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I The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. II The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms. III You tossed a blanket from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands. IV His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At four and five and six o’clock; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties, The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

For all your days prepare, And meet them ever alike: When you are the anvil, bear— When you are the hammer, strike.

MARIA NEFELE : I walk in thorns in the dark of what’s to happen and what has with my only weapon my only defense my nails purple like cyclamens. ANTIPHONIST: I saw her everywhere. Holding a glass and staring in space. Lying down listening to records. Walking the streets in wide trousers and an old gabardine. In front of children’s-store windows. Sadder then. And in discotheques, more nervous, eating her nails. She smokes innumerable cigarettes. She is pale and beautiful. But if you talk to her she doesn’t hear at all. As if something is happening – she alone hears it and is frightened. She holds your hand tight, tears, but is not there. I never touched her and I never took from her anything. MN: He understood nothing. He kept asking all the time “Remember?” What’s to remember? My dreams alone I remember because I see them at night. Days I feel bad – how to say: unprepared. I found myself so suddenly, in life – where I’d hardly expected. I’d say “Bah, I’ll get used to it.” And everything around me ran. Things and people ran, ran – until I set myself to run like crazy. But, it seems, I overdid. Because – I don’t know – something strange happened in the end. First I’d see the corpse and then the murder. First came the blood and then the blow and cry. And now, when I hear rain I don’t know what’s waiting... A: “Why don’t they bury people standing up like archbishops?” – that’s what she’d say to me. And once, I remember, summer on the island, all of us coming from a party, dawn, we jumped over the bars of the museum’s garden. She danced on the stones and she saw nothing. MN: I saw his eyes.  I saw some old olive groves. A: I saw a column on a grave. A girl in relief on the stone. She seemed sad and held a small bird in her cupped hand. MN: He was looking at me, I know, he was looking at me. We both were looking at the same stone. We looked at each other through the stone. A: She was calm and in her palm she held a small bird. MN: She was sitting and she was dead. A: She was sitting and in her palm she held a small bird. You’ll never hold a bird like that – you aren’t able. MN: Oh if they let me, if they let me. A: If who let you? MN: The one who lets nothing. A: He, he who lets nothing is cut by his shadow and walks away. MN: His words are white and unspeakable his eyes deep and without sleep... A: But the whole upper part of the stone was taken. And with it her name. MN: ARIMNA – as if I could still see the letters carved inside the light... ARIMNA EFE EL ... A: Gone. The whole top gone. There were no letters at all. MN: ARIMNA EFE EL – there, on the EL the stone had cut and broken. I remember it well. A: She must have seen it in a dream since she remembers. MN: In my dreams, yes. In a large sleep that will come sometimes all light and heat and small stony steps. The children will walk in the streets arm in arm like in some old Italian movies. Song everywhere and enormous women in small balconies watering their flowers. A: A large blue balloon will take us high then, here and there, the wind will beat us. The silver domes will stand out first, then the belfries. The streets will appear narrower and straighter than we imagined. The terraces with the white television antennas. And all around the hills, and the kites – so close we’ll just shave past them. Until one moment we’ll see the whole sea. On it the souls will be leaving small white steams. MN: I have lifted my hand against the mountains, the dark and the demonic of this world. I’ve asked love “Why?” and rolled her on the floor. War and war and not one rag to hide deep in our things and forget. Who listens? Who listened? Judges, priests, police, which is your country? One body is left me and I give it. On it those who know cultivate the holy, as the gardeners in Holland, tulips. And in it drown who never learned of sea or swimming... Flux of the sea and you stars’ distant influx – stand by me! A: I have lifted my hand against the unexorcised demons of the world and from the place of illness I have exited to the sun and to the light self-exiled! MN: And from too many storms I’ve exited self among humans exiled!

