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The very flatness of portraits makes for nostalgia in the connoisseur. Here’s the latest little lip of wave to flatten and spread thin. Let’s say it shows our recklessness, our fast gun, our self-consciousness which was really our infatuation with our own fame, our escapes, the easy way we’d blend in with the peasantry, our loyalty to our old gang from among whom it was our nature to be singled out

We piled planks, sheets of tin, & sandbags across the creek till the bright water rose & splayed both sides, swelling into our hoorah. Our hard work brought July thrashers & fat June bugs in decades of dead leaves. Water moccasins hid in holes at the brim of the clay bank as the creek eased up pelvic bones, hips, navel, & chest, to eye level. When the boys dove into our swim hole we pumped our balled fists to fire up their rebel yells. The Jim Crow birds sang of persimmon & mayhaw after a 12-gauge shotgun sounded in the deep woods. If we ