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Some seventy years later your father, sitting at your table over wine he savors, last rays mellow- ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt, Rifka. “Just naming her shoots rifles off again inside the morning square, rifles she aimed into the air for certain customers, the pigeons erupting.” Handsome, clever, but with little actual schooling, she, a Jewess, kept a shop in Moscow, stocking horse- and battle-gear, bustling all day long. Powders, braided with his laboring breath, still prickle inside his nostrils; like the wayward flickers cast by lazily swimming, naked limbs, leathers polished, buckles, gleam; and the oats banked in their bins, heavy August winds drowsed in them, at one glance, a single sniffing, bloom; the harnesses and bells, by gaslight starred, send out appeals, while sleighs collect for midnight junkets. He smitten with it all, like those officers of the Czar who, admiring her wit, her seasoned gaiety, forever jammed the shop. “Even the city’s metropolitan, young despite his full, black robes, took to dropping in on her, his jagged, bushy beard awag with chat. One balmy summer evening, I remember, the three of us, laughter brimming like wine (he turned his glass to the lessened light), relaxed in her snug flat. The next morning at breakfast, talk going on as if we’d never stop”— he, a startled look lit on his face, breaking in upon himself, exclaims, the pigeons crackling through the air— “My God, he spent the night with her!” He, sipping the last drop, sits back, as much as he’s amazed amused to see this special virtue of old age, the oats ripening only in slow time.

Far out of sight forever stands the sea, Bounding the land with pale tranquillity. When a small child, I watched it from a hill At thirty miles or more. The vision still Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away: The rain has washed the dust from April day; Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground; The wind above the hill-top has the sound Of distant water in unbroken sky; Dark and precise the little steamers ply- Firm in direction they seem not to stir. That is illusion. The artificer Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise And holds the ocean steady to my eyes. Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull; Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair. Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare. I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. That was the ocean. From the ship we saw Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw, The blunt head plunging clean above the wave. And one rose in a tent of sea and gave A darkening shudder; water fell away; The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray. A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound. I would be near it on a sandy mound, And hear the steady rushing of the deep While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep. I have lived inland long. The land is numb. It stands beneath the feet, and one may come Walking securely, till the sea extends Its limber margin, and precision ends. By night a chaos of commingling power, The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour. The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand, Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land, Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind; Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears; Yet slower, yet, O faintly, gentle springs! List to the heavy part the music bears, Woe weeps out her division, when she sings. Droop herbs and flowers; Fall grief in showers; Our beauties are not ours. O, I could still, Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.

Three people in the snow getting rid of  themselves breath by breath and every six seconds a blackbird three people in raincoats losing their tracks in the snow walking as far as the edge and back again with the trees exhausted tapping at the sky and every six seconds a blackbird first three then two passing one eye between them and the eye is a white eraser rubbing them away and on the edge a blackbird trying over and over its broken line trying over and over its broken line

The first to arrive when the sleepy-eyed coach grunts good morning and undoes the rusty lock, he starts each day facing the water alone— the shimmering skin over the cold deep end holding the calm of sunrise before his mind bellows start. He plunges in to tame the water before the water tames him back—cutting meat and treading at the Y each weekend only keeping the pounds in place. On the deck stool with his fake leg stretched before him, the coach rasps his creeds from the Navy.There’s standing tough and moving tough, he tells them.Whichever one’s tougher,that’s what you do. On the cold mornings, the slowest tries standing tough, his feet buckled in at the water’s edge and every still joint its own heady fix. When he moves, he moves to reach the finish line. The team is mired in last, not quailing from the season’s end the only victory left. All around, hungry, he eyes the greater meets: the varsity team that shreds the water twice as fast, the seniors’ cars and flaunted car keys. Is every test decided by the one before? Do the mind, the joints ever forget? He stares down the water, his body cold and primed for the tournament, finals, anything assigned.

am I not    olden olden olden it is unwanted. wanting, wanting am I not    broken stolen    common am I not crinkled cranky poison am I not glinty-eyed and frozen am I not    aged shaky    glazing am I not    hazy guarded    craven am I not    only stingy    little am I not    simple brittle    spitting was I not    over over    ridden? it is a long story will you be proud to be my version? it is unwritten. writing, writing am I not    ancient raging    patient am I not    able charming    stable was I not    building forming    braving was I not    ruling guiding    naming was I not    brazen crazy    chosen even the stones would do my bidding? it is a long story am I not proud to be your version? it is unspoken. speaking, speaking am I not    elder berry brandy are you not wine before you find me in your own beaker?