We Had Stalked the Doe Commerce. Production. Consumption. Who makes? Who takes? It's useless to give up cashmere shawls, gold armatures, SUVs, furs and silks to achieve cross-cultural pollination or transcendence. Since we've ceased to celebrate works-in-progress or cutting-edge sound bites, we photo commodities to provide a permanent record of desire in the grass and under the elms. Turkey on the chairlift. Rooster in the coop. Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority. We recall the limited palette of ashen tones when we drove through Eastern Europe. Billboards, even in Estonia, summoned up fascinations with dieting, alcoholism and psychotherapy. Should we have eaten those salads of language? Should we have risked teased hairstyles and gained weight? Should we have giggled amidst severest woe? Mimicry, idolatry, fanaticism, greed. Oh, fervid tangled brushwork, what can we do to hold you at bay? I am old. I am old. The good day grows cold.

It was a vertical time. It was the expression, a spirit giving way onto an electric barren. We circled and were encircled and had no cause. It was a time of the self come on in a field of apparatuses. It was vignetted by sleep, and the sleep was in its center breached. Cold moving through the smell of gas. The big-leafed enclosure. It was a time that clattered at the horizons, whose recounting was already foreclosed, as in a numeral smudged in powder, as in a thin water making of the atmosphere a disc. It was a time of guzzling. A time amid what has been kept, a time of calendered trust, repeated appeal, erasures of flight. We begin with a weedy stem drawn against the winter sky. Dear hierophant, our decision initialed. The muffled sound of the closet and the machine.

The present that you gave me months ago is still unopened by our bed, sealed in its rich blue paper and bright bow. I’ve even left the card unread and kept the ribbon knotted tight. Why needlessly unfold and bring to light the elegant contrivances that hide the costly secret waiting still inside?

Nervy, sparrow-like, Eyes Cherokee, Blackberry black, Arrow-quick, Picky eater, Lean in spirit, Converted Quaker, She taught her grandson Arithmetic And checkers tactics And let him touch Through her cotton nightie Small, tense nipples. Her hands, arthritic, Knitted doilies, Breaded tomatoes, And put up apples, While the hoarded guilts Made for bright quilts, The torrid migraines’ Counterpanes.

Aloft between heaven and them, I babble the landscape—what staunch, vicious trees, what cluttered roads, slow cars. This is my country as it was gifted me—victimless, vast. The soundtrack buzzing the air around my ears continually loops ditties of eagles and oil. I can’t choose. Every moment I’m awake, aroused instrumentals channel theme songs, speaking what I cannot. I don’t ever have to come down. I can stay hooked to heaven, dictating this blandness. My flyboys memorize flip and soar. They’ll never swoop real enough to resurrect that other country, won’t ever get close enough to give name to tonight’s dreams darkening the water. I understand that somewhere it has rained.

Why is the word pretty so underrated? In November the leaf is pretty when it falls The stream grows deep in the woods after rain And in the pretty pool the pike stalks He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too, The prey escapes with an underwater flash But not for long, the great fish has him now The pike is a fish who always has his prey And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between The land and water. Not ‘torn’, he does not mind. The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty The lake water below him rustles with ice There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist All this is pretty, it could not be prettier. Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough, Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier A field in the evening, tilting up. The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late The sky is lighter than the hill field All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty. And it is careless, and that is always pretty This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless, As Nature is always careless and indifferent Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty. So a person can come along like a thief—pretty!— Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel, Lick the icicle broken from the bank And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty. Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able Very soon not even to cry pretty And so be delivered entirely from humanity This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.

He’s 1200 pounds of pink pork covered by black bristles stiff enough to needle and sew with, Pretty Ricky, all six feet of him spread out, asleep, no fancy dancer, neither twirler nor prancer, just eats and sleeps, the biggest boar at the Fair, oblivious to gawkers, smirkers, cholesterol, or weight watchers, fat off the hoof, fat lying flat, good only for breeding and eating, he won’t even stand to show off all the pork cuts displayed on the poster behind him: ham, it says, from the butt, oldest meat of civilized man; kabobs from the shoulder, roasted on swords by early Asian nomads; spareribs, sausage, and bacon from the belly. Pretty Ricky urges me to swear off pork, but it’s lunchtime and my stomach wanders off to a foot-long or a brat with ‘kraut. I think twice, three times, waffle back and forth between meat and a veggie wrap, as, in front of me, many meals stretch out, dozing.