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My father and I lie down together. He is dead. We look up at the stars, the steady sound Of the wind turning the night like a ceiling fan. This is our home. I remember the work in him Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost. And I imagine the way he had fear, The ground turning dark in a rain. Now he gets up. And I dream he looks down in my eyes And watches me die.

On the secret map the assassins Cloistered, the Moon River was marked Near the eighteen peaks and the city Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending Of the trail among dry, papery leaves Gray-brown quills like thoughts In the melodious but vast mass of today’s Writing through fields and swamps Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds. Certainly squirrels lived in the woods But devastation and dull sleep still Hung over the land, quelled The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons Singing on marble factory walls Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack The air with heavy invisible rods Pent in some sand valley from Which only quiet walking ever instructs. The bird flew over and Sat—there was nothing else to do. Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength Or the waterfall for a harbor Full of light boats that is there Performing for thousands of people In clothes some with places to go Or games. Sometimes over the pillar Of square stones its impact Makes a light print. So going around cities To get to other places you found It all on paper but the land Was made of paper processed To look like ferns, mud or other Whose sea unrolled its magic Distances and then rolled them up Its secret was only a pocket After all but some corners are darker Than these moonless nights spent as on a raft In the seclusion of a melody heard As though through trees And you can never ignite their touch Long but there were homes Flung far out near the asperities Of a sharp, rocky pinnacle And other collective places Shadows of vineyards whose wine Tasted of the forest floor Fisheries and oyster beds Tides under the pole Seminaries of instruction, public Places for electric light And the major tax assessment area Wrinkled on the plan Of election to public office Sixty-two years old bath and breakfast The formal traffic, shadows To make it not worth joining After the ox had pulled away the cart. Your plan was to separate the enemy into two groups With the razor-edged mountains between. It worked well on paper But their camp had grown To be the mountains and the map Carefully peeled away and not torn Was the light, a tender but tough bark On everything. Fortunately the war was solved In another way by isolating the two sections Of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland Warded away the big floating ships. Light bounced off the ends Of the small gray waves to tell Them in the observatory About the great drama that was being won To turn off the machinery And quietly move among the rustic landscape Scooping snow off the mountains rinsing The coarser ones that love had Slowly risen in the night to overflow Wetting pillow and petal Determined to place the letter On the unassassinated president’s desk So that a stamp could reproduce all this In detail, down to the last autumn leaf And the affliction of June ride Slowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.

For Wally Roberts, 1951-1994 Palaces of drift and crystal, the clouds loosen their burden, unworldly flakes so thick the border zones of sea and shore, the boundless zones of air fuse to float their worlds until the spirits congregate, fleet histories yearning into shape. Close my eyes and I’m a vessel. Make it some lucent amphora, Venetian blue, lip circled in faded gold. Can you see the whorls of breath, imperfections, the navel where it was blown from the maker’s pipe, can you see it drawn up from the bay where flakes hiss the instant they become the bay? Part the curtain. The foghorn’s steady, soothing moan—warning, safety, the reeling home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories— there’s this one of the cottage nestled into dune snowed into pure wave, the bay beyond and its lavish rustle, skirts lifting and falling fringed in foam. But I’m in another season—my friends’ house adrift, Wally’s last spring-into-summer, his bed a raft, cats and dogs clustered and we’re watching television floods, the Mississippi drowning whole cities unfamiliar. How could any form be a vessel adequate to such becoming, the stories unspooled through the skein of months as the virus erased more and more until Wally’s nimbused as these storm clouds, the sudden glowing ladders they let fall? But that’s not the moment I’m conjuring—it’s when my voyager afloat so many months brought back every flood story I carried. Drifting worlds, and Wai Min takes a shape I tell Wally as steady watermarks across the cold bare floor— Chinatown, South Pacific flashing its crimson, neoned waves tranced across Wai Min’s midnight eyes behind black shades, and that voice unraveling past each knocking winter pain. It’s another world I’m telling, Cognac and squalor. The foghorn’s haunting drone blends with that halting monotone, scarlet watermarks, the Sinkiang’s floodtides murky brown, the village become water, swept away. Three days floating on a door, his sister, the grandmother weaving stories endless beneath the waxed umbrella canopy she’s fashioned, stories to soothe the children wrapped in the curtain of her hair, to calm the ghost souls’ blurred lanterns. How rats swam to their raft, soaked cats, spirits she said, ghosts held tranced by the storied murmurous river. I have no spell, simply the foghorn’s song when voices unbodied, drift over water past the low dune this cottage nestles in becoming shape in motion stilled. No boundaries on this point, foghorn singing its come-home incantation over the ruthless currents. And isn’t it so we’re merely vessels given in grace, in mystery, just a little while, our fleet streaked moments? As this day is given, singular, chilly bolts of snow chenilled across the sky, the sea. How to cipher where one life begins and becomes another? Part the curtain and here’s my voyager afloat, gentle sleeper, sweet fish, dancer over water and he’s talking, laughing in that great four-poster bed he could not leave for months, a raft to buoy his furious radiant soul, if I may hazard to say that? Yes, there was laughter, the stories, the shining dogs— gold and black—his company. Voyager afloat so many months, banks of sunflowers he loved spitting their seeds. Tick. Black numerals on the sill. A world can be built anywhere & he spun, letting go. . . . The last time I held him, the last time we spoke, just a whisper—hoarse—that marries now this many-voiced mansion of storm and from him I’ve learned to slip my body, to be the storm governed by the law of bounty given then taken away. Shush and glide. This tide’s running high, its silken muscular tearing ruled by cycles, relentless, the drawn lavish damasks—teal, aquamarine, silvered steel, desire’s tidal forces, such urgent fullness, the elaborate collapse, and withdrawal beyond the drawn curtain that shows the secret desert of bare ruched sand. I’ve learned this, I’ve learned to be the horn calling home the journeyer, saying farewell. And here’s the foghorn’s simple two-note wail, mechanical stark aria that ripples out to shelter all of us— our mortal burden of dreams— adrift in the sea’s restless shouldering.

