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She said: the pitying audience melt in tears, But Fate and Jove had stopp'd the Baron's ears. In vain Thalestris with reproach assails, For who can move when fair Belinda fails? Not half so fix'd the Trojan could remain, While Anna begg'd and Dido rag'd in vain. Then grave Clarissa graceful wav'd her fan; Silence ensu'd, and thus the nymph began. "Say, why are beauties prais'd and honour'd most, The wise man's passion, and the vain man's toast? Why deck'd with all that land and sea afford, Why angels call'd, and angel-like ador'd? Why round our coaches crowd the white-glov'd beaux, Why bows the side-box from its inmost rows? How vain are all these glories, all our pains, Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains: That men may say, when we the front-box grace: 'Behold the first in virtue, as in face!' Oh! if to dance all night, and dress all day, Charm'd the smallpox, or chas'd old age away; Who would not scorn what housewife's cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly thing of use? To patch, nay ogle, might become a saint, Nor could it sure be such a sin to paint. But since, alas! frail beauty must decay, Curl'd or uncurl'd, since locks will turn to grey, Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade, And she who scorns a man, must die a maid; What then remains but well our pow'r to use, And keep good humour still whate'er we lose? And trust me, dear! good humour can prevail, When airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail. Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul." So spoke the dame, but no applause ensu'd; Belinda frown'd, Thalestris call'd her prude. "To arms, to arms!" the fierce virago cries, And swift as lightning to the combat flies. All side in parties, and begin th' attack; Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack; Heroes' and heroines' shouts confus'dly rise, And bass, and treble voices strike the skies. No common weapons in their hands are found, Like gods they fight, nor dread a mortal wound. So when bold Homer makes the gods engage, And heav'nly breasts with human passions rage; 'Gainst Pallas, Mars; Latona, Hermes arms; And all Olympus rings with loud alarms. Jove's thunder roars, heav'n trembles all around; Blue Neptune storms, the bellowing deeps resound; Earth shakes her nodding tow'rs, the ground gives way; And the pale ghosts start at the flash of day! Triumphant Umbriel on a sconce's height Clapp'd his glad wings, and sate to view the fight: Propp'd on their bodkin spears, the sprites survey The growing combat, or assist the fray. While through the press enrag'd Thalestris flies, And scatters death around from both her eyes, A beau and witling perish'd in the throng, One died in metaphor, and one in song. "O cruel nymph! a living death I bear," Cried Dapperwit, and sunk beside his chair. A mournful glance Sir Fopling upwards cast, "Those eyes are made so killing"—was his last. Thus on Mæeander's flow'ry margin lies Th' expiring swan, and as he sings he dies. When bold Sir Plume had drawn Clarissa down, Chloe stepp'd in, and kill'd him with a frown; She smil'd to see the doughty hero slain, But at her smile, the beau reviv'd again. Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air, Weighs the men's wits against the lady's hair; The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside. See, fierce Belinda on the baron flies, With more than usual lightning in her eyes, Nor fear'd the chief th' unequal fight to try, Who sought no more than on his foe to die. But this bold lord with manly strength endu'd, She with one finger and a thumb subdu'd: Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew, A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw; The Gnomes direct, to ev'ry atom just, The pungent grains of titillating dust. Sudden, with starting tears each eye o'erflows, And the high dome re-echoes to his nose. "Now meet thy fate", incens'd Belinda cried, And drew a deadly bodkin from her side. (The same, his ancient personage to deck, Her great great grandsire wore about his neck In three seal-rings; which after, melted down, Form'd a vast buckle for his widow's gown: Her infant grandame's whistle next it grew, The bells she jingled, and the whistle blew; Then in a bodkin grac'd her mother's hairs, Which long she wore, and now Belinda wears.) "Boast not my fall," he cried, "insulting foe! Thou by some other shalt be laid as low. Nor think, to die dejects my lofty mind; All that I dread is leaving you benind! Rather than so, ah let me still survive, And burn in Cupid's flames—but burn alive." "Restore the lock!" she cries; and all around "Restore the lock!" the vaulted roofs rebound. Not fierce Othello in so loud a strain Roar'd for the handkerchief that caus'd his pain. But see how oft ambitious aims are cross'd, The chiefs contend 'till all the prize is lost! The lock, obtain'd with guilt, and kept with pain, In ev'ry place is sought, but sought in vain: With such a prize no mortal must be blest, So Heav'n decrees! with Heav'n who can contest? Some thought it mounted to the lunar sphere, Since all things lost on earth are treasur'd there. There hero's wits are kept in pond'rous vases, And beaux' in snuff boxes and tweezercases. There broken vows and deathbed alms are found, And lovers' hearts with ends of riband bound; The courtier's promises, and sick man's prayers, The smiles of harlots, and the tears of heirs, Cages for gnats, and chains to yoke a flea, Dried butterflies, and tomes of casuistry. But trust the Muse—she saw it upward rise, Though mark'd by none but quick, poetic eyes: (So Rome's great founder to the heav'ns withdrew, To Proculus alone confess'd in view) A sudden star, it shot through liquid air, And drew behind a radiant trail of hair. Not Berenice's locks first rose so bright, The heav'ns bespangling with dishevell'd light. The Sylphs behold it kindling as it flies, And pleas'd pursue its progress through the skies. This the beau monde shall from the Mall survey, And hail with music its propitious ray. This the blest lover shall for Venus take, And send up vows from Rosamonda's lake. This Partridge soon shall view in cloudless skies, When next he looks through Galileo's eyes; And hence th' egregious wizard shall foredoom The fate of Louis, and the fall of Rome. Then cease, bright nymph! to mourn thy ravish'd hair, Which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Not all the tresses that fair head can boast Shall draw such envy as the lock you lost. For, after all the murders of your eye, When, after millions slain, yourself shall die: When those fair suns shall set, as set they must, And all those tresses shall be laid in dust, This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame And 'midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name.

