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Other-lips     whispering     between my legs. What they called black hole     not-thing is really packed full of secrets.     A rebel mouth testifying from the underside.     Careful not to let it     speak too loudly.     Only hum demure     in polite company — never laugh or spit on the sidewalk     or complain lest we both be dragged     under the wheels of one of those.     Or worse     coddled smiled at     as at a lapdog acting wolf. Or worse     called ugly     a cruel joke. Or — there are always     worse things. Too many messengers     shot.     But then who wouldn’t fear     an eyeless face whose ghost stories     always     come true?

Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill & now for a moment, like Sisyphus I watch it roll. I walk through the snow. I breathe the dirty East Side wind pushing past the Russian church, the scent of fish & freighters & the refinery filling the hole in my chest—how many years have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice & sat down to die. Only to look up at the geometry of sky—& stood to face whoever might need me—

Natchez Afternoon burns everything off Franklin Street. Even the birds, even the flies. Or iced-tea sugar and chicken grease weigh everyone into a doze, all indoors, in a cool they said would never come eighty years ago when this was still the center of business and the civilized left these high hours to the dogs, ice in a highball, and let each house close its lids a while. They've kept their quiet, so I'm alone before the windows, the radiant panes, each with its scrim of clay, the finish the river gives everything, so nothing, not even glass, is clear. It's almost painful, this saturation, this street and its stores of rugs and signs and flags, bright and strange as a magazine photo you'd find in an attic or an antique store, hard to believe the color was ever real. The teacups, the painted china and jeweled eggs, even the bottles, medicine vials and flasks each with its ounce of dirt, even the smell of the prolific earth, the sedimentary atmosphere of empire chairs and oak armoires and mantles that survive their tall, white homes, like the plantation house where, later, I'll witness again the marriage of gray suit and hoop skirt that still feels like a dream, where I'll walk out of—or is it into?—myself, the maitre'd's small, solicitous voice proffering another julep—cotton-leaf hand, silver cup—though even he must be a reenactment or a revenant, a hanger for the clothes of memory. I will take it, I would, a handful of refuge in unthinking weather, will take the same lethargic joy in a breeze, any chill in the throat, any kind of shade— so I enter the dim of one old cotton house, its air-conditioned maze of hand-tools and quilts, corn cribs and cotton gins, and of course the owner's smile, porcelain, bright, almost blinding, blooming in welcome and how-you-do and what-brings-you. We talk amid rows of cook-stoves, stew-pots, and cast-iron skillets about the wedding I've come to see on the famed estate, the time the town exploded, the Rhythm Club's inferno, and then she ventures she knows the accent, knows I'm from Alabama, and soon she's eloquent on our lakes and rivers, where the mister takes her every chance they get. She's seen it all, so she asks where I'm from, and when I say she starts to glow, gushing over mountains all the way to Gatlinburg. She's walked each one, even skied the state's one slope, which conjures not the "Southern snow" that required almost everything around us, but snow, cold snow, a thought that cools me further, so my sweat is nearly dry when the smile tightens across her teeth and she leans in to say Ijust love it you know—there are no darkies there. Then afternoon is a conspiracy of color, an echo the heat or the history in our voices draws us into— someone else's version of ourselves— and the inevitable, painful quiet in which an answer must arrive. What can you say? And how long do you have to wait before you can leave, before you can walk out of yourself and down the cotton-trading streets into the smother of trees on some more recent lane? How long do you have to wait before you can leave and not be followed, and how long do you have to walk before the mockingbirds drown in bass and drum and anger, before you can cross back into the proper century? The smell of the river stays with you, maybe even grows as you move so you don't know where you're going, and the key in your hand could open a car door or a plantation room or nothing at all, some door that's vanished in the air, June's shimmer from the asphalt and the roofs of every house, so you walk toward that moment when the sun starts burning and the magnolias' thick perfume washes all around and you find yourself on a corner, all linen and sweat, again the only one who'd walk in a heat like this. You have no idea where you are, so you cock your head as if you might hear your way through the afternoon, and when you raise your head, you see, across the street, two men hunched in shadow on a barbershop's stoop, ties dangling like smoke in the solid air. They've seen you and now their brows sharpen as if they know, too, you're not from here, and in the space between you anything could pass, the ghosts of Farragut or Grant or a hot white Caddy rattling New Orleans Bounce, you're waiting to see, it seems like years or centuries, then one rises, ties his tie, and steps back in, leaving the other, who keeps your eye a moment longer then looks into the distance through that lace of smoke that seems etched in the air for something far behind you, something you don't even know how to look for, something that may never arrive.

After the first sex, there is no other. I stick my gender in a blender and click send. Voilà! Your new ex-girlfriend. You cuckold me with your husband. I move a box with Ludacris. The captain turns on, we begin our descent. Be gentle with me, I’m new to this. I say the wrong thing. I have OCD. My obsessive compulsions are disorderly. I say the wrong thing, did I already say? I drive my dominatrix away. The coyote drives her in a false-bottomed van. He drops her in the desert. The bluffs are tan. She’ll get a job at Chili’s picking up butts. I feel ya, Ophelia, I say to my nuts. And there is pansies. That’s for thoughts.

