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I From a blue keg, the barrel's thumb-tuned goatskin, the choirs of ancestral ululation are psalms and pivot for the prodigal in a dirt yard at Piaille, are confrontation, old incantation and fresh sacrifice where a ram is tethered, without the scrolled horns, wool locks and beard of the scapegoat, in the Old Testament, or black blood gushing in a trench in Attic ceremony and rite. Death softens the eyes of the still, unbleating sheep, a common ewe, as for you this is common. There is no awe in repetition, no claim, no tribal ecstasy, no pardon in the bent smoke from Guinea, the sprinkled white rum, or the meal crumbled on the small stone altar, in the broken memory of the slaver's coast and the braided villages of thatch and coalpot from the salted passage to this paralysis where your pale feet cannot keep time feel no communion with its celebrants, they keep another time, the time you keep comes with a different metre, your skin what sheath and prison that it has become as a dried chrysalis with no ressurection and one unwished for. Star-embers fade. II I could give facts and dates, but to what use? In the lush chasms and fissures of Choiseul an ogre bred my grandam, whelped my father, erected my tall aunts; slopes with potato vines, and the narrow, clean dark water of River Doree, the fragrant hogplums and chapel of La Fargue; go in search of his own shire, unlatch a gate that opens into Albion, its faery flowers, its source of intellectual bastardy, without embarrassment or degradation, without belligerence or accusation, and mostly selfishly, without self-contempt, a curious and self-nourishing integer outside their given numbers and their dates, as nameless as the bush, beyond heredity or prophecy, or the quiet panic of clocks, the shallow penitence of mirrors. Mongrel. And out of this chord, this discord will come the Atlantic's drone, the Caribbean hum of chaos in an ochre afternoon the enclosing harmony that we call home when the sea mints its quicksilver, when the cedars sag and the light ends up with nothing. The facts! The Facts! The history. The cause. You need a history to make your case. III 1492. 1833. 1930. Dates. The one thing about which there is no discourse. Dates multiplied by events, by consequences, are what add up to History. We have a few coins struck for a mere handful of events, as amateur numismatists, regal profiles, none worthy in the traditional way of memory slavery being an infinity of endeavour without pause or payment, without commemoration, only the long division of day into dark, of drought into rainburst, equinoxes glide over their own shadows, and all our dates, our calendars, hymns and anniversaries, were bequeathed to us. Left to itself the brain would be mantled like coral in the cool shade of a reefs outcrop and turret, swayed like reeds in meditation, dateless. The petals of the sun curl, wilting on its stalk– here comes the quiet lily crescent of the moon. IV From this thick tree issues miraculous bread. The breadfruit makes itself from copious shade, whose dial is the ground's dry, palmate leaves, a voluble, invaluable dome, a library, where all the town's talk is stored, and in whose core is coiled—a tempest, a rising sea in wind, the spinning pages of remorseful texts, Bligh's log and cannonballs and bowling thunder, shelter from the rain and so magnanimous in circumference that it has no time without shade, and shade is suffering. The sun makes their suffering mute. This bedraggled backyard, this unfulfilled lot, this little field of leaves, brittle and fallen, of all the cities of the world, this is your centre. O to be luminous and exact! As this tree is in ripening sunshine, that your own leaves could shine with nourishment, and give such shade and peace, the mirror of each canvas that you sign. Despite acclamation, despite contempt, I was never part of that catalogue in spite of friends in the same business neither of the free-verse orthodoxy, nor the other— the clogged, elegiac thickness of memory; farther away from all that, forever, knee-high in the foam of the page wading by sounding caves. Gradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame. V And Sancta Trinidad. It is that sacred to me. However fragmentary, through a sunlit hedge, by the running of clear water over the sun-wiry stones and a cool hoarding of bamboos without a bridge phrases of Spain in summer, in the vale of Santa Cruz, perhaps because of the name, but the bamboo's fountains arch, sounding sweet, surreptitious, twittering leaves and shadows moving over indigo mountains. In a green street of hedges and vermilion roofs, and gates that creak open into banana yards and doors that groan on the evocation of ginger behind which are the hill with five cresting palms whose long fingers are stirring tropical almanacs darkened with rain over the grey savannahs of zebu and bison and the small chalk temples of an almost erased Asia, and the ovations of cane through which turbaned horsemen carry feathering lances. The cloud-white egret, the heron whose hue is wet slate, move through a somnolence as sweet as malaria to a child whose parched lips are soothed by a servant or his own mother, to the sudden great sound of rain on the roofs, cloudburst of benediction, dry seas in his ears.

“Fly at once!” he said. “All is discovered.” — Edward Gorey In Miami, this May afternoon, I look up, the sky hot, so hot, always, and heating up hotter — how long I have loved this scene. The clouds are white optimistic churches; I cannot number them. Herons, pelicans, and gulls glide like dreams through cloud-portals, cloud-porticos, and cloud-porte-cochères Giotto could have done with his passion for blues and dimensions. Hard not to love a place always called by possibility. Nearby, Cuba is singing and somewhere here Richard Blanco is writing his poems. As I enter the city, my bishop walks with a cane towards our cathedral. The sun shines on the people and unites us in a delirium of light. High above this bleached, scorched, fragile, groin-scented peninsula, the birds track their insects and remain loyal to their nests. I look up and I feel bliss building as I did when my father read another book to me, and another, the pages like wings. There are moments of memorable patience in this world. Airplanes advance towards Miami International, booked with Jewish retirees and Cuban émigrés— their descending engines disrupt the white-gloved illegal waiters at the country clubs in Coral Gables, who deliver flan to the ladies who have pulled their skin behind their ears like gum. This is a place where few decisions are doubted. On South Beach, where everyone rearranges or expands their sexual parts, there seems to be no life outside the physical and time becomes a tricky thing here, spring looks like winter, winter like spring, the scenes dense, shifting, shut — and before you know it the rats have preached from the mangoes and then chewed them to corpses. And look, how the interior decorators unroll their fresh bolts and wink-wink to new clients — what would be considered frivolous anywhere else is here pondered and coerced at great length. The feminine gains strength. Moving closer to the cathedral, the sea presses the harbor, wanting to be loved, pushing up the cruise ships with its muscles. The sea says: “I am the sea.” We have seen Cubans come atop dolphins’ backs here. Mothers have drowned for their sons, but the cool gray backs of the dolphins have buoyed their children to us, numbed by the lullaby of sonar clicks. The sea blesses the city the way mothers do — forceful, pushy, ungraspable, persistent. The black mangrove shoots take root on the porous, chalky rock, building themselves up like steeples. Listen. How the waves love what does not love them back. Pedicurists buff the toenails of the sugar daddies in the Delano. Lincoln Road refines its scarlet seductions. Bees are sticky with tourism inside the motel rooms of the rose. Red-orange petals from the Royal Poincianas tint the minutes with flamboyance. The pink and white bottlebrush trees explode with seeds. I will always love my time in this city, you might say craziest of cities, delivering its youth in short-shorts and Rollerblades with rainbow sweatbands. City smelling of unzipped things.Cha cha cha! Cha cha cha! I do not think the city will ever be mine. Beautiful Spanish and broken English spoken everywhere. How I love that sound, for it is the sound of people making their way where they were not born. Maids from Honduras push their carts, stacking their wrapped soaps, counting them like children, their cuticles sting with disinfectant, perspiration staining their uniforms as they pray over the toilet seats they clean. O Miami! For a decade I did not speak to my parents. Are you listening to me? I will not bore you with details. Instead, I will tell you something new. Listen to me. I was angry. But the reasons no longer interest me. I take the liberty of assuming you approve of forgiveness, stressing hardening gentleness as you do. I speak to the bishop about my call and the sacraments, we discuss blessings, absolutions, consecrations— our work of the soul. The soul has no sex and I am relieved to speak of a thing alive in the world that has no sex. The bishop places a paperweight atop my reports on his desk, our professional talk is measured by the silence of the dead who are always flinging open their shutters, religion being the work of the living and the dead, the hope and release in the hearts of parents turning to their children and the hearts of children turning to their parents — all that business in life that remains unrehearsed. Superior to obedient, we pray. The laughter of the bathers through the grillwork of the office window pleases me, their movements rinsed in the baptism of the sea, the languorous sea. The sky at the end of the city trembles. Light and dust warm to cream to pink to lavender. Miami, it has been a gorgeous day, indeed. Thank you. How I love your decks, bridges, promenades, and balconies — the paraphernalia of connection. How fast the pastels encroach upon the edges. I have a dinner engagement in Coral Gables at Books & Books where I will see the poet Richard Blanco. I hope he will tell me stories of his beloved, broken Cuba. Nearly five o’clock now, and I am late. When I arrive, Richard Blanco speaks of Cuba as I had wished, and the city quiets all around him. “If our bodies house our souls,” I think to myself, “Then, Richard, poets are the interior decorators of the mind.” Richard Blanco is saying something about going back, his relatives singing poems in the fields. I listen. Behind us, in the palmetum, at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens, the Elephant, Date, Malaysian, Kiwi, Coconut, and Royal palms ask the city to remember their names with the insistence of priests. Good-bye, Miami, good-bye. Good-bye to the workers laying down the grids of the concrete embeds on the high-rises, reinforcing their masculine nests, gluing glass with their spermy compounds to stone and steel. Good-bye to you, South Beach. Let your rapturous sands darken to a deep grape color. Let the polished feet of youth launch into their surprises and swaps. Let the elements cool. Good-bye, Richard Blanco, good-bye. Today my candidacy for Holy Orders was affirmed. I listen to the sea flatten. Cuba pleads in the distance one more night. Honduras waits on too many things to count. No longer can I stand still. Stars smooth the sea with their immaculate highways of long lights. Mother and father, forgive me my absence. I will always be moving quietly toward you.

