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He was a surprise of white: his teeth like knives, his face a triangle of albino dislike. I had seen him before, on our back porch, where my father sometimes left watermelon rinds, and he dipped his tongue into them, his skin glowing beneath our lights, like some four-legged relative of the moon. I knew him as a citizen of the night: a fainting, ghostly presence with a tail so naked it was embarrassed to drag behind him. But that morning, terrified and violent, he was different: a hissing fury at the bottom of the garbage can, a vampire bathed in light.

Incomprehensible fate that sentenced my father to my mother. I can’t blame him, I would have left the raving bitch myself, and would do so many many times in years to come. Then, of course, I came along. There is a limit to what one man can endure. So I suppose I am the reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame. And yet he did his best; he did all that he was capable of doing, and wrote me every year, like clockwork. He rarely remembered to mail what he wrote me, poor man (when I think of what I must have put him through), barely legible one-sentence postcards he sometimes worked at half the night; but as they all said the same thing, word for word, it wasn’t that bad. He could be forgiven.The blizzard I visit your city disguised as will never be over and never arrive. I think what he was trying to say was that at some point I’d begin to notice I was freezing, wasn’t dressed right, had nowhere to go, and was staggering into a blinding snow that no one else could see. I think he meant, the cold will make you what I am today.

I want you to know how it was, whether the Cross grinds into dust under men’s wheels or shines brightly as a monument to a new era. There was a church and one man served it, and few worshipped there in the raw light on the hill in winter, moving among the stones fallen about them like the ruins of a culture they were too weak to replace, too poor themselves to do anything but wait for the ending of a life they had not asked for. The priest would come and pull on the hoarse bell nobody heard, and enter that place of darkness, sour with the mould of the years. And the spider would run from the chalice, and the wine lie there for a time, cold and unwanted by all but he, while the candles guttered as the wind picked at the roof. And he would see over that bare meal his face staring at him from the cracked glass of the window, with the lips moving like those of an inhabitant of a world beyond this. And so back to the damp vestry to the book where he would scratch his name and the date he could hardly remember, Sunday by Sunday, while the place sank to its knees and the earth turned from season to season like the wheel of a great foundry to produce you, friend, who will know what happened.

simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling with delight. In the yard we plant rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes, cupping wet earth over tubers, our labor the germ of later sustenance and renewal. Across the field the sound of a baby crying as we carry in the last carrots, whorls of butter lettuce, a basket of red potatoes. I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures.

Sometimes, the naked taste of potato reminds me of being poor. The first bites are gratitude, the rest, contented boredom. The little kitchen still flickers like a candle-lit room in a folktale. Never again was my father so angry, my mother so still as she set the table, or I so much at home.

Go to the mother, to the father, to the house where no trees grow, to the bedroom, the door closed, to her fear and to his fear, and their shame, their longing, and to their bodies, their bodies young, their bodies separate, their bodies together. How far must you go back? Her womb. Her child body and his child body. Go to first hairs. To flesh, chests, arms, faces, buttocks, and stomachs. There, a wrinkle. There, color, nipples, and bellybuttons. Go to the eyes, see what she sees and what he sees. To the fingertips, which want what the eyes have made their own. Go to want, to love, to what wants more than love. Go to sins. What are your sins? Go to where the mother is not mother, the father is not father, and kiss her lips, and kiss his mouth. Do not be ashamed or afraid. The past is a strange land. Go because you can. Go because you can come back.

Those intervals between the day’s five calls to prayer the women of the house pulling thick threads through vegetables rosaries of ginger of rustling peppers in autumn drying for winter in those intervals this rug part of Grandma’s dowry folded so the Devil’s shadow would not desecrate Mecca scarlet-woven with minarets of gold but then the sunset call to prayer the servants their straw mats unrolled praying or in the garden in summer on grass the children wanting the prayers to end the women’s foreheads touching Abraham’s silk stone of sacrifice black stone descended from Heaven the pilgrims in white circling it this year my grandmother also a pilgrim in Mecca she weeps as the stone is unveiled she weeps holding on to the pillars (for Begum Zafar Ali)

O Ancient One, your web hangs down from the pines. I am of the Owl clan. I have been to water, my dress is of red clay. He moves at the edge of you, binds us with your threads. The center of his soul shall be my soul’s center. Our paths shall be white forever. Where we move the paths from every direction shall recognize each other. We are one never to be parted.

It was a good day and I was about to do something important and good, but then I unscrewed the pen I was using to see the ink. Precision German craftsmanship. The Germans are so persnickety and precise, they wash their driveways. Their mountains and streams dance around each other in a clockwork, courtly imitation of spring. They build the Panzer tank, out of rakes hoses and garden gnomes; they built me. And I’ve seated myself above an avenue on the brink of mystery, always just on the lip, with my toes over the lip but my bowels behind. When I replaced the ink the sky was socked in, only one window of blue open in the north, directly over someone. But that person was reading about Rosicrucians in the laundromat, he was unaware as the blue window closed above him. The rest of us are limp and damp, I see a button in front of us that says “spin cycle.” I’m going to push it.

The Bone-man lives in a stucco house. He ticks his heels on the cold terrazzo floor. He parks his ragtruck in the yard, instructs his crew on the white telephone. I am training my dog to attack the red-capped hunter bearing his long package. I am training the tethered jay to cry out against the killer who cracks the latch. On the open map, the road to my house bulges like a vein. He takes a train, he rents a car, he lurches in with an open fly. Sweet Eve was just the Farmer’s Daughter, he wooed her with a wormy apple. He’s a dirty joke, he’s always everybody’s last lover, he’s a regular can of worms—you wry Medusa, I am a mongoose staring you down.