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An asparagus eating contest— I thought I’d misheard. Downstairs the rude old man lays tile, makes demasiado noise. I fell asleep at last around 5:30 am and he woke me an hour later or so: it is better I don’t look at the clock. By this means I clock my progress: I know now it is sometimes better not to know. I have midnight equilibrium but it is gone by 3 am. Thank you for Cloud of Sparrows, man who wrote it. I read all night. Thank you for the pen from Iran, Kamyar. Its myriad stars have just run out of ink eleven years on. Thank you, sun, for leaf shadows on horrible carpet in horrible box I live in and for tree by which I mean what’s living. I think of the gardens I planted and left. I think of beets, of beans and asparagus. Then on the radio, hear the contest. The noise of ten lanes of traffic does not cancel the consolation of seeing the wind in the sweetgum leaves. The experience of this is my food and my sleep. As at some strange customs, I declare.

Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace of a new song far from this lament of lame words and fossils of a losing game. No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness of tongue and thigh and eye again! I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress who contemplated venison stew and knew the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked. I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land. And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did. I loitered in some great halls of ivy and allowed the inquisition of education: electric cattle prods placed lovingly to the lobes of my earth memories. I carried the false spirit force of sadness wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket of a worn, tweed coat. In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows in the narrow passages of my own discarded history. Then, when I was old enough I ran back to Indian land. Now I’m thinking of running from here. Pine Ridge, South Dakota February 1988

Well, this is nothing new, nothing to rattle the rafters in the noggin, this moment of remembering and its kissing cousin the waking dream. I wonder if I'll remember it? I've had a vision of a woman reclining underneath a tree: she's about half naked and little by little I'm sprinkling her burial mounds with grass. This is the kind of work I like. It lets me remember, and so I do. I remember the time I laid my homemade banjo in the fire and let it burn. There was nothing else to burn and the house was cold; the cigar box curled inside the flames. But the burst of heat was over soon, and once the little roar was done, I could hear the raindrops plopping up the buckets and kettles, scattered out like little ponds around the room. It was night and I was a boy, alone and left to listen to that old music. I liked it. I've liked it ever since. I loved the helpless people I loved. That's what a little boy will do, but a grown man will turn it all to sadness and let it soak his heart until he wrings it out and dreams about another kind of love, some afternoon beneath a tree. Burial mounds—that's hilarious.

I ruin my hats and all the mat slides glad I hop my girls and all is skip again I jump I run you up inside my truck The car goes looping out in dark and light And yellow hat slides in I run my mats and all the girl slides glad I hoped you skipped me into luck And jump me black, ruin me glad I jump I run you up inside my truck I jump my slopes and all the dopes slide glad I glide my luck and all is slip again I jump my hopes and all the rope glides sad I skip you jump the way you said But I run old and sigh your name I ruin my mats and all the girl slides glad At least when luck hops it skips back again A rune my mats and all the girls slide glad I jump I run you up inside my truck After "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath

There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend, And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming, Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming And humming sands, where windy surges wend: And he called loudly to the stars to bend From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they Among themselves laugh on and sing alway: And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Cried out,Dim sea, hear my most piteous story! The sea swept on and cried her old cry still, Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill. He fled the persecution of her glory And, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping, Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening. But naught they heard, for they are always listening, The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping. And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Sought once again the shore, and found a shell, And thought,I will my heavy story tell Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart; And my own tale again for me shall sing, And my own whispering words be comforting, And lo! my ancient burden may depart. Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim; But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.

Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness. Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There’s something laughable about this, The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below) High and preposterous and separate— Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! O wolves of memory! Immensements! No, One shivers slightly, looking up there. The hardness and the brightness and the plain Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can’t come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.

It’s a fine fact that whenever I sit in a tavern corner sipping a grappa, the pederast’s there, or the kids with their screaming, or the unemployed guy, or some beautiful girl outside—all breaking the thread of my smoke.That’s how it is, kid, I’m telling it straight, I work at Lucento.

Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb. She didn’t leave a tangle in. Her comb found every strand. Sadie was one of the livingest chits In all the land. Sadie bore two babies Under her maiden name. Maud and Ma and Papa Nearly died of shame. When Sadie said her last so-long Her girls struck out from home. (Sadie had left as heritage Her fine-tooth comb.) Maud, who went to college, Is a thin brown mouse. She is living all alone In this old house.

Somehow pesters the sadness of a dog—that ungiven guardedness at first report of day in a slyly chosen alley; not the cat hidden in the bougainvillaea blossom, not the bull barefaced into the lissome highway, it’s a madness less to do with mordant Englishness in a glum phototropic teat, more a perky realpolitik in over-familiar mottled skin. That hoarse howl at the garden’s shrub-ridden edge, that shawl a woman knits, waiting for a man who’s not her man—not a man at all—then crouching by the bedpost mewling. * When to be tame is at most a disavowal in proxy to the master’s unacknowledged fear: knowing fear as part of privilege, knowing privilege a state infeasible, the amenable innate animal to whom we assign the affectionate name —Bango, Napoleon, Spot—bounding resolutely into the black-red greenness of the middle sea— believes itself to be human in dogly garb, a non-veg incarnation of mortal virtue, no less than a wife, child, comrade in armless charms. We nurture this notion, lure it to the rug. * So even if it steal to the street trailing a fog- -dust deliberate, choosing mange over matter to be free—deranged, sheltering in a truck’s dappled shade, but dreading the hunger-dusk or charity at noon—if it claim its independence among curs, dodging some dog-chief, teeth clenched, lurking in building societies— it still will count the hand that carries the house in a fist, or follow, for a glance, a humanist. Paused between doorstep and forest, both gone; kept in equilibrium, the sadness of a dog.

Minutes ago those quick cleft hoofs lifted the dik-dik’s speckled frame. Now the cheetah dips her delicate head to the still-pulsating guts. Our Rover’s so close we need no zoom to fix the green shot of her eyes, the matted red mess of her face. You come here, recall a father hale in his ordinary life, not his last bed, not the long tasteless slide of tapioca. This is the Great Rift, where it all began, here where the warthogs and hartebeest feed in the scrub, giraffes splay to drink, and our rank diesel exhaust darkens the air for only a few moments before vanishing.