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Some quests begin before a person ever learns to walk. Q’s began at the foundling home, when he was still in diapers. They’d kept anything pointed from the Quonset hut where they housed the orphaned newbies, and later the house mothers forbade the children all but scissors with round edges, even table knives. “Mind, now stay in the queue,” they said, when his fingers reached for a safety pin or a paring knife or, once, one of the razors they kept (usually under lock and key) for the older boys. Q slipped back in line. Only the blunt was available to him, nothing to question, naught with an edge. Best pretend to be dull (though that was hard with a high IQ) and never query:Why hide the scissors? Why hide the razor? Why speak so sharply? Why no mums? No dads? At night in his bed, listening to the breathing of all the other boys in the long room, he also asked himself,Why me? When the house mothers changed shifts, there were always some unsupervised minutes, and that’s when the boys sprang into swashbuckling. Q loved leaping from bed to bed with an imaginary sword in hand.En garde! • At sixteen, with a razor cut on his chin from the new trial of shaving himself, Q stood at the doors of the Royal Flower Hall. He was quaking. This was the very first day of work in his life. He’d been supposed to be a shop assistant, a quotidian job like those of the other orphans who were all sent out to live as apprentices — to return only if found unsuitable. However, the Royal Flower Keeper had stepped in and demanded to know the name of the boy meant to be sent to the local florist, and now young Q was called to prep flowers for the Queen. “Can’t someone else do it?” he quailed as the Flower Keeper 
handed him a quilloned silver thorn knife. Q didn’t want to be found unsuitable. He quivered as thousands of roses arrived — he was supposed to separate their long, tangled stems, cut off the thorns, and queue them up straight on the tables for the arrangers. “But I’m new!” Q cried. He couldn’t quell his horror at the prospect of lifting a real blade to cut the thorns. “Look, dear, no quibbling. If you work here, you’re qualified,” the Flower Keeper said. Her knuckles bloomed out of the crooked stems of her hands. “Hold the knife with two fingers behind this little crossbar, that’s the quillon, and snip under the thorn.” She did it with elegant speed. One thorn gone. “It’s like swordsmanship,” the Flower Keeper joked, wielding her knife, fencing in miniature mime. In Q’s head rang the orders of the house mothers, “ don’t touch! ” But in his fingers lay his imaginary weapon come alive. “No time to be quiescent,” she said. “Equipoise is all.” Don’t quit now, Q said to himself. If he quit, he’d have to slink back to the orphanage, a failed apprentice, instead of going home to his newly found haven, a cold-water flat with a coin-operated heater, all his own. There he’d store the new paring knife his paycheck would buy, the pointed scissors    ...    So Q quashed his fear and set to work. • He began to duel through the roses. “En garde!” he whispered, lunging toward his petaled quarry. Soon there were thorns everywhere (some a bit bloody), but he did not make any big mistakes. He wasn’t perfect, like the Flower Keeper, but he was catching on. Like quicksilver she flashed her knife, each stem quickening with the sharpest cut. Instinctively Q used the quartata maneuver, a quarter turn to the inside, protecting himself as he flicked each thorn into the quagmire of floral detritus on the floor. With each toss of the thorn he added to what appeared to the Flower Keeper to be his nascent gift. As the lorries loaded with rose baskets and vases and bowls roared off to the palace, he quietly pocketed a thorn. Then the first question he’d ever spoken aloud curlicued to his lips. And because he’d had to save up this query for sixteen years, he posed the essential one, previously mouthed only to himself at night in bed: Pourquoi? “Why,” said the Flower Keeper, “for the Equerry, of course. And he for the Queen. You know who she is.” “Just a flower of a figurehead,” Q quipped. The boy’s quick-witted, the Flower Keeper thought, and said, “We’ll require you tomorrow.” And for quadruple tomorrows after that and after that, until Q began to accumulate expertise. Know-how defines a person, especially someone who’s grown up watching his P s and Q s. He no longer 
quavered, quadrillions of roses now quasi-ordinary, royal waste a quiddity. I’m not a quitter, he’d said to himself, and each night went back to his cold-water flat where he had enshrined that little thorn in a matchbox. • Well, he didn’t live in a cold-water flat now. Now he lived in a sunlit house with a stash of razors in the marble bathroom and, in the drawers of his magnificent kitchen, a motherlode of paring knives, bread knives, steak knives, bird’s beak parers, boning knives, cheese knives, chef’s, clam, and carving knives, filleters, and mincers. Now Q was Senior Keeper of the Royal Flower Hall, walking across a stage toward the Queen herself. He had kept the talisman thorn from his very first day with the roses. Just that afternoon he had taken it out and dropped it in the pocket of his tuxedo, anticipating touching it for luck before he received his award from Her Majesty. But when the Queen posed her standard question, “Have you come a long way?” Q was quite bewildered as to how to answer. Sometimes a simple question cuts into an aromatic world of mysteries. But we must learn to answer, to cut. Q, his distinguished silver hair perfectly trimmed, his neck properly shaved, looked down at the curls on the Queen’s forehead and remembered his first unspoken word,Why. A quixotic word, an essential thorn. It had pricked him awake, into manhood. Arrangements of roses passed through his mind — how those magnificats of magentas quenched his imagination. How the choral crooning of pale pinks calmed his qualms. Among roses he had reached his quintessence. Yet, is it a large enough life, to arrange roses for a Queen? When the whole world out there hurtled toward famine and war? He hadn’t intended to stay, to make a future in flowers, taking people’s breath away with something so spectacularly unnecessary as his rose floats. He had been a thorn in someone’s side, spectacularly unnecessary himself. He’d been sent out into the world alone, blunted by the unknown facts of his identity — his search for his parents rewarded only by locked doors, locked cabinets, and, later, graveyards. Patiently Her Majesty waited for his answer. In physical distance he had come a short way, but he’d swashbuckled miles to reach the end of his quest. “Only from Kew Gardens, Your Highness,” Q answered simply at last. Then she put into his palm the royal thank-you, in a quilted sleeve: a silver rose wreath made from an ancient mold that gave it stylized petals, prickly leaves, and, cut in at the bottom of the circle, a thorn. “Q from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka

[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket— The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came, Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name Is blocked in yellow chalk. Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea Where dreadnaughts shall confess Its hell-bent deity, When you are powerless To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet Recoil and then repeat The hoarse salute. II Whenever winds are moving and their breath Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers, As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones, Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East. III All you recovered from Poseidon died With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god, Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain, Nantucket’s westward haven. To Cape Cod Guns, cradled on the tide, Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand Lashing earth’s scaffold, rock Our warships in the hand Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost In the mad scramble of their lives. They died When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry: “If God himself had not been on our side, If God himself had not been on our side, When the Atlantic rose against us, why, Then it had swallowed us up quick.” IV This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell: This is the end of them, three-quarters fools, Snatching at straws to sail Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale, Spouting out blood and water as it rolls, Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals: Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail For water, for the deep where the high tide Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs. Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out, Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs, The beach increasing, its enormous snout Sucking the ocean’s side. This is the end of running on the waves; We are poured out like water. Who will dance The mast-lashed master of Leviathans Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? V When the whale’s viscera go and the roll Of its corruption overruns this world Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword Whistle and fall and sink into the fat? In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags, Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather, Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers Where the morning stars sing out together And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side. VI OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM There once the penitents took off their shoes And then walked barefoot the remaining mile; And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file Slowly along the munching English lane, Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose Track of your dragging pain. The stream flows down under the druid tree, Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad And whistled Sion by that stream. But see: Our Lady, too small for her canopy, Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness At all or charm in that expressionless Face with its heavy eyelids. As before, This face, for centuries a memory, Non est species, neque decor, Expressionless, expresses God: it goes Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows, Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham. VII The empty winds are creaking and the oak Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph, The boughs are trembling and a gaff Bobs on the untimely stroke Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well; Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish: Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers, Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil You could cut the brackish winds with a knife Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime And breathed into his face the breath of life, And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill. The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat and suspenders, I think of the Quakers who lectured us on nonviolent social action every week when I was a child. In the classrooms we listened to those who would not take up arms, who objected, who had accepted alternative service in distant work camps and showed slides of hospitals they helped to build. On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship, when someone rose to speak, all the energy in the room flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell what she had seen on her brief encounter with the divine: sometimes, a parable, a riddle, a kindness. The fall that we were seventeen, we scuffed our loafers on the gravelly path from the Meetinghouse, while maple and elm leaves sailed around our shoulders like tiny envelopes, our futures sealed inside. Despite the war in Vietnam, I felt safer than I ever would again. Perhaps those aged, protective trees had cast a spell on us, or maybe the nonviolent Quaker God had set up a kingdom right there— suburban Philadelphia. Looking back, I see how good deeds and thoughts climbed with us to the attic room for Latin, descended to the gym for sports, where we hung from the praiseworthy scaffolds of righteous behavior. We prepared to leave for college, armed with the language of the American Friends and the memories of Thanksgiving dinners we’d cooked for the unfortunates: borrowing our parents’ cars to drive downtown to the drop-off point, racing back to play our last field hockey match. Grim center forwards shook hands before the whistle, the half-backs’ knee-pads strapped on tight; one varsity team vanquished another.