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the chance of the enemy not attacking but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. —Sun Tzu My father called me a chink so I’d know how to receive it. So I wouldn’t be surprised. Therefore the good soldier will be terrible in his onset and prompt in his decision. In the wall, I bricked up my secret. So it would gush forth. I did this for effect. So you would know me. On the day of battle your soldiers might weep bedewing their garments. But it grew like a bullet loving its flowerstain. It happened nonetheless. But let them at once be brought to bay. Because you are simply my medic watching me. I’m a poem someone else wrote for me. All of the characters “beautiful and flawed.” When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far. My sister said, you can forget our way of life? I said yes and was annoyed. She ran away and I was desperate for her. I was screaming into the mindspeaker. When far away, we must make him believe we are near. I said, Christine, christine, christine.

I can feel she has got out of bed. That means it is seven a.m. I have been lying with eyes shut, thinking, or possibly dreaming, of how she might look if, at breakfast, I spoke about the hidden place in her which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo, and right then, over toast and bramble jelly, if such things are possible, she came. I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it. I imagine her hair would fall about her face and she would become apparently downcast, as she does at a concert when she is moved. The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes and there she is, next to the bed, bending to a low drawer, picking over various small smooth black, white, and pink items of underwear. She bends so low her back runs parallel to the earth, but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun. The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking, lift toward the east—what can I say? Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth. Her breasts fall full; the nipples are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars of the gate under the earth where those who could not love press, wanting to be born again. I reach out and take her wrist and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas. Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again, rummaging in the same low drawer. The clock shows eight. Hmmm. With huge, silent effort of great, mounded muscles the earth has been turning. She takes a piece of silken cloth from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls of hair her face has become quiet and downcast, as if she will be, all day among strangers, looking down inside herself at our rapture.

