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Wondered Knob-Cracker at Stout-Heart: ‘Are you timed by your will, does your pulse List credit, ready to slam like a till? Can you keep it up?’ Growled Beard Splitter to Smug: ‘Your forces delay, bibbing at Northern walls While snow drives rifts between, barring the way. I am sufficient.’ Pleaded Knob-Cracker with Fail-Safe: ‘You’ve boarded at last, your hands in your pockets, Hat on the back of your head and flags up the mast. Can’t I come with you?’ Nodded Beard-Splitter to Sorrowful: ‘The islands are prisons and no one returns, No power or possessions where my rule is. I will make you mine.’

The first night at the monastery, a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight, long after the first frost. A short stick of incense burns thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine rising through the old pine of the hours. Summer is trapped under the thin glass on the brook, making the sound of an emptying bottle. Before the long silence, the monks make a long soft rustling, adjusting their robes. The deer are safe now. Their tracks are made of snow. The wind has dragged its branches over their history.

We say pinhole. A pin hole of light. We can’t imagine how bright more of it could be, the way this much defeats night. It almost isn’t fair, whoever poked this, with such a small act to vanquish blackness.

It hangs around the wardrobe for days, dull, or reclines in the hamper like a flattened flamingo. I wash it in soft water. I give it new life, and what thanks? It walks out the door with my legs, through the gate, headed straight for the racetrack.

Strand. String. In this dream, the paths cross and cross again. They are spelling a real boy out of repetition. • Each one is the one real boy. Each knows he must be wrong about this, but he can’t feel how. • The fish and the fisherman, the pilot, the princess, the fireman and the ones on fire.

i Marionette means little Mary. Think of Mary Shelley, a jointed doll lifted from her mother’s unstitched interior, that fist-shaped hole, the future mother of three dead children and Frankenstein’s monstrous electric baby, hater of creators. Think of all the porn-dollies moving their mouths up and down on wood and the way the men jerk, responding as they’re made to, and the clear wires. The men who make up cyborgs, beautiful and silver-skulled with wet mouths that might deliver quick blue shocks. Think of Eve’s small teeth kinking apple flesh and who put it there and who suggested and who lifted her wrist. Think of shadow puppets with enormous penises. Think of little boys shot for holding up toy guns. Think of animals compared to puppets by Aristotle — how levers are released and strike the twisted sinews against one another. Think of people compared to animals. Think of men on a bus forcing instruments so far inside a girl they puppet the girl to death and puppet means pulled by tendons. Think of if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. Think of the grace of a marionette as it glances the earth, as its limbs shake and float. Think of how its mind is elsewhere. ii Fox and Cat hang Pinocchio from the tree, a noose of string around his throat. Hoist by what he’s made of, the merciless weather swings him to clatter like a wedding bell that rings out atrocious spasms to a shuddered stop. His maker is not here for this unmaking. They should make him watch.

Her sister was shot, and hers found bludgeoned dead in her car trunk;her mother was alcoholic, and hers a suicide;her daughter killed by an uncle, and hers stayed alive thanks to prison. Before the term,date-raped, she was. Before domestic violence, love punched her face. We wanted the career. Not just skills and money, but structure, focus, printed plans, the rowdy order of raising buildings that years later would still stand right where you left them. We joined a tradition, expected a well-marked path and a welcome. The earnest ads never mentioned we’d be human minesweepers steering around barricades, sinkholes, lethal instructions, We learned Solidarity was a corporation privately held. Some left in shock. Some were maimed. Some went missing. A few found gold. Those with talent for sifting real threat from bluff, or detecting hair-triggers before the blast, fared best, We taught ourselves to disarm booby traps, shared hand-drawn maps, and prepared for a long winter. We lied on postcards home.

Yesterday I found my pipe while pondering a long evening of work, of fine winter work. Thrown aside were my cigarettes, with all the childish joys of summer, into the past which the leaves shining blue in the sun, the muslins, illuminate, and taken up once again was the grave pipe of a serious man who wants to smoke for a long while without being disturbed, so as better to work: but I was not prepared for the surprise that this abandoned object had in store for me; for hardly had I drawn the first puff when I forgot the grand books I was planning to write, and, amazed, moved to a feeling of tenderness, I breathed in the air of the previous winter which was now coming back to me. I had not been in contact with my faithful sweetheart since returning to France, and now all of London, London as I had lived it a year ago entirely alone, appeared before my eyes: first the dear fogs that muffle one’s brains and have an odor of their own there when they penetrate beneath the casements. My tobacco had the scent of a somber room with leather furniture sprinkled by coal dust, on which the thin black cat would curl and stretch; the big fires! and the maid with red arms pouring coals, and the noise of those coals falling from the sheet-iron bucket into the iron scuttle in the morning—when the postman gave the solemn double knock that kept me alive! Once again I saw through the windows those sickly trees of the deserted square—I saw the open sea, crossed so often that winter, shivering on the deck of the steamer wet with drizzle and blackened from the fumes—with my poor wandering beloved, decked out in traveller’s clothes, a long dress, dull as the dust of the roads, a coat clinging damply to her cold shoulders, one of those straw hats with no feather and hardly any ribbons that wealthy ladies throw away upon arrival, mangled as they are by the sea, and that poor loved ones refurbish for many another season. Around her neck was wound the terrible handkerchief that one waves when saying goodbye forever.

Is it Spanish? No, Swedish. What’s that? Where Loki came from. Writing about Ragnarök in the purple octopi of a gel pen, it’s the end of the world and a gigantic wolf is going to swallow the coagulated sun whole. Myth, wish fulfillment. He broke the strongest chains ever built. He was strong. He won. I’m not strong. I don’t win. Pippi is strong too. And smart. Sit with me, little one, inside this mansion of June hieroglyphics, inside the belles lettres of fluttering paper-doll tomorrrows, and mourn how we never lived.

"Mad—bad—and dangerous  to know"  bore  George  Gordon to the pageant of his bleeding heart in Philhellenic pirated by radicals reaching further and further to  Cephalonia  devoted  to his  fortune  and  the  shaft  that  paid the brigade a remedy of  bleeding  heroism  on  hearing the news  the  Carbonari dreaming The Two Foscari to beat the row and lasting eulogy  "she walks in beauty" at  the crack of   bark  the  bloody  news  spoke for  many writing   on a rock  "Byron  is  dead" and   agreed  to act  as  the  agent  on  VIRONOS   he became a name  not  an  island  and subjugated  to  "Byron is dead"  "so, we'll go no more a-roving" immense and lasting.