I grew up bent over a chessboard. I loved the word endgame. All my cousins looked worried. It was a small house near a Roman graveyard. Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes. A retired professor of astronomy taught me how to play. That must have been in 1944. In the set we were using, the paint had almost chipped off the black pieces. The white King was missing and had to be substituted for. I’m told but do not believe that that summer I witnessed men hung from telephone poles. I remember my mother blindfolding me a lot. She had a way of tucking my head suddenly under her overcoat. In chess, too, the professor told me, the masters play blindfolded, the great ones on several boards at the same time.

The heat shimmer along our street one midsummer midafternoon, and wading up through it a horse’s hooves, and each shoe raising a tongueless bell that tolled in the neighborhood, till the driver drew in the reins and the horse hung its head and stood. And something in a basket thin as shavings (blackberries? or a ghost of the memory of having tasted them?) passing into my hands as mother paid, and the man got up again, slapping the loop from the reins, and was off on his trundling wagon.

Not, in the saying of you, are you said. Baffled and like a root stopped by a stone you turn back questioning the tree you feed. But what the leaves hear is not what the roots ask. Inexhaustibly, being at one time what was to be said and at another time what has been said the saying of you remains the living of you never to be said. But, enduring, you change with the change that changes and yet are not of the changing of any of you. Ever yourself, you are always about to be yourself in something else ever with me.

For Allison Hogge, in memory of Brian Wilkie I was a math major—fond of all things rational. It was the first day of my first poetry class. The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass, told us that we could “make great poetry personal,” could own it, since poetry we memorize sings inside us always. By way of illustration he began reciting Shelley with real passion, but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”— because, with that last plosive, his top denture popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair. He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture, a promise so splendid it made me give up math: “More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.”

Professional Middle-class Couple, 1927 by August Sander What justifies the inequality That issues her a tastefully square-cut Ruby for her finger, him a suit Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity Declares a life of working sitting down, While someone in a sweatshop has to squint And palsy sewing, and a continent Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground, Could not be justice. Nothing but the use To which they put prosperity can speak In their defense: the faces money makes, They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse, Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong; Only among the burghers do you find A glance so frank, engaging, and refined, So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.

I get there early and I find a chair. I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod. I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod and second an opinion I don’t share. I think: whatever else I am, I’m there. Afterwards, I escape across the quad into fresh air, alone again, thank god. Nobody cares. They’re quite right not to care. I can’t go home. Even my family is thoroughly contemptuous of me. I look bad. I’m exactly how I look. These days I never read, but no one does, and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was. Everything I know is from a book.