i want to talk about haiti. how the earth had to break the island’s spine to wake the world up to her screaming. how this post-earthquake crisis is not natural or supernatural. i want to talk about disasters. how men make them with embargoes, exploitation, stigma, sabotage, scalding debt and cold shoulders. talk centuries of political corruption so commonplace it's lukewarm, tap. talk january 1, 1804 and how it shed life. talk 1937 and how it bled death. talk 1964.  1986.  1991.  2004.  2008. how history is the word that makes today uneven, possible. talk new orleans, palestine, sri lanka, the bronx and other points or connection. talk resilience and miracles. how haitian elders sing in time to their grumbling bellies and stubborn hearts. how after weeks under the rubble, a baby is pulled out, awake, dehydrated, adorable, telling stories with old-soul eyes. how many more are still buried, breathing, praying and waiting? intact despite the veil of fear and dust coating their bruised faces? i want to talk about our irreversible dead. the artists, the activists, the spiritual leaders, the family members, the friends, the merchants the outcasts, the cons. all of them, my newest ancestors, all of them, hovering now, watching our collective response, keeping score, making bets. i want to talk about money. how one man's recession might be another man's unachievable reality. how unfair that is. how i see a haitian woman’s face every time i look down at a hot meal, slip into my bed, take a sip of water, show mercy to a mirror. how if my parents had made different decisions three decades ago, it could have been my arm sticking out of a mass grave i want to talk about gratitude. i want to talk about compassion. i want to talk about respect. how even the desperate deserve it. how haitians sometimes greet each other with the two words “honor” and “respect.” how we all should follow suit. try every time you hear the word “victim,” you think “honor.” try every time you hear the tag “john doe,” you shout “respect!” because my people have names. because my people have nerve. because my people are your people in disguise i want to talk about haiti. i always talk about haiti. my mouth quaking with her love, complexity, honor and respect. come sit, come stand, come cry with me. talk. there’s much to say. walk. much more to do.

June 7, 1990 breath, life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch of going nowhere. how do we celebrate a poet who has created music with words for over fifty years, who has showered magic on her people, who has redefined poetry into a black world exactness thereby giving the universe an insight into darkroads? just say she interprets beauty and wants to give life, say she is patient with phoniness and doesn’t mind people calling her gwen or sister. say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and clarity, yet returning to chicago’s south evans to record the journey. say her voice is majestic and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned, melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed, with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape. life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has not disappointed our expectations. in the middle of her eldership she brings us vigorous language, memory, illumination. she brings breath.

I On the top of the Crumpetty Tree The Quangle Wangle sat, But his face you could not see, On account of his Beaver Hat. For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide, With ribbons and bibbons on every side And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace, So that nobody ever could see the face Of the Quangle Wangle Quee. II The Quangle Wangle said To himself on the Crumpetty Tree, — "Jam; and jelly; and bread; "Are the best of food for me! "But the longer I live on this Crumpetty Tree "The plainer than ever it seems to me "That very few people come this way "And that life on the whole is far from gay!" Said the Quangle Wangle Quee. III But there came to the Crumpetty Tree, Mr. and Mrs. Canary; And they said, — "Did every you see "Any spot so charmingly airy? "May we build a nest on your lovely Hat? "Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! "O please let us come and build a nest "Of whatever material suits you best, "Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!" IV And besides, to the Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail, and the Bumble-Bee, The Frog, and the Fimble Fowl; (The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg;) And all of them said, — "We humbly beg, "We may build out homes on your lovely Hat, — "Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! "Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!" V And the Golden Grouse came there, And the Pobble who has no toes, — And the small Olympian bear, — And the Dong with a luminous nose. And the Blue Baboon, who played the Flute, — And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute, — And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat, — All came and built on the lovely Hat Of the Quangle Wangle Quee. VI And the Quangle Wangle said To himself on the Crumpetty Tree, — "When all these creatures move "What a wonderful noise there'll be!" And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon, On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree, And all were as happy as happy could be, With the Quangle Wangle Quee.

You know how hard it is sometimes just to walk on the streets downtown, how everything enters you the way the scientists describe it—photons streaming through bodies, caroming off the air, the impenetrable brick of buildings an illusion—sometimes you can feel how porous you are, how permeable, and the man lurching in circles on the sidewalk, cutting the space around him with a tin can and saying Uhh! Uhhhh! Uhh! over and over is part of it, and the one in gold chains leaning against the glass of the luggage store is, and the one who steps toward you from his doorway, meaning to ask something apparently simple, like What’s the time, something you know you can no longer answer; he’s part of it, the body of the world which is also yours and which keeps insisting you recognize it. And the trouble is, you do, but it’s happening here, among the crowds and exhaust smells, and you taste every greasy scrap of paper, the globbed spit you step over, your tongue is as thick with dirt as though you’ve fallen on your hands and knees to lick the oil-scummed street, as sour as if you've been drinking the piss of those men passing their bottle in the little park with its cement benches and broken fountain. And it’s no better when you descend the steps to the Metro and some girl’s wailing off-key about her heart—your heart— over the awful buzzing of the strings, and you hurry through the turnstile, fumbling out the money that’s passed from how many hands into yours, getting rid of all your change except one quarter you’re sure she sees lying blind in your pocket as you get into a car and the doors seal themselves behind you. But still it isn’t over. Because later, when you’re home, looking out your window at the ocean, at the calm of the horizon line, and the apple in your hand glows in that golden light that happens in the afternoon, suffusing you with something you’re sure is close to peace, you think of the boy bagging groceries at Safeway, of how his face was flattened in a way that was familiar—bootheel of a botched chromosome—and you remember his canceled blue eyes, and his hands, flaking, rash-reddened, that lifted each thing and caressed it before placing it carefully in your sack, and the monotonous song he muttered,paper or plastic, paper or plastic, his mouth slack, a teardrop of drool at the corner; and you know he’s a part of it too, raising the fruit to your lips you look out at the immense and meaningless blue and know you’re inside it, you realize you’re eating him now.

LAUDS Somehow I am sturdier, more shore than sea-spray as I thicken through the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness. You give me morning, Lord, as you give earthquake to all architecture. I can forget. You put that sugar in the melon’s breath, and it is wet with what you are. (I, too, ferment.) You rub the hum and simple warmth of summer from afar into the hips of insects and of everything. I can forget. And like the sea, one more machine without a memory, I don’t believe that you made me. PRIME

If there were a monument to silence, it would not be the tree whose leaves murmur continuously among themselves; nor would it be the pond whose seeming stillness is shattered by the quicksilver surfacing of fish. If there were a monument to silence, it would be you standing so upright, so unforgiving, your mute back deflecting every word I say.

Why are you here? Who have you come for and what would you gain? Where is your fear? Why are you here? You’ve come so near, or so it would seem; you can see the grain in the paper — that’s clear. But why are you here when you could be elsewhere, earning a living or actually learning? Why should we care why you’re here? Is that a tear? Yes, there’s pressure behind the eyes — and there are peers. But why are you here? At times it sears. The pressure and shame and the echoing pain. What do you hear now that you’re here? The air’s so severe. It calls for equipment, which comes at a price. And you’ve volunteered. Why?Are you here? What will you wear? What will you do if it turns out you’ve failed? How will you fare? Why are you here when it could take years to find out — what? It’s all so slippery, and may not cohere. And yet, you’re here    ... Is it what you revere? How deep does that go? How do you know? Do you think you’re a seer? Is that why you’re here? Do you have a good ear? For praise or for verse? Can you handle a curse? Define persevere. Why are you here? It could be a career.