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I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

1. READING THE RESULTS I don’t move, but the inside corner of my right eye turns glassy, then shatters, hands focus more sharply. I don’t move, but the pigeon shudders on the sill. The door opens to a maze of wallpaper, family photos— their bliss-frieze burns the last unaffected corner of my sight, like molten Karo. My husband’s mouth collapses, and the air about his shoulders has crystallized. We don’t say a word, all the noise is around us, the letter, half-folded, on the desk, an albatross, a dove. 2. POSITIVE Because in those days there were no words for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning: enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools of butter, little sides of sautéed onions, paper cups of pure sour cream, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, no ice, as chaser, but now when the call comes I’m sitting in the kitchen with two plastic funnels over my breasts and the pump on the coutner with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table, milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word heroin makes me feel the lovely way a body can go slack from inside out. 3. A SINGLE DROP I’d never paid much mind to my implements, but now I paint “Fire Engine Red” on the handle of my razor, a single drop on my nail clippers, one long stroke on my lethal toothbrush to cordon off my blood, I tend and sop each splash or seep, soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets— every bleeding gum, torn hangnail, paper cut, scrape, gully  of cracked lip another hazard, each infectious throb now forever watched as I patrol my body’s raging arroyo in the family bathroom, to keep my children safe from me. 4. PAPER GOWNS X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing those delicate petals (gaping, cold through the sleeves). He asks me to extend my palms: the motion is of pushing away. Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft tup, tup, tup, along my spine, as if checking a cantaloupe. There is a piece of gum beneath the windowsill, green imprint of a thumb. We’re talking percentages, genotypes, we’re talking bundled pharmaceuticals. Studies, it seems, are inconclusive. I try to look at the big picture: a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash, neither in, nor out. On the insurance card, raised numbers, black ink worn away. There's a girl on the street with her head back, the strap of her dress falling carelessly.

Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind. Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient. Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them. Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you— these must burn away before you’ll apprehend how near I am, with what fervor I adore precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

We’re talking about when we met and you say it was easier to fall for me thinking (I’ll remember this pause) it was likely I’d be dead by now. Talking. Falling. Thinking. Waiting . . . Have I undone what you’ve tried to do? You say no. You say the surprise of still being is something being built— the machine of our living, this saltwork of luck, stylish, safe, comfortable and unintended. Meanwhile, I haven’t had the opportunity to tell you, but our lovely little dog has just killed a possum. Maybe it’s unfair, a possum entering the argument here. But I lay it down before us: because an ugly dying  possum played dead and didn’t run, its dubious cunning was brought to an end outside our door by our brutal, beautiful and very pleased little dog. So how do I say that this is not about death or sadness or even whether you really first loved me waiting, thinking I’d be dying young? It’s just that standing there a few minutes ago holding a dead possum by its repellent bony tail, I was struck by how eerily pleased I was to be a spectator to teeth, spit, agony and claw, feeling full of purpose, thinking how different in our adversaries we are from possums. We try love— the fist of words, their opening hand. And whether we play dead or alive, our pain, the slow circulation of happiness, our salt and work, the stubborn questions we endlessly give names to haunt us with choice.

after Elizabeth Bishop for Scott Manning Stevens The monoliths, sandstone carvings crest high in the air, tall like redwoods with striking wind-eroded, rain-washed, sunny edges. Driving from the East, two lovers from Chicago discover a new city made of sand cliffs, rabbit brush, red soil, a prairie dog’s echoes, heavy dark clouds, sharp yucca. Sheep dot the valley, nibbling on wild green shoots. Monument Valley— 50 miles from Kayenta

The wall of identical boxes into which our Aunt Sticky sorted the daily mail was at the far end of her dining room, and from the private side looked like a fancy wallpaper upon which peonies pushed through a white wooden trellis, or sometimes like crates of chickens stacked all the way to the ceiling. I'd learned by then – I was a little boy – that a thing can look like one thing on one day and another on another, depending on how you might be feeling. There were times when we were there, having our coffee and sweet rolls, when some woman on the lobby side would with a click unlock her box and leaning down, peer inside to see if she had mail, and see us at the table, Mother and Father, my sister and I and our postmistress aunt, and call out, "Yoohoo, Sticky! I see you have company!" and waggle her fingers, waving hello.

