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I ran into the afterlife. No fluffy white clouds. Not even stars. Only sky dark as the inside of a movie theater at three in the afternoon and getting bigger all the time, expanding at terrific speed over the car which was disappearing, flattening out empty as the fields on either side. It was impossible to think under that rain louder than engines. I turned off the radio to listen, let my head fill up until every bone was vibrating—sky. Twice, trees of lightning broke out of the asphalt. I could smell the highway burning. Long after, saw blue smoke twirling behind the eyeballs, lariats doing fancy rope tricks, jerking silver dollars out of the air, along with billiard cues, ninepins. I was starting to feel I could drive forever when suddenly one of those trees was right in front of me. Of course, I hit it— branches shooting stars down the windshield, poor car shaking like a dazed cow. I thought this time for sure I was dead so whatever was on the other side had to be eternity. Saw sky enormous as nowhere. Kept on driving.

My Dear Conflicted Reader, If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direc- tion we're headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume- and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their predestination. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplat- ing a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy's school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off... Count your grey hairs Count your chigger bites Count your pills Count the times the phone rings Count your T cells Count your mosquito bites Count the days since your last menses Count the chickens you've eaten Count your cankers Count the storm candles Count your stitches Count your broken bones Count the flies you killed before noon

id Two ids walk into one body & fight over whether to break melon on the kitchen counter & eat it by the fistful or to throw the melon out a shut window & watch it break on the pavement, stabbed by shards of glass. ego Sorry, for yelling through the speaker at the McDonald’s drive thru. Sorry, for not letting you through the door first. Sorry, I ate the dozen donuts in fifteen minutes over the sink. Sorry, I sound shrill, sound dumb, sound ditzy, sound spacey. Sorry, mom. I mean, mamá. 
I mean, miss. I mean, nevermind. superego Dear body: Cut the melon into slices with the sharpest knife you can find & enjoy the pain you are causing this melon. Stop saying you’re sorry, instead feel guilty for being shrill, being dumb, being ditzy, 
being spacey. Feel guilty because your mom is your mamá is your miss is the one who is guilty for giving you this body with two ids, 
& one ego, & one superego who hush-hushes you whole.

Recalcitrant elephants begin to attack. The angry young males of murdered mothers. Any Martian could see it how we did it The historian of   the future is amazed. So much feeling once in so many bodies. But maybe they were different didn’t think or feel that much

The Seneca carry stories in satchels. They are made of  pounded corn and a grandmother’s throat. The right boy will approach the dampness of a forest with a sling, a modest twining wreath for the bodies of  birds. A liquid eye. When ruffed from leaves, the breath of  flight is dissolute. What else, the moment of  weightlessness before a great plunge? In a lost place, a stone will find the boy. Give me your birds, she will say, and I will tell you a story. A stone, too, admits hunger. The boy is willing. Loses all his beaks. What necklace will his grandmother make now. The sun has given the stone a mouth. With it, she sings of what has been lost. She sings and sings and sings. The boy listens, forgets, remembers. Becomes distracted. The necklace will be heavy, impossible to wear.

One morn I left him in his bed; A moment after some one said, ‘Your child is dying – he is dead.’ We made him ready for his rest, Flowers in his hair, and on his breast His little hands together prest. We sailed by night across the sea; So, floating from the world were we, Apart from sympathy, we Three. The wild sea moaned, the black clouds spread Moving shadows on its bed, But one of us lay midship dead. I saw his coffin sliding down The yellow sand in yonder town, Where I put on my sorrow’s crown. And we returned; in this drear place Never to see him face to face, I thrust aside the living race. Mothers, who mourn with me today, Oh, understand me, when I say, I cannot weep, I cannot pray; I gaze upon a hidden store, His books, his toys, the clothes he wore, And cry, ‘Once more, to me,once more!’ Then take, from me, this simple verse, That you may know what I rehearse— A grief – your and my Universe!

This afternoon the park is filled with brides. Among varieties of persuasion the big trees turn back toward the forest. Adventurers gather in side streets. The police are looking hard at the sky. Down at the bay, boys trapped in solitude fish. Girls hike their pants and stare at the wave line, remembering secrets they once held dear. The day offers a ridiculous variation as an excuse for not coming in on time. Wild imaginings take the place of religion. Someone who can't swim offers to cook. We've devised a means for the obstinate children to be fed, she says, but no one understands this. We crave affection, but give only advice. There are walls topped with broken bicycles. Someone makes an obscene offer and this is the best we get all day. Oh don't give in so easily she says, handing over the keys. We climb the blue fire escape. We would like to keep going, skyline climbers, old men remembering their childhood who devise a few illegal experiences no one wants to try. It gets to be more than the officers can take. The park is dusty, dark, yet the children, ignored all day, play on, convinced their dedication releases a magic that changes everything.

One sung of thee who left the tale untold, Like the false dawns which perish in the bursting; Like empty cups of wrought and daedal gold, Which mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.

How easily happiness begins by dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter slithers and swirls across the floor of the sauté pan, especially if its errant path crosses a tiny slick of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions. This could mean soup or risotto or chutney (from the Sanskrit chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions go limp and then nacreous and then what cookbooks call clear, though if they were eyes you could see clearly the cataracts in them. It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare and rage and murmury animal comfort that infant humans secrete. This is the best domestic perfume. You sit down to eat with a rumor of onions still on your twice-washed hands and lift to your mouth a hint of a story about loam and usual endurance. It’s there when you clean up and rinse the wine glasses and make a joke, and you leave the minutest whiff of it on the light switch, later, when you climb the stairs.

Only she who has breast-fed knows how beautiful the ear is. Only they who have been breast-fed know the beauty of the clavicle. Only to humans the Creator has given the earlobe. The humans, through clavicles slightly resembling birds, entwined in caresses fly to the place at night where, rocking the cradle of cradles, the babe is wailing, where on a pillow of air the stars nestle like toys. And some of them speak.