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Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over again, like the rented animals in Aïda . In the late morning the land breeze turns and now the extras are driving all the white elephants the other way. What language are these children shouting in? He is lying on the beach listening. The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels. He tries to remember snow noise. Would powder snow ping like that? But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow. Why doesn’t the girl who takes care of the children, a Yale girl without flaw, know the difference between lay and lie? He tries to remember snow, his season. The mind is in charge of things then. Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic, all that openness and swaying. No matter how often you make love in August you’re always aware of genitalia, your own and the half-naked others’. Even with the gracefulest bathers you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises, mammals disporting themselves in a blue element, smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard watches himself awhile, like a blue movie. In the other hemisphere now people are standing up, at work at their easels. There they think about love at night when they take off their serious clothes and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets. Today the children, his own among them, are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese, using the colonial dialect of Brazil. It is just as well, they have all been changed into small shrill marginal animals, he would not want to understand them again until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich — yes, richer than a king — And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Brooklyn, the present day I. The Spirit Box Son: A son is a steadfast keeper of secrets, a cupped palm, a calyx, a son is a spirit box, listen— I was born after armistice, the fissured cities, but slept nights with a human smoke. And though I never shuddered from a black rouge of rationed coffee to keep clean, the frost and sullen mud of a forced march, the unspoken, the unspeakable, became my life: I was a boy bathed in dreams by a menorah fashioned against the penalty of death, a mysterious klezmer. A son is a spirit box, imagine. II. Riders on the Back of Silence Son: As a boy, my old-world aunts and uncles would weep when I entered the room: What did I have to do with sadness? Their cryptic tears and purse-tucked Kleenex were my own tantalizing Hardy Boys case to crack. Gradually, as a junior detective, I grasped how much I resembled an uncle lost in the war, and like the savvy, querying boy at the Passover Seder become a scrupulous man, an inquisitive reporter, I set out to track my look-alike’s, my family’s wartime destiny— What my father marshaled against, what my mother endured, the unspoken, the unspeakable, became my mission: though I was born in a venomless time and suburb, phantoms, chimeras breathed in our never-quite-here-and-now house, secret calendars of fire: Mother, I dreamed we were riders on the back of silence, the wild unsaid beneath us: horse, whale, behemoth. We never spoke of the war. So with stark reading, a well-thumbed Diary of Anne Frank, I resolved to imagine pitiless showers, whips and watchtowers of brute commanders, their Gypsy-less, Jew-less, jerry-rigged heaven. III. The Photojournalist Son: In my search for your cloud-wrapped past, Mother, the wounded earth became mine, and each time I aligned myself with the exiled, the dispossessed, I aligned myself with you. Apprenticed to, obsessed with, light and justice, always I’ve tried to bring into focus a girl, with war as her spur, with hunger as her horse and shadow— Mother, in El Salvador I couldn’t lift my camera to capture the unearthed bodies of silenced nuns: I’m almost, but never quite, inured to death: a child in a jacket of flies; the last typed lines of a friend, a dissident poet whose body was opened beyond belief— In the Secret Annex, in the countless precincts of strife, I’ve learned an Esperanto of blood and hope and forbearance, as if someday I might receive my wish: to read, on a night as serene as truce, your long-awaited story: the capo’s unrelenting curses, a castaway’s pain: I should know it by heart, Mother. IV. The Antimiracle Mother: At the spring’s start, there were fists rather than fragrance, April-upon-April hope braided with arrests and betrayals, as dark as the derided spaces in our censored mail. Garrisons, watchtowers, checkpoints as daunting as Gorgons, proliferated. The borders became too-tight belts— Long after the white of truce, in restless sleep I struggled to awaken the family dead, to confess, unabashed: Lampshades of sullied flesh, linens fashioned of human hair— I was not prepared to stand outside humanity— V. The Pet Name Son: Soft as a fontanel, Dove was the pet name you gave me as a boy, and on the world’s battlefields, like a drop of holy water, its bolstering sweetness became my talisman. It was with me, mitigating, winged, shielding me somehow, as my lover Jaeger’s lens shattered and his lifeblood soaked into my shirt. It was with me, a thousand leagues from God, when I photographed a gassed village— whole families and their livestock hushed as if by an invisible hand, as if some heedless, insane baker had dusted the afternoon with flour. VI. Trains Mother: Today, amid the earliest birdcalls, the first neighborhood sounds, I swept the stoop, leaned on the trusty broom, and wondered: If I could write, son, about those years, where would I begin?— Your grandfather was a stationmaster, tall as a flagpole and as taciturn. And though his owl-gray eyes have gone to earth, I keep thinking he’ll round the corner in his fastidious clothes, carrying a sprig of asphodel or fragrant honeysuckle— so dignified with his gold spectacles and timetables. God took him the Sabbath before the shouts and stones, the smashed storefronts of Kristallnacht. How it would’ve angered him to see that his beloved trains were used to betray us. VII. Dove’s Arc Mother: For years I dreamed maternal dreams of your cozy security— spacious freedom from pogroms, all the misery the wide, unmerciful world doles out to Jews and scapegoats, and always you seemed determined to court danger— So you want to know about a prisoner’s, a Häftling’s dignity? This is what it meant: at the roll call, some anchoring wish— or a shared shoe, a black rouge of rationed coffee in the camp, to dodge selection for the flames ... Truth to tell: there’s barely been a day when the filth of the barracks, the fury of the camps didn’t obsess my heart; But I will go with you to Birkenau, near the slain beasts of the old crematoriums, where everywhere you walk, you are walking on human ash. I want to leave something sturdy in this world, maybe a book of live-to-tell truth, grace and vitamins, for those to come. More than anything, son, what I’ve wanted to tell you: there was a woman of courage in the camp, and she shepherded me, kindled me to keep me alive. A clear light seemed to shore her (as if we were seeing a one-woman sunrise, an unstoppable human dawn), so that she garnered strength to share her meager scraps, strength to carry the ones still minus an alphabet, making up soothing rhymes, little puddles of sound... Like so many, she died of typhus. And after liberation, in the DP camp, amid the chaos, I prayed my children would inherit a portion of her spirit. And it’s true, you have some of her fearlessness, her passion, you do. Son, why didn’t I see it before? How my hardscrabble prayer, in it’s dove’s arc, was answered.

