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Small and panting mass Of moonlight and dampness on a log This glistening tumor, terrible frog Of moonlight and dampness on a log My small and panting mass

Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in: Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kissed me.

The same to me are sombre days and gay. Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright, Because my dearest love is gone away Within my heart is melancholy night. My heart beats low in loneliness, despite That riotous Summer holds the earth in sway. In cerements my spirit is bedight; The same to me are sombre days and gay. Though breezes in the rippling grasses play, And waves dash high and far in glorious might, I thrill no longer to the sparkling day, Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright. Ungraceful seems to me the swallow's flight; As well might Heaven's blue be sullen gray; My soul discerns no beauty in their sight Because my dearest love is gone away. Let roses fling afar their crimson spray, And virgin daisies splash the fields with white, Let bloom the poppy hotly as it may, Within my heart is melancholy night. And this, oh love, my pitiable plight Whenever from my circling arms you stray; This little world of mine has lost its light ... I hope to God, my dear, that you can say The same to me.

Dad dead, Mom—back in the bank, tellering— started dressing in cute skirts and pants suits she sewed herself from onionskin patterns and bright-colored knits picked up at Cloth World. Got her dark brunette hair cut in a shag. And she and her single girlfriends from work on a weekday night would leave me to "Love American Style" or Mary Tyler Moore and step out to hear the country house band or now-and-then headliners like Ray Price and Merle Haggard. Mom's blue Buick Wildcat shoulder to shoulder with the other Detroit behemoths in the dim lot around back. Wind skittering trash along the street. Bass notes thumping through the sheet-metal walls and the full swinging sound suddenly blaring when a couple came in or out the door. I know because I'm there, now, in the lot, crouched behind the fender of a Skylark or Riviera, in the weird green glow of the rooftop Ronnie's sign, not keeping tabs on Mom, not watching out, just keeping time with the band and sipping a Slurpee while she dances through this two-year window before getting re-hitched, settling back down. Just twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, looking pretty, having the time of her life.

Sewn straw, exact pattern. Fields of rice-sprigs evenly set, a mile of herringbone tweed. The town, a sea of gunmetal, fish-scale tiles. By morning each floor a casserole of pillows, coverlets, comforters, towels:    flown nests. Imprint of bodies, fading. They fold the beds away, the room waits empty all day. All day the bodies circle, leaving no impression on each other. Tooled in the foundry of the streets. School-caps, factory-packed subway, miracle train: one territorial imperative, an emperor’s. On his platform one yard square perched on a roof that slopes in waves of tiles up toward other tiled cascades, the karate student for  hours does running in place, deep knee bends on his surfboard perch. All his free time to make his body efficient, tight, exact, rising and falling, mint piston pumping in its shaft.

After it came in like a dark bird Out of the snow, barely whistling The notes father,mother,child, It was hard to say what made us happiest. Seeing the branches where it had learned To stir the air? The air that opened Without fear? Just the branches And us in a room of wild things? Like a shapeless flame, it flew A dozen times around the room. And, in a wink, a dozen more. Into the wall, the window, the door. You said the world turns to parts. You said the parts are cunning spheres. You said you always love the face of sin. You said it’s here, the lips and eyes and skin. Outside the snow deepened With heaves of discontent. Inside, the tremor of our life Flew in and in and in.

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill with a morning light so bright you can’t see beyond its windows into the afternoon. A kitchen falling through time with its things in their places, the dishes jingling up in the cupboard, the bucket of drinking water rippled as if a truck had just gone past, but that truck was thirty years. No one’s at home in this room. Its counter is wiped, and the dishrag hangs from its nail, a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist, blue aprons of rain, my grandmother moved through this life like a ghost, and when she had finished her years, she put them all back in their places and wiped out the sink, turning her back on the rest of us, forever.

After a while I thought of it this way: It was a town underneath a mountain crowned by snow and every year a river rushed through, enveloping the dusk in a noise everyone knew signaled spring— a small town, known for a kind of calico, made there, strong and unglazed, a makeshift of cotton in which the actual unseparated husks still remained and could be found if you looked behind the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird with swept-back wings always trying to arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it might have occupied if anyone had offered it. And if you ask me now what happened to it— the town that is—the answer is of course there was no town, it never actually existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton on which a bird never landed is not gone, because it never was, never once, but then how to explain that sometimes I can hear the river in those first days of April, making its way through the dusk, having learned to speak the way I once spoke, saying as if I didn't love you, as if I wouldn't have died for you.

I remember rooms that have had their part In the steady slowing down of the heart. The room in Paris, the room at Geneva, The little damp room with the seaweed smell, And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide— Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. But there is the room where we (two) lie dead, Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed Out there in the sun—in the rain.

There are rooms that know you, rooms you know & can name, rooms that rise & stutter into view if you stare long enough. Rooms where nothing happened but in your head, where the world went on apart from you, you trying to rise to it. Rooms with walls of white blocks, one window, the only sound the bang bang banging of the headboard against the wall, your bed still. The room where the bed fell on you, the room where the hand going down was not your own, the groping tongue the proof. The room you talked your way out of, four men of monosyllables, thick arms & necks flushed pink, closing in, emptying the air between. The room where you were walked in on, the room where you were the walker, both times the last time in that room. The room with no door, a woman across the threshold, you crawling to her, over her to the bathroom to press your cheek against the white, your name an indictment among the stalls. The room the sun never touched, the sound of cars dropping you to sleep, your pupils large & hungry for light.