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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.

1 only you are allowed to enter voice for the first time the look   hesitant   undemanding body supple as sound the hand   unexpected   a fruit falling skin curves of sand lull below the arms scent of the ocean's salt 2 the body pushed into life's mouth 3 velvet crunch of white under feet   my heart snowy lizards' tails sleeping on branches arms rhyme with bending earth a shadow slants like a calligrapher's quill 4 pass the threshold 5 a genus of the solitary the knitted night       stained-glass boxes where memories ferment unplanned   you come 6 saguaros crack      monsoons consider erosion of rocks water's fire    lit worlds intersect           dusk     purity of ascent ferocious nose of a cat incandescent          through forces stay up waiting planes converge        fates intersect 7 how long does a measure last? 8 sea in the sky knives striking obliquely           army of light beating walls the aquamarine houses are ghosts between crystal trees water steals over skewed floors only this life 9 a cat sleeps one eye opened

The count of cappuccino, the marquise of meringue, all the little cantuccini... and what was the song they sang? Oh, the best of us is nothing but a sweetening of the air, a tryst between the teeth and tongue: we meet and no one’s there though the café’s always crowded as society arrives and light glints to and fro between the eyes and rings and knives. We’ll slip away together, perfect ghosts of appetite, the balancing of ash on fire and whim—the mating flight of amaretti papers, my petite montgolfiere , our lit cage rising weightless up the lift shaft of the air. So the count of cappuccino, the marquise of not much more, consumed each other’s hunger. Then the crash. And then the war.

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil dragging from my neck as I swim through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos, which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say: I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means. And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café, and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No, I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise when my self-absorption gets usurped by the sound of opera streaming from an open window, and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl, and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue which means a language more beautiful than my own, and I don’t recognize the song though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face, staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers, some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers and training wheels and nearly trampling me when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway and friends, it is not too much to say it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles of love and every name of the unborn and dead from this abuelita only glancing at me before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here and tell you I said thank you.

For once, he was just my father. We drove to the Computing Center in a Monte Carlo Landau not technically ours. Lexington, 1977. That fall. The color had settled, too, undone orange-brown and dull yellow, crimson. And it was something, yet not, the pile of  leaves just a pile of  leaves. Sorry to think what thinking has done to landscape: He loved punched cards, program decks and subroutines, assembly languages and keypunch machines. Even my father looked small next to a mainframe. The sound of order; the space between us. We almost laughed, but not for years — we almost laughed. But not. For years, the space between us, the sound of order next to a mainframe. Even my father looked small. And keypunch machines, assembly languages, program decks and subroutines. He loved punched cards, what thinking has done to landscape — just a pile of leaves. Sorry to think, yet not, the pile of leaves crimson. And it was. Something orange-brown and dull yellow had settled, too, undone 1977, that fall, the color not technically ours, Lexington in a Monte Carlo Landau. We drove to the Computing Center. For once he was just, my father.

A fascicle of feathers in my hand, hand frantic and shaking, my arm holding my hand as far away from my body as possible—I am disgusted. I cannot pull out the central stalks of my wings where they protrude from between my shoulder blades, but I can strip every tuft of feathers from them to bare those cartilaginous stems as they rise from my back, stalks stripped perfectly clean so as to better tuck them along my spine, hide them, make them invisible beneath my clothing. I was so foolish then, a teenager not yet able to accept what he was. When my wings blackened, withered, and fell off, I was beyond happy. They would stay dormant sometimes as long as three months. Sadly, they always came back. In the bathroom mirror, I can see myself offering a cluster of feathers to myself, as if to say: Take this from me and I will be forever grateful. But the me that is a trick of light on glass is uncaring, offers them back immediately. If I concentrate, if I think hard on it, I can move my wings, and I practice in the bathroom mirror. But these wings cannot support my weight, cannot buoy me on even a strong gust of wind. What good are wings if you cannot fly? What good is this ridiculous secret I am asked to keep? With the feathers ripped cleanly away, I tuck the stems along my spine. I bandage them down— cloth wound under my armpits, tightly wound around my chest. I fashion myself into an ordinary boy.

Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.

It’s mostly the same here slow as melonvines in an arctic sun where the great ball of the plane went down in nineteen thirty-five & an eskimo with a camera took a picture that stayed in his camera twenty-one years & by some chance he told an explorer who bought the film & found the crash & the bodies under tarp looking like two seals on the ice, the crumpled plane with oversized pontoons, the propeller as though it could turn again— the men, Wiley Post & Will Rogers, still twelve miles southwest of Barrow, Alaska.

At sunset from the top of the stair watching the castle mallets wrenched from their socket fell from ambush into flame flew into hiding; above the stoneware a latch like muscle hid the green; he stood waist high under the rapt ceiling and hanged the sparrow; where the kitchen had been a mirror of eggs served in a tumbler he saw the ring when a lancet pierced and threw it. In a basket and lowered it where sails enter the harbor over a parchment like dominoes; the petrel-like eyelash. To the sun and its rites were pulled the dried banners; they flew past the ruins the tower and window where ivory guided the mist on his back; he rubbed his eyes and counted them kneeling wrinkled as grass. A ghost in their nostrils put a heel at their forehead; they saw only the moon as it fasted.