Who could have dreamed them up? At least snails have shells, but all these have is—nothing. Small black antennae like fat pins wave as if they could take in enough to get them through. Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes, pale and unmarked as babies. They flow, the soil itself learning how to move and, moving, almost staying still, their silver monorail the only evidence of where they’d been. And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully) out of the human ear’s range, between two stones, under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tips of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say, do something. Don’t just take it. But they die as they had lived, exuding slime, like the smaller boys, who’d just stand there, miserable in short pants, school socks down to their ankles, school tie unknotted and askew, and flowing from noses slow cauls of snot that from time to time they’d lick or sniff back up part way, until it flowed again, coating the upper lip, falling into the mouth, mixing with tears before anything had been done, the fear itself enough, so even if we wanted we couldn’t let them off. Sometimes it was the knee “where you daren’t show your mother,” other times the kick in the shins, the stick over the head, the punch in the mouth, while they just stood there, or double up, gasping for breath, and we did it again.

1. What were we watching on the tube under mildewed ceilings in Eastlands? A Kenyan guy shaking a rattle made from a can while another guy in the band was talking to the queen about making sound out of anything? The queen smiled. The Jubilee receiving line filed through. 2. We shimmied past tin shacks selling wigs and bananas, coke and goat lungs; the tine of a kalimba kissed my face. My face kissed the blue plastic of a soda bottle sliding down a hill of glass. I paid the gang leaders for protection and we walked into the hills of airplane garbage, black and blue plastic bags glowing in the sun spray over the heads of the marabou stalking the mounds with their knife-blade beaks. 3. Stevie Wonder and Elton John moved through the Jubilee line. Prince Charles thanked God for the weather as the camera cut to fireworks spewing over Hyde Park and then to an image of Nairobi and the Slum Drummers picking metal out of the collages of garbage. 4. My jeans were charred from the tin-can fires, and the grilling pig guts when some men looked up from scraps of wire— and you went back and forth with them in Swahili before they offered us some sizzling fat, before we thanked them with our coy smiles and moved on with Michael who took us down a maze of alleyways where tin shacks were floating on polymers and nitrogen and a dozen pigs from nowhere snouted the garbage. 5. You were saying “Dad”—when a marabou-hacked bag shot some shit on our shoes—“Dad, kinship roles are always changing”— when a woman asked us for a few shillings and salt for her soup. Salt? Did I hear her right? Or was it Swahili for something else? And through the sooty wind of charcoal fires and creaking rusty tin you were saying, “Hannah Arendt called Swahili a degraded language of former slave holders.” In the soot of my head—I was listening— and Michael was asking for more shillings for the gang guys who were “a little fucked up,” he said, “but needed help”— and when I turned around the heads of chickens were twitching, the feathers fluttering down on oozing sludge; “Arendt called it a nineteenth century kind of no language,” you were saying, “spoken”—as we were jolted by a marabou eating a shoe—“spoken—by the Arab ivory and slave caravans.” 6. Out of bottles, cans, pipes, mangled wire—the Slum Drummers twisted and hacked, joined and seamed their heaven into the black plastic ghost of a mashed pot. Pure tones blew from the vibrato holes like wind through Makadara where the breath of God flew through sewage pipes. I heard in a tubophone the resurrection of ten men rising out of coal and pig snouts into the blue Kenyan sky where a marabou swallowed a purse—and a woman’s conga was parting at the seams above boiling soup cans. 7. Down a slope of stinking plastic you kept on about Arendt— “a hybrid mixture of Bantu with enormous Arab borrowings” I could say poa poa  sawa sawa  karibu. We could make a kalimba out of a smashed pot and pour beans into a can and shake it for the queen. Yesterday in the soundless savannah the wildebeests and zebras seemed to float through the green-gold grass toward Tanzania. We could hear a lion breathe; we could hear wind through tusks. 8. On TV the guys were grinning into metal go-go drums; hammering twisted sewage pipes and cut wire like sailors from Mombasa— harder nailed than da Gama’s voyage down the Arab trade coast— 9. So, where are we—in a slum of no language? Walking through steam shovels of light, breaking over mounds of metal as if the sky were just blue plastic? Isn’t English just a compost heap of devouring grammar, joined, hacked, bruised words, rotting on themselves? I keep following you, daughter of scrutiny, into plastic fields of carrion between sight and site, vision not visionary, pig guts on the grill, trying to keep balance between streams of sewage and the sky, as you keep hacking, Sophia, at the de-centered, the burning text, anthropology’s shakedown. A marabou just knifed the arm of a woman picking bottles out of plastic bags. A rooster crows from under a pile of galvanized tin as if it were morning on a farm.

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

spread millet in this neighborhood all you get is bluejays bluejay may be cooked three ways