The shag rug of a Great Plains buffalo, a flightless bird gone to stone: over its fellow keepsakes, into the archives of air, the whale hauled a harvest of dust. In the ripples of glass sealed over songbird skins, I wavered. What could be said for love? From the Full-Serv to the Self-Serv Island at the Gulf station next door, landlocked waves shivered in a row of corn. The great flukes lifted. A Milky Way scarred the underside more vast than the Midwestern night. Dark cargoes would give themselves up to these shallows that waited to take home the sailor, home to the sea of fossilized coral upon whose shoals just down the road the motels of Coralville lay sprawled. Here would lie a ring scratched by a scrivener with florid hand, In thy breast my heart does rest flung back to shore, here rest two coins face to face, joined by the salt that turned them faceless as they turned to each other.

It’s all of it rigged, she says, Bust-one-wins, Hi-striker, even the Dozer. It’s like you think you’ll score that giant panda for the wife except you can’t, or not without you drop another twenty and then—what?—then you win a thumb-sized monkey or a little comb. She hands me five ones and then stands. She’s worked the whole of the midway, she says, funnel cake to corn-dogs. She’s worked every game plus half the rides, Krazy Koaster, Avalanche, Wing-Ding, Tilt-a-Whirl and if there’s somebody sick she’ll do a kiddy ride too, Li’l Choo-choo, maybe the Tea Cup. There’s a collapsing soft sigh and she sits, opens the paper, turns a page and as if she were the one assigned to face forwards, as if it were her job to intuit the world and interpret the news, Anymore, she says, it’s out of our hands, it’s all we can do—it’s not up to you. You see that bald bronco tearing tickets at the carousel? We worked the Bottle-drop and now he’s mine: he’s no genius but he loves me and he’s mine. Things happen, she says, you can’t take them back.