Yesterday, everything was possible. Today we’re good as married. You don’t want to hear that, do you, thinking I’m going to call you back in from the rain to fight over the morning paper, limning my deft and emotional promiscuities? That we’ll sit in our sitting room, watching the shaggy junipers twirl in winter wind as a storm closes its throat around the city? I’m thinking about how to ask God to be nicer. I’m thinking about that fabled leper colony where the last, solitary patient waited inside its unlocked tower three years in the belief she could not step outside. And how the local doctors visited only to re-wrap her face, to brush out her last gold strands of hair, wondering how to save anybody so willing to kill herself with denial. They wanted to talk about pain, the doctors, to say, One day, you’ll be half asleep in the dark, listening to a radio play in another room, and feel yourself suddenly filling like a jug with the cold awareness nothing more will ever happen, the disaster of your old ambivalence, the familiarity of desire’s wolfish teeth sinking into the body. The body, as if it didn’t belong to you anymore. The doctors said, Fear should never be elevated to ritual. They told the woman, You must change your life! One day, I’m on the steps of an office tower losing a shoe, the next I’m screaming on a gurney, I’m stuffing a baby into a diaper. I’m wondering the woods in my scar-dark cape. Every story has an archetype, doesn’t it? And if so, why aren’t we married? Why can’t we be just like everyone else this fucking, fucking once? God, I hate the way this tale is turning out: two aged strangers learning to tuck in their blood, hiding the knives and bread crumbs deep inside their pockets. Look, this time I swear, I won’t run; really; I’ll come and go from my stone room without a mirror, all my extremities taped in white. I’ll learn to knit with three fingers. I’ll learn to read into the deepening silences, to be nice to your step-sisters, singing to drown out the tears of their ugliness. I love you. Can I even say that? In this story, I want to spend the rest of my life growing quietly bored with you, locking away loom and spindle, sweeping out the piles of rose petals and ash. For once, I plan to triumph over smug experience. I marry you. Don’t hit me. Please, just come in from the stars awhile, sit here in this sitting room, let me find you another section of the paper to argue over. The doctors said I get to wear a suit. They said I’ll be released next Thursday. Listen: even now, the junipers are whispering their dark good-byes, thin limbs smocked in white. A riderless horse has appeared on the horizon. And somewhere, out in the meretricious night, somebody’s life is quietly changing.

Cinder blocks ripple. A hard lot is suddenly glammed up by an illusion. Cats will slip under chain-link and lap this dirty pool. I want to go there, be gone there, be anything liquid or even topped with barbed tape. But the sky is swept away and I am stuck in a parked car, all limbs attached to the idea of being human. As if sketched by da Vinci. As if stretched across a piece of parchment, I am drawn. Fear circles flesh boxed in by so many tawdry corners: disease, grocery lists, and suchnot. Even my thighs face Vitruvian quandaries: whether to stay together or fall apart. The mental ward is not unappealing: I check my calendar. What’s a lesion in the temporal lobe except an opportunity for time to fall into a black hole? These are clinical terms, time and black hole, words even this century’s doctors will recognize as problematic: both should help me forget but don’t. Heal, deaden. Either way I am a woman who wants to be rid of memory, past and future. Today I desire nothing more than to sit stilled. What’s so rotten about this willing suspension of all inclinations to engage anything other than stasis, brow furrowed, body puddled, hollow? Earlier, I watched a shiny black millipede on turned dirt make progress that could be measured in inches. Perhaps the art of letters is as insubstantial, as oddly disconcerting, and as unwavering. Nothing can be mistaken for resolution, yet the allure of metamorphosis, the way hard things buckle under the line, ameliorates something, at least encourages the generalized slurry of bad thinking to flow into the next available trough. Slop has purpose. This much I know.

One condition of work-release is daily to confess my obsessions, which I then write in disco glitter, one gluey blossom across my permanent record. When I eat too much of the local fruit, it gives me clairvoyance. But I forget to write down the predictions, instead crush cherry pits into a fine powder, chop the powder into lines with an expired credit card. The homeless give me quarters. Union rules require at least one mention of the weather here. My flight leaves on an inexact date in the nebulous future, arrives late afternoon, two days before our first kiss. I pay the airline $25 extra to lose my dignity between here and Chicago. At the airport you buy it back. When I walk to the market to buy more cherries, a parade of kittens follows, marching in formation, singing precise and bawdy cadence about prostitutes and crack houses. They change the names to protect the innocent. Signs say this mile of interstate is paved with the bones of the great mastodons, and kept clean by the well-meaning gentlemen of the Kiwanis Club. Vacationers from further south sit in the lobby watching guests from the north put on one-act plays. On even-numbered days, only, of course. Registered letters from the clerk of the court inform me that it won't violate my probation to drag you across state lines as long as I promise to return you by 8 p.m., mostly whole. The desk clerk is also the milkman is the town orthodontist. Instead of leaving Bibles at bedside, Gideons leave individual soaps printed with couplets from the Song of Songs, or corkscrews. I did not catch last night's plays, but promised to attend this evening's performance. I play a slightly amplified version of myself, with one line:Wish you were here. It's a song and dance number. Everyone applauds.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The spring clouds blow Above the shuttered mansion-house, Beyond our gate and the windy sky Cries out a literate despair. We knew for long the mansion's look And what we said of it became A part of what it is ... Children, Still weaving budded aureoles, Will speak our speech and never know, Will say of the mansion that it seems As if he that lived there left behind A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.