffusing through one atom. “What we keep,” reports an archivist at the New York Times, “is the information, not the paper”... everything e-storaged now. A thousand years of pages,pffft: dismissiveness as obliterative as a bonfire, in the long run. Oh, yes, easy to cease to exist as an actual shape, inside the huge, occluding mists of legalese: we say “repatriation of native archeological remains,” and we mean human bones, that’s what we mean: hard and dear and contested. We say “ritual signifier of threat,” but what the Narragansetts sent to the colonists at Plymouth was a bundl of thair Arrows tyed about in a mightie Snake skin. I died. And I was stolen into a land of strangers—of not-the-People. I floated all day, many days. And here the ribs of my cage were empty: always I was hungry, for the things that People need. But this was not the sun, and this was not the soil, of the People; and I was restless, I had no one for between my legs, and no drum in my chest. There was much war from this: the People desired me back, they said “this one is part of many-ones,” and after words and words, their word was so. One day the breezes sent the fishes and savory beaver parts, and I knew at last that I was home: my mouth of my skull watered. 4 “When hegemonic identity-structures systemize cognition—” whoa. There are times I think my friends might flimmer away in that high-minded mush... and I concentrate, then, on the names of those people from 1621, names that are true, specific labor and specific, beautiful common things. Cooper. Fletcher. Glover. Miller. Glazer. Mason. Carpenter. Cheerfull Winter. Oceanus Hopkins. Lydia Fish, Nathaniel Fish and Steadfast Fish, of Sandwich. Zachariah Field, father, and daughter Dutiful Field. Pandora Sparrow. Who wouldn’t care to meet Peregrine Soule? And who could wish to let go of this life when faced by Countenance Bountie?

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back. No one believes in his own life anymore. The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs. In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings. They sing songs, and their fingers blear. And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot And belladonna insist on our comforting, Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more, Like a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind, Part eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.

Stone gullets among       Inrush       Feed         Backsuck and The borders swallow            Outburst             Huge engorgements       Swallow In gulps the sea      Tide crams jagged         Smacks snorts chuckups       Follow In urgent thirst      Jaws the hollow      Insurge       Hollow Gushing evacuations follow       Jetty it must       Outpush       Greed