The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds. Loren Eiseley A door opens in the wilderness. People cross through it–bloused women families Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn– Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into Moons–and everything I’d known– Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs In the capillaries of my eyes a blood Glancing through the hatches– If I said I would always be grateful If I lied or touched with spite If night is just a foamline of shadows Though we were both lost–the door Opening–the fear of being shown Whole to the one who must love you still– And stopped as if on a walk to say Look at that and what matters what really counts And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise I stood at door and behind me heard Snow-plows scrape against roads At the center of night–unknown to yourself And the word I said out-loud to no one That meant it was all to no purpose The word for the desire inside destruction For everything that can never be brought back– Loose snow blown hard to each bank And the common reel of those who To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite– Snow blasted to piles–and never opened up to Anything that could reach me until you reached me– Which hours belonged to us When was I unknowingly alone Why did you always return to walk here a path Behind my closed eyes shedding salt Dry snowfall and sticks–still were you here With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike There are still picnics there are fountains And the world I am leaving behind says One learns to see one learns to be kind– I closed my eyes I closed my hands I shut down the fields in my arms The cattle on the plains veins ditches Blue ravines a gray bird Sailing through a poplar brake kids Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized The river the town I shut down The hard muscles of sleep farmlands Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed The smooth bone of evening a storm On the hills white and noiseless spindled Prairies where I was born I shut I seized The clouds I closed in ager–fervor–ardor

This sweater is made from only the finest, softest underhairs of the Mongolian camel. “Fancy-schmancy,” my father would have said, whose snazziest sweater was still a declassé synthetic from the sweatshops of Taiwan. My friend Deloris, however, who really owns such clothes, would say “exquisite” or “sublime”—her opened closet’s row of shoulders teases late-day bedroomlight along such textures, there are days when the laboring brain and throbbing crotch appear to us to be not much more than her wardrobe’s tasteful accessories. “. . . woven from genital-down of prepubescent yeti, and then hand-sewn in our undersea domes.” “Untouched by anyone other than albino elves, this wool is . . . .” ______________ Rarefied—to Helthi Hart, the diet guru, it’s a cup of clear organic cauliflower broth. And for the Emperor Excessia, it’s a mad dessert of swans’ tongues —there were, what? ten thousand?—dipped in a slip of stiffening honey and set out to await the banqueteers like a field of fresh shoots they could graze. Some Roman party hosts had great roped bowls of snow brought from the mountaintops to entertain their guests with dishes of rose-petal sherbet and chilled roe. They might even allow the household slaves to slide leftover snow along the burning welts the ropes ate into their shoulders all down the mountainside. ______________ Afterwards it was an unrecognizable tatter. But an image of my father’s worn-thin Bargain City “all-weather” jacket is still whole in its polyester glory. This is what happened: the alley dog (he later called the thing a “cur”) had cornered Livia, and she screamed once, with a seven-year-old’s unselfconscious terror. And then my father was there, with his jacket wound around his arm, and a rock. When it was over, he tore the sleeves off, tied the poor dog quiet and, after comforting Livia, they both kneeled down to comfort the dog. He was like that. And the jacket that served as weapon and restraint?—was like him, every day of his life. It did what was needed. ______________ I misread “migraine.” Which of the two would we call the most rarefied? “Margarine”? Or maybe comparison isn’t the point. A ghost is a person rarefied through the fine, fine colander death; that doesn’t make, for most of us, extinction an ideal. It was hard to think of Frank and Deloris divorcing, since it was hard to imagine the two of them engaging in anything so mundane as sex or rage or envy with the rest of the hoi polloi. They seemed unearthly in close to a literal way, like radio waves. And yet divorce they did. They found something real they could unjoin, hertz from hertz until there just was air. ______________ A dream: We own the softest of the soft Mongolian camel underhair sweaters. One day (we think we’re doing the “right thing”) we release it into the wild, to romp with its brother and sister desert sweaters, out where it “belongs.” You know, however, what happens by now: it’s unfit to fend for itself amid that hardened herd. They beat it. It’s hungry. It crawls back into the city, mewing, curling up at night against a door my father opens and, seeing something in need, brings it inside, wraps it in flannel. That’s how he was. He’d give you the cheap shirt off his back.

It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees. It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists in the wind, daring anyone to come in.  I was trying so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was born to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard.  I was cross- stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles.  The effort of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong. Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to: just space enough for a girl to lie down.