1. He turned so fast he wound the spirals of his arms tight into a slap in the face he beat himself to death dancing he would fall then get right — back up to some music he heard all by himself no one to help listen 2.Program We tune taking in hand the remote as partner to the news. We turn twirling the tit of the dial      in touch to touch between our fingers. We feel ourselves both touch and button coming on. Or is it music we two pick up step to      that times happening into receiving line? 3. table. . . Tied to a table top      the table tilted up right so he hung by his ankles, he filled from a bucket on the floor at his head the cup at his feet overhead      with a spoon, and when it filled, then an attendant emptied cup back into bucket, and he began again doing the senseless       hanging sit ups like prayer   in the morning naked, his throat cut draining the words into the bucket from which he delivered the blood of his songs into the cup of heaven, his feet, in steps 4.By The Rivers of. . The boys came in the house home from day camp that summer they were stopped so many feet into their running through the door made to meet the guests required of        to sing what they had done today They sang of being taught though they thought they knew already how to swim Asked if they liked it the youngest explained that what he liked the best was to come in through the top door of the water into the city underneath the pool      He said he saw long lights he liked      people made funny faces and were flying. I am the guest      I come in through the top door of the water 4 to 12   for the public aquarium I'm a diver tankman to porpoises, moray eels, the lightning cloud of neon tetras at my hand I midwife the anaconda — all 60 plastic wrap egg babies — making a living living in a vision city of living cubes of water door to door. Door to door tank displays on my shift don't get visited by out of tank appearances in their own likeness hiding gifts of transcendence and wisdom Rather than glory — tubes and cylinders trailing old air   poor disguise flippers for wings and gifts no more than of care and feeding. Though I'm trained to their pH's and oxygen levels this is a lay practice of my own care and feeding      They live in a timeless solution of their histories the living broth of their other lives, their dead, their brothers      I find something familial familiar in these small squares these boxes buried in the public air of the aquarium, the slave atlantic's water, blocked each into a plot water is one with its everywhere: the how many lost of the all of us brought here — in my wandering going in door to door into the gathered ecologies keeping a watch out for the shark, in what I bring     in this extra grace said      from some black thing to this fare — get their care and feeding as if some hour in all employment living to give it goes to their loss where without that sorry new york minute's pause at ourselves in this country       we lose our colors        the gray side of money that pale of ghosts flying   folds on our chests, and we float up fattened by work that is emptied of the gain back of our lives. They come from in between things through      as though between things shines a door   we sing of the orisha I hear a singing on the other side of a door singing going on behind the tanks heard on the public floor people invisibly at work on public display their aquarium      parading the corps we've decorated as gods      thousands of years unseen that morning we woke when we had lost the attempt all our supplies everything but our lives      washed down the river            left in a puddle a fish we only had to dish up out of its own carapace      a shelled catfish Plecostomus and here it was I see now      recognize one of my samples I care for in this exhibit all that kept me alive 'til we reached a village. Come back in from my own expeditions out      I know the diving aboard landing of the plane made into the glittering night waters that are the city      home searching the long waving light refraction for its drawing of that African's face. But the boys             they'll grow up in what only is a difference in this country      as if starting the exhibit at a different door changed the subject: their mother white like many's somewhere in our people here, their African black like a many's in our American   peoples) father came over long after the middle passage on a plane to school A whole new subject here. But we sit down to Miles to Louis Armstrong over dinner and later a little Lou Donaldson gets us dancing      our stuff. 5.seat The erased unshined polish of a board that is a mind unmet nor chaired into a seat of any solving, gray with no answers the slate smoothness of the cities' street education That moving standing still we learn that rest is hanging on      no seat keeping the strap and loop's flow open from around your neck your foot out of the trap The loss of grace complaint forgets we find footing accomplishment in that 6.Dance, for the Balance of New Mexico We had driven until the land rover was in danger of never being upright again at this height. The cloud came through the window on the driver side and out the passenger and stopped, its center on the seat between. To go further would have been to carry black clown from Second Mesa's Butterfly Dance, his foggy, white stripes      floating ash across the blackened rocks naked from a fire        his hardened body We could hear the land rover strain,   his screaming laughter just before he'd leap through a complete standing somersault, and we would halt and float the truck for that moment he was air in a sweated cloud of fear until he touched the balance to the ground and put us down. 7.Flamenco Goyasques We all have women we were born of We all were dragged out & lined up against the sky Know that Somebody here stood beside you You put up your hands & you die . . . . . . . . . . . . Just in . . . Just in word. Word of navigational challenges

The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery. My left eye is smaller than my right, my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly aligned like Muslims in prayer. My lips an accordion. Each sneeze a facial thumbprint. One corner of my mouth hangs downward when I want to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s palsy perhaps or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting, that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush in a young beauty’s face without thinking it could be a fever, a malar rash, a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie facedown now as cadavers posed on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine was a woman until three weeks later we turned her over. Out of reverence there was to be no untimely exposure of donors, our patrons who were covered in patches of scrubs-green dish towels, and by semester’s end we were sick of all that, tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts into lab air and caught them. My body was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said when it was released before finals. The cause of her death? Nothing memorable, frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit were there skull cracks to condemn the house of death, no shattered glass in the brain, only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely. He had the most beautiful muscles of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged, zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred. Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed. Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance, he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war. I had come across that which will end me, ex- tend me, at least once, without knowing it.