In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I'm your real father, not just the almost dad arriving through random channels of divorce, you and I don't lie to one another— shrugging each other off when words get the best of us but coming full circle with wan smiles. When you hole up inside yourself, headphones and computer screen taking you away, I want to feel in ten years that if I'm still alive you'll still look at me with that same wary expectancy, your surreptitious cool-eyed appraisal debating if my love for you is real. Am I destined to be those shark-faced waves that my death will one day make you enter? You and your mother make such a self-sufficient pair— in thrift stores looking for your prom dress, what father could stand up to your unsparing eyes gauging with such erotic calculation your figure in the mirror? Back of it all, when I indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones: no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires in a future that allows one glass of wine per shot of insulin. Will we both agree that I love you, always, no matter my love's flawed, aging partiality? My occupation now is to help you be alone.

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse behind the heels and drags it behind his chariot like the cans that trail a bride and groom. Then he lays out a banquet for his men, oxen and goats and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards. The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

1862: Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his young wife Elizabeth Rossetti with a sheaf of his unpublished poems. . . . and then of course the weeping: some demurely, some flamboyantly. Those elegiac tears, if shed enough, will alter a face and the person behind the face. We all know that erosion is a mighty thing, and even—for example— the seemingly permanent, hard-black Mississippi banks undo and slip south. In a sense, the delta at New Orleans—the land gone silt, and rebuilt— is the Mississippi’s second thought. “My pet, your wiles have altered my earlier obstinacy, and the vision of you in your luxury stateroom beckons; I shall join you for your voyage on the Gigantic —what? oh. Titanic”—is a tragic second thought. A happy one: when Skyler and I decided to try again to “save the marriage.” Now we’re lazing in a pour of Sunday morning light as orangely voluptuous as marmalade. A simile’s a first thought, then an equaled next. She slips back into sleep, and now I’m reading about the night that shady London dandy Charles Augustus Howell (1869) unshoveled the grave at Highgate, broke the coffin, and looted her bone breast of “the book in question, bound in rough gray calf, and with red edges to the leaves,” on eager orders from Rossetti —who’d had second thoughts in seven years, desiring to publish now a volume of his verses (1870, Poems ). Lizzie’s death-stenched pages were saturated with disinfectant by a medical practitioner “who is drying them leaf by leaf”—and then they joined the world of woven radish baskets, bobbered fishing skeins, and god dolls in their second life as art on a museum wall; a world where the “conversion pool” saw swimmers step in white robes from its farther end, reborn to new religion; and the lumbering land animals said no , and gave up legs, and so their legs rolled up like stored-away and useless rugs inside them, and they returned to the waters, and birthed and breached in the waters, and made the waters their orchestral glory, and spouted out their great Ionic columns of air and water in the touch of the changing mind of Earth, that’s sunlit at times and at other times darkened.

While my husband packed to fly back to Vietnam, this time as a tourist instead of a soldier, I drove to the zoo to say goodbye to the musk oxen who were being shipped out early next morning to Tacoma. We were getting lions instead. When I got there, it was too easy to park. The zoo was closing early so they wouldn’t let me in. I went back to my car and slid into the driver’s seat. Sobs tore from deep in my chest, I who had never seen a musk ox and never cared until now.

When the trains come into strange cities The citizens come out to meet the strangers. I love you, Jack, he said I love you, Jack, he said At another station. When passengers come in from strange cities The citizens come out to help the strangers. I love you too, I said I love you too, I said From another station. The citizens are kind to passing strangers And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness. I walk the unbelieving streets I walk the unbelieving streets In a strange city. At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers Achieve in memory the city's promise. I wake in love with you I wake in love with you At last year's station. Then say goodbye to citizens and city Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers. I leave my love with you I leave my love with you In this strange city.

If I could only get hold of the whole of you, How could I ever get hold of the whole of you, Even more than the most beloved idols, More than mountains quarried whole, More than mines Of burning coal, Let’s say mines of extinguished coal And the breath of day like a fiery furnace. If one could get hold of you for all the years, How could one get hold of you from all the years, How could one lengthen a single arm, Like a single branch of an African river, As one sees in a dream the Bay of Storms, As one sees in a dream a ship that went down, The way one imagines a cushion of clouds, Lily-clouds as the body’s cushion, But though you will it, they will not convey you, Do not believe that they will convey you. If one could get hold of all-of-the-whole-of-you, If one could get hold of you like metal, Say like pillars of copper, Say like a pillar of purple copper (That pillar I remembered last summer)— And the bottom of the ocean I have never seen, And the bottom of the ocean that I can see With its thousand heavy thickets of air, A thousand and one laden breaths. If one could only get hold of the-whole-of-you-now, How could you ever be for me what I myself am?