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You are part of other people but not like them. You live in a little wooden box and wake up with your face in your palm and some sunlight. Which is a sign of resignation but not for you. Which is part of what I meant by trying to effect change in myself and also talking. By describing to you that before a city can become spectacular its buildings must put on an iron gown. And then some workers climb all around it. And it is like having no teeth because you are waiting for better teeth. I tell you I am very attached to my old teeth. In a game called all of this is hypothetical I did not once slide my teeth across the table. I do not even remember what you offered as the hypothetical exchange for a life where I only drink soup. There were some girls on their bikes and wind. There were some people reuniting after many years apart or just a day. You were not like everyone else making demands with wild gesticulations. I thought about maybe trying to sharpen my knowledge of jokes. I thought about really needing a hug. A very important car with sirens rumbled by and sounded exactly right.

The shoe repairman works behind the married shoes, his whole hand inside the boot he’s shining, everything cozy in the glass displays, laces paired on gravel he’s spread out in the window, shoes placed as though they’re walking, and beside them propped up, the wooden tongues of shoe horns, poised to serve the inanimate world ... He comes out mildly attentive, soft accent, possibly a Scottish childhood, possibly sheep to tend ... Clear day, first summer divorced in Berkeley, a time of seamless, indescribable grief; he waits kindly in his blue apron, fingering the well-worn inner sole, and I am grateful for those who serve us knowing nothing of our lives ... * The cleaner waits behind the silver bell; he’s from Cambodia and has free Christian literature on the counter. He greets me with pleasant chatter, searches through the coats, some left for years, he says; they make a soft blue whistle as they circulate on the ovals like the ones under those automatic boats. As the clothes pass, little checks and prints under the whooshing of motion, I see my husband’s coat— how long will I call him my husband—like an old friend passing by quickly not bothering to greet me. Odd now, I don’t have to pick it up, the serious plaid will go around between the women’s suits and stay all night. . . * I watch the young butcher flipping over the young chicken: he takes one wing and sort of spins it, first on its back, flinging the trimmed, watery lemon-colored fat into the trash, then before he starts on the legs he puts his hand so deeply in that the finger comes out the neck ... The other butcher sets the slab of beef under the saw: the riveting intricate swirl as the dead flesh pulls away; he goes off, shouts short words from the deep freeze— to me or to the carcass hanging by the shank?— I can wait, but the spaces can’t, there’s a slight ticking, then the carcass swings and swings ... Somehow I thought we would know everything through the flesh. Perhaps. But my days have become spirit. The young butcher splits the chicken down the back, seems to enjoy the crack of the knife as it enters the bone, so I try to. Housewives lean against the cool glass to convey holiday news and he responds without really looking up; I love that. * oh Berkeley summer mornings, aren’t they— what? past the French Hotel, the glint of tiny spoons so briefly and soberly allowed to rest on white saucers, the plums just about over, the agapanthus—“lilies of denial”— in the center dividers, blooming, or just about to— like me, hearty and hesitant, not wanting to write it, not wanting to ruin the perfection of the poem by writing it . . . At the dentist, the little mirror, the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth: the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family, having briefly reached inside the visible mystery and found nothing ... I imagine Wisdom in the text is like this, creating the cosmos from the mind of God, looking interested and competent; she touches the physical place with her prong, and the pain shines ... (—a man told me I better think about my ‘system.’ Oh dear! I better think about my ‘system’—!)

What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

It is said that after losing his wife, Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads, who threw his head into the River Hebron. The head went on singing and forgetting, filling up with water and floating way. Eurydice already forgetting who she is with her shoes missing and the grass coming up through her feet searching the earth for the bracelet of tiny weave on her charcoal wrist the name of a fly or flower already forgetting who they are they grow they grow till their bodies break their necks down there in the stone world where the grey spirits of stones he around uncertain of their limits matter is eating my mind                                I am in a river I in my fox-cap floating between the speechless reeds I always wake like this being watched already forgetting who I am the water wears my mask I call  I call lying under its lashes like a glance if only a child on a bridge would hoik me out there comes a tremor and there comes a pause down there in the underworld where the tired stones have fallen and the sand in a trance lifts a little it is always midnight in those pools iron insects engraved in sleep I always wake like this being watched I always speak to myself no more myself but a colander draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound can you hear it you with your long shadows and your short shadows can you hear the severed head of Orpheus no I feel nothing from the neck down already forgetting who I am the crime goes on without volition singing in its bone not I not I the water drinks my mind as if in a black suit as if bent to my books only my face exists sliding over a waterfall and there where the ferns hang over the dark and the midges move between mirrors some woman has left her shoes two crumpled mouths which my voice searches in and out my voice being water which holds me together and also carries me away until the facts forget themselves gradually like a contrail and all this week a lime-green hght troubles the riverbed as if the mud was haunted by the wood this is how the wind works hard at thinking this is what speaks when no one speaks

