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How long it must have been, the girl’s hair, cascading down her shoulders almost to her waist, light brown and heavy as brocade: the story I’m remembering of N’s, remembering as my own hair’s washed and cut, the salt-and-pepper cuneiform to frill my barber’s smock. Arts and Science is expanding. The wall to the empty shop next door pulled down and a dozen workmen slink improbably on scaffolds butting the dusty ceiling, cacophony and plastic tarps, the whirr of drills that mingles with the dryers’ jittery hums, the scissors’ flash, veronicas of clicks, the coloring, the curling, the antique cash register, melodious with its chime. And best, the liquid gurgle of hands massaging scalps the row of sinks, twelve hands and six wet scalps in a line. I’m next, and leaning back (let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon)

When bones and flesh have finished their business together, we lay them carefully, in positions they’re willing to keep, and cover them over. Their eyes and ours won’t meet anymore. We hope. It’s one of the oldest rules we mostly follow. In the deep Stone Age in Shanidar, now Iraq, someone or all of them laid or threw on the grandfather’s chest whatever was blooming— St. Barnaby’s thistle, yarrow, hollyhock... His was their only burial before the frost. For millennia, then, the dead might go under with thistle, quantities of red ocher, a chunk of meat. Now we have everlasting bouquets of plastic; now we have hundreds a day to bag and box and pickle to re-cross the Atlantic. Light a row of oil wells and kneel on sand too much embroiled for tombs. Regrettably, something of the smell is of bodies suddenly buried in fallen stones. But some is incense, pinches of pulverized Baghdad rising in ceremonial smoke: dust of combatants, onlookers, miscellaneous limbs, contents of hovels, contents of museums, ancient pollen of yarrow and hollyhock.

forCora Though she lives in a world of Velcro, snaps and zippers, I'm showing my granddaughter how to sew on a button. She's nine, same age I was watching my mother pick my favorite one, shaped like a flower a child might draw, color of sunshine. Her homemaker hands held everything together, needle and red thread lickety-splitting up, over, down, up again attaching the blossom to grass- green cloth:Colors no bee could pass by. Now, before the last tug of thread through the button my granddaughter brought me, I point out the pinch of space—width of a scissor-blade—between it and the fabric, a shaft of stitches with a half-dozen twists of thread around it before tying off.Shank, I tell her, same as Mother named it. It strengthens the bond between button and garment, less friction than ready-mades, fasteners that loosen too soon.Like love, my mother said.Close, but not too close. A snip of thread and my granddaughter's ready to go, fluorescent-pink button back on the nose of her dog-faced school bag, the shank fixing us together in this world my mother could trust only so long as everything was done right, only when she didn't forget to check I was buttoned up proper, buttoned up tight.

Everything contains some silence. Noise gets its zest from the small shark's-tooth shaped fragments of rest angled in it. An hour of city holds maybe a minute of these remnants of a time when silence reigned, compact and dangerous as a shark. Sometimes a bit of a tail or fin can still be sensed in parks.

Shattered glass in the street at Maryland and 10th: smashed sand glittering on a beach of black asphalt. You can think of it so: or as bits of broken kaleidoscope, or as crystals spilled from the white throat of a geode. You can use metaphor to move the glass as far as possible from the raised hands that threw the bottle for their own reasons of amusement, or despair, or the desire to make a cymbal crash in the ears of midnight sleepers. Or you can use words like your needle, the probe curious in tough heels, your bare feet having walked in risky places. You can work to the surface the irritant, pain, the glass sliver to blink in the light, sharp as a question.

Forget contingencies from weather and wind, my Helen’s head was shaved, the shortest bit of stubble growing in. With darkened arching black eye-brows, Betty-Blue mouth penciled red, jet patent-leather trench and high-heeled boots, she seemed more mannequin for Fashion Ave.’s penitent spread than enemy to brass at Camp LeJeune. Simply and grudgingly put, her talk was action. Invincible in Bell- Atlantic block and tack, she converted non-coms and saved CO’s, harped flint and skinned the chair of military courts through well-pitched cheek, prompt dispatch from the War Resister’s League. She looked good even on a bicycle, hemming left through traffic on Fourteenth Street, locking up on Lafayette or Grand. She doused for me to celebrate—marched right through human waste and Bowery puddles, stretched her legs over the last old-fashioned hobos up to East Second Street. Those ancient days, our vestibule was manned by crack-dealing Stan, a concierge of wit and improv, half his face scored by orange scars from hydrofluoric burns. He kept the place safe. But I had gone, cleared out behind a gang of kids from Bronxville high on catnip wins, shell-game victims. Left Stan my toaster, shelves, a wire bird-cage, and, for once, nothing to say. Except to ask if he could touch her skull. Even now it makes no sense. Her precedents I knew lurched out of focus: photos from France after the Vichy fell, Jeannes and Sylvianes who’d made Nazi moll; those Belfast girls last-ditched by soldier boys or peelers; two- toned Bergen-Belsen, bald sister to Fort Santiago. Then Squeaky Fromm, the other Manson moms, at Charlie’s trial. Extremes of Joan of Arc, or even Buddhist nuns. Hated, chastened— or chaste, at least. Not what you’d run (I ran) your fingers satisfied across, the stubble surprising, soft as mink or fox, and arch your back, as I did once she found me uptown, say yes I give again when she went down— and faster now, quick as the television dropped after dishes to the curb—or slipped gradually up, the seconds separating as slowly as but more exquisitely than ticks off expensive fifty-minute hours— and some community service—all gone, and just as easily forgotten the raft of former friends I’d cursed and floated off the island. Shaved head, her slender neck, dark shoulders—that was half— or less—her most convincing argument.

for Carolyn Grace When she sits at the kitchen table while she talks her hands seem to balance in the air faithful at the level of her words; she is careful what she says. The morning sun through the window strikes her skin, shows how the faint lines in her palms will come to deepen like corduroy cloth to fit the weather of her age. Still a young woman, she has to work the graveyard shift, sleeps what is left then wakes to get the kids to school. It must be morning when she dreams. Peering into her coffee’s surface she looks back from its depth, her hands caught holding an implement, a fossil of her life: Alabama born, feelings huddled north, these steel cities this cold month, her dark soul twisting into fingers whose motion at this brown angle is the slow fall flight of leaves through time. And she rises with the gesture, and the oil in her hands is necessity’s sweat: each hand on the tabletop a work cloth rubbing the other fine wooden one.

The shape of her soul is a square. She knows this to be the case because she often feels its corners pressing sharp against the bone just under her shoulder blades and across the wings of her hips. At one time, when she was younger, she had hoped that it might be a cube, but the years have worked to dispel this illusion of space, so that now she understands: it is a simple plane, a shape with surface, but no volume— a window without a building, an eye without a mind. Of course, this square does not appear on x-rays, and often, weeks may pass when she forgets that it exists. When she does think to consider its purpose in her life, she can say only that it aches with a single mystery, for whose answer she has long ago given up the search— since its question is a word whose name can never quite be asked. This yearning, she has concluded, is the only function of the square, repeated again and again in each of its four matching angles, until, with time, she is persuaded anew that what it frames has no interest in ever making her happy.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge struck into oneness, the solid surge seeking completion, and strikes and shatters and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters and now, unholding, the cleave and merge the hew and fusing, plundering the verge and substance is the scheme it scatters and what it numbers in substantial sun. Her hands hold many or her hands hold none. And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye and be salt fact and be the bodied sky and that gray weight is both or beggared one, a dead dimensional, or blue begun.