Immersed we don’t ask who entered whose stream. Take my hand there is no line no bridge only fond foolishness— the bread crumbs I bring you in morning— they float on the surface water with two violins un- strung like the silent song on your lips soft as the same hands I crushed to keep you from death.

They all are asleep, below. Above, awake, the helmsman and I. He, watching the compass needle, lord of the bodies, with their keys turned in the locks. I, with my eyes toward the infinite, guiding the open treasures of the souls.

This is what poetry is (says the Road), a laying down of uniform pattern across a land you can't control but which you think it best to flatten. It's far from vivid. Look at the whole flamboyant forest! Look at the paths that can't be uttered by a mouth and at the scattered arcs of light more integral to this wide planet than words will ever be. Your lines? Like railroad tracks that cut the bracken, bring something through, then disappear. No one knows what speck was taken or where it moved, and no one cares.

I shall foot it Down the roadway in the dusk, Where shapes of hunger wander And the fugitives of pain go by. I shall foot it In the silence of the morning, See the night slur into dawn, Hear the slow great winds arise Where tall trees flank the way And shoulder toward the sky. The broken boulders by the road Shall not commemorate my ruin. Regret shall be the gravel under foot. I shall watch for Slim birds swift of wing That go where wind and ranks of thunder Drive the wild processionals of rain. The dust of the travelled road Shall touch my hands and face.

Driving west through sandstone’s red arenas, a rodeo of slow erosion cleaves these plains, these ravaged cliffs. This is cowboy country. Desolate. Dull. Except on weekends, when cafés bloom like cactus after drought. My rented Mustang bucks the wind—I’m strapped up, wide-eyed, busting speed with both heels, a sure grip on the wheel. Black clouds maneuver in the distance, but I don’t care. Mileage is my obsession. I’m always racing off, passing through, as though the present were a dying town I’d rather flee. What matters is the future, its glittering Hotel. Clouds loom closer, big as Brahmas in the heavy air. The radio crackles like a shattered rib. I’m in the chute. I check the gas and set my jaw. I’m almost there.

I like the story of the circus waif bought by the man-of-weights to be his mistress, Profit the demon dragging her to market and Lust the soul who paid in lire for her. I like the peculiarities of her faith, the startling quality of that innocence, kissing the hand that dealt her cruelty believing, poor and dumb, that this was love. I relish a destitution stripped to sing pure in a voice all passion and denial: such are the driven burning by their breath more than mere air allows and cold permits. I savor my own involvement and concern lest all the transformations seem unreal, lest love be painted water-sweet and classic rather than salt and anguish to the end. I like her squatting in the village road combing the dust for something of her own, coming away belonging and committed, roots to be cherished, stones she could befriend. And what I like the subtlest and profoundest is that the circus traveled grief to grief educating the waif into a woman loving and beautiful and fiercely proud. I think of the sense of fury in that road, stooping to scratch the earth out for a life somewhere awaiting finding in one’s name. I like that, and I like the word Expense. I think of the years together which they had, the strong-man working her into the act, that hint, despite himself, of some devotion. I like that, and I like the ring of Cost. Not in a root, or stone, but in a man she found a thing to hold her tenderness. I like her dedication after that, her saying, if she spoke, I live by this. And what I like pervasive and forever is that my eyes have wept the tale before, wanting the telling not so much as story but for the way the waif befits my life.

For Nathan Gebert I The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew. I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan. In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House, right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida, I began my story— it was an interview, much of life is an interview. She said I did not need to pay her, but donations, yes, donations were appreciated: they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope that she could take back to the cloister. She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper. She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife. My meetings with her went on for a few years. I had come to speak about Durell. I did not know how to end sentences about Durell. He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror? What? There were so many ways to end my sentence. He was an unlikely candidate for so many things. Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer. I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact, but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own, which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly. Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things. Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile— parts were chipped like on a recovered fresco. Above her gray head, a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene, the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading— the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity. There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame. It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples, one named Cleopas, the other anonymous, forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them, the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger. They were on their way to that town, Emmaus, seven miles out from Jerusalem, gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing— they argued about whether to believe what they had seen; they were restless, back and forth the debate went— when there is estrangement there is little peace. ii