Camille Corot's painting, stolen from the Louvre, May 1998 It might have always been meant that they walked completely away, this man on horse, woman with basket. With their backs to us and the painter, they are so private. But like those stories where children step right into a picture and, looking over their shoulders, see the consoling frame, these two would know the way home like the palms of their hands, the routine so ordinary it most encloses, no need for thought, only motion and the full sensation of sun on your flesh, along the usual road.

Once again, someone falls in their first falling–fall of two bodies, of two eyes, of four green eyes or eight green eyes if we count those born in the mirror (at midnight, in the purest fear, in the loss), you haven’t been able to recognize the voice of your dull silence, to see the earthly messages scrawled in the middle of one mad state, when the body is a glass and from ourselves and from the other we drink some kind of impossible water. Desire needlessly spills on me a cursed liqueur. For my thirsty thirst, what can the promise of eyes do? I speak of something not in this world. I speak of someone whose purpose is elsewhere. And I was naked in memory of the white night. Drunk and I made love all night, just like a sick dog. Sometimes we suffer too much reality in the space of a single night. We get undressed, we’re horrified. We’re aware the mirror sounds like a watch, the mirror from which your cry will pour out, your laceration. Night opens itself only once. It’s enough. You see. You’ve seen. Fear of being two in the mirror, and suddenly we’re four. We cry, we moan, my fear, my joy more horrible than my fear, my visceral words, my words are keys that lock me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone. And I am well aware what night is made of. We’ve fallen so completely into jaws that didn’t expect this sacrifice, this condemnation of my eyes which have seen. I speak of a discovery: felt the I in sex, sex in the I. I speak of burying everyday fear to secure the fear of an instant. The purest loss. But who’ll say: you don’t cry anymore at night? Because madness is also a lie. Like night. Like death.

And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could.Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston street to have sex with her. The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame.“If you want attention and you see that you’re getting it, you just follow your feelings,” senior Araceli Figueroa, 17, said. “It’s sad.” It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may.A plague more commonly associated with other countries has been taking young victims in the United States, one by one.

Of ox and luncheon tongue, six hundred pounds; of Wiltshire bacon, seven-tenths of a ton. Seventeen hundred miles they walked, and it was pony meat that saved them. But one biscuit, this one Of thousands, baked by Huntley & Palmers, a special formulation fortified with milk protein, survives—the men Long dead, and the ponies, whose lives flew through Bullet holes easily over the frozen labyrinth of the Fortuna Glacier, all gone to powder. Found a century later in the wrecked Larder of one of Shackleton's way stations, it remains perfectly nutritious, and sold at a Christie's auction Is worth a thousand-some sterling.We had seen God in His splendors; we had reached the naked soul of man, He wrote. And:This biscuit, said a Christie's director, is an object that really catches the imagination.

I went by the Druid stone That broods in the garden white and lone, And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows That at some moments fall thereon From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing, And they shaped in my imagining To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders Threw there when she was gardening. I thought her behind my back, Yea, her I long had learned to lack, And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me, Though how do you get into this old track?’ And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf As a sad response; and to keep down grief I would not turn my head to discover That there was nothing in my belief. Yet I wanted to look and see That nobody stood at the back of me; But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision A shape which, somehow, there may be.’ So I went on softly from the glade, And left her behind me throwing her shade, As she were indeed an apparition— My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

A shadow on the wall boughs stirred by the noonday wind that’s enough earth and for the eye enough celestial participation. How much further do you want to go? Refuse the bossy insistence of new impressions— lie there still, behold your own fields, your estate, dwelling especially on the poppies, unforgettable because they transported the summer— where did it go?