A riot is the language of the unheard. —martin luther king John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe, all whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. Because the Negroes were coming down the street. Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty (not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka) and they were coming toward him in rough ranks. In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet. Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot itched instantly beneath the nourished white that told his story of glory to the World. “Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered to any handy angel in the sky. But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili, malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old averted doubt jerked forward decently, cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man, and the desperate die expensively today.” John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord! Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”

II Something is taking place. Horns thrust upward from the brow. Hooves beat impatient where feet once were. My son, youth grows alarming in your face. Your innocent regard is cruelly charming to me now. You bristle where my fond hand would stir to stroke your cheek.    I do not dare. Irregular meters beat between your heart and mine. Snuffling the air you take the heat and scan the lines you take in going as if I were or were not there and overtake me. And where it seems but yesterday I spilld the wine, you too grow beastly to become a man. Peace, peace.    I’ve had enough.    What can I say when song’s demanded? —I’ve had my fill of song? My longing to sing grows full. Time’s emptied me. And where my youth was, now the Sun in you grows hot, your day is young, my place you take triumphantly.    All along it’s been for you, for this lowering of your horns in challenge. She had her will of me and will not let my struggling spirit in itself be free.

Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined, and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork from supper. Mad and I used to do everything together, but now I need a project all my own, so I roam the green fields, finding bones. The skull of a wild boar. The jawbone of a mule. Older cousins show me how to shake the mule’s quijada, to make the blunt teeth rattle. Guitars. Drums. Gourds. Sticks. A cow bell. A washboard. Pretty soon, we have a whole orchestra. On Cuban farms, even death can turn into music.

A loon dives in the swollen river. It followed the river first. The town lies between it and canals Diverted from the river. The beak of the loon is orange, Its wingspan broader than a duck’s. My father’s legs were swollen. His once thin ankles barely fit his shoes. His heart no longer fed his body. Toxins and liquids began to drown him. His silly doctors didn’t see He couldn’t breathe. My father took me to the river. We fished for bass and bluegill, Sunfish, cats. Fat suckers, Their lips like suction cups, We put back. Too many little bones To catch and make you choke. I no longer want to go fishing. I don’t even want to play In the water. The boat Here has no oars, the current Is too swift. In the dark, teenagers Discover their body together. The body feels like a prison. I kneel by my father’s stapled body. He suctions thick liquid from his lungs. He coughs to clear them; it hurts. He wants more air. He wants To live, the heart’s valve's parachutes Opening with oxygen to feed The body’s healing. A tube Empties the chest cavity. He excretes Liquids and poisons. His shocked kidneys come to life. His stunned heart beats. His lung Opens again. He eats. He poops. He walks. He wants to go home. On the phone, I catch my sister Taking him home. It’s snowing. It’s cold. My brother and mother Help him climb the stairs. I walk down the path By the shallow canal. I see A falcon fishing. The power plant Breathes steam. I hope The wind won’t singe me. I come to the falls Where a little dog Barks and bounces hello. His owner Smiles and greets me. In the church Of Saint Laurence I kneel, I Give thanks, my heart jumps.

In a dream I returned to the river of bees Five orange trees by the bridge and Beside two mills my house Into whose courtyard a blindman followed The goats and stood singing Of what was older Soon it will be fifteen years He was old he will have fallen into his eyes I took my eyes A long way to the calendars Room after room asking how shall I live One of the ends is made of streets One man processions carry through it Empty bottles their Image of hope It was offered to me by name Once once and once In the same city I was born Asking what shall I say He will have fallen into his mouth Men think they are better than grass I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay He was old he is not real nothing is real Nor the noise of death drawing water We are the echo of the future On the door it says what to do to survive But we were not born to survive Only to live