When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others. You think:That one’s too clever, she’s dangerous,

I walked along Rue du Faubourg du Temple on the way to Belleville and I stopped at a shop selling rat poison. To my astonishment and my amusement they had a window full of stuffed rats, including four small rats standing round a table, playing cards. I liked that very much. Paris was full of weird turnarounds, it seemed — poisoning and elevating the rats to art at the same time. I nearly went in and asked how much the four rats and the tiny table would cost, but I remembered I’d be going back to Ireland pretty soon, and the people at airport security might not see the joke. It was not the first time I’d seen rat poison on sale here. Paris seemed to have a problem with rats. Someone I’d met for lunch recently had said she’d seen them running around the Métro platform when she was coming home once around midnight. I remembered a rat had made a dramatic appearance in one of Baudelaire’s little poems in prose. A rich boy had lost interest in his expensive toy because he’d seen a poor boy poking a rat in an improvised cage. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an invention on Baudelaire’s part — lots of poor parents probably thought of giving their children (or at least, their sons) rats as pets. Hadn’t I had a pet mouse myself? The rich boy who’d seen the rat certainly was delighted at the idea of having the creature as a pet. Many years ago a friend of mine who worked as a chef gave me his original copy of Larousse Gastronomique— an edition first published in the 1920s or 30s. In there, I think, was a recipe called Cassoulet de Grand Souris. This was basically rat meat given the coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon treatment, i.e. cooked in red wine with mushrooms and tiny onions. I can’t remember which top Parisian restaurant introduced the dish onto their menu during the Siege of Paris in 1870–71, but apparently it proved very popular. It made sense too, as the Siege lasted for more than four months, and no meat was getting in, while rats were plentiful, then as now. I seem to recall the menus of the time sometimes also included rat salami, and a rat sauce called Sauce Robert. It’s no use looking in a current edition of Larousse as the book has been cleaned up — all mention of rats have been removed. I had some experience of rats when I was a child in Donegal. 
I commonly saw water rats swimming in the stream or small river that flowed behind my primary school. The house I grew up in had rats under the floorboards. I used to love spending time under the stairs, and sometimes the rats would come in through a hole in the back. I don’t remember ever having been afraid of them but I never touched them or wanted them to walk on top of me. And I certainly never thought of capturing one and making it my pet. My little pink-eyed albino mouse was rodent enough for me, and even that was a trial for my mother.

Seven of them pinned in blood by long, shiny tails, three of them still alive and writhing against the wood, their heaviness whipping the wall as they try to break free, rattles beating in unison, hisses slowly dying in silence, the other four hanging stiff like ropes to another life, patterns of torn skin dripping with power and loss, the wonder of who might have done this turning in shock as all seven suddenly come alive when I get closer, pink mouths trembling with white fangs, lunging at me then falling back, entangled in one another to form twisted letters that spell a bloody word I can’t understand.

I’m a rattling boy from Dublin town, I courted a girl called Biddy Brown, Her eyes they were as black as sloes, She had black hair and an aquiline nose. Chorus— Whack fal de da, fal de darelido, Whack fal de da, fal de darelay, Whack fal de da, fal de darelido, Whack fal de da, fal de darelay. One night I met her with another lad, Says I, Biddy, I’ve caught you, by dad; I never thought you were half so bad As to be going about with another lad. Chorus. Says I, Biddy, this will never do, For to-night you’ve prov’d to me untrue, So do not make a hullaballoo, For I will bid farewell to you. Chorus. Says Barney Magee, She is my lass, And the man that says no, he is an ass, So come away, and I’ll give you a glass, Och, sure you can get another lass. Chorus. Says I, To the devil with your glass, You have taken from me my darling lass, And if you look angry, or offer to frown, With my darling shillelah I’ll knock you down. Chorus. Says Barney Magee unto me, By the hokey I love Biddy Brown, And before I’ll give her up to thee, One or both of us will go down. Chorus. So, with my darling shillelah, I gave him a whack, Which left him lying on his back, Saying, botheration to you and Biddy Brown,— For I’m the rattling boy from Dublin town. Chorus. So a policeman chanced to come up at the time, And he asked of me the cause of the shine, Says I, he threatened to knock me down When I challenged him for walking with my Biddy Brown. Chorus. So the policeman took Barney Magee to jail, Which made him shout and bewail That ever he met with Biddy Brown, The greatest deceiver in Dublin town. Chorus. So I bade farewell to Biddy Brown, The greatest jilter in Dublin town, Because she proved untrue to me, And was going about with Barney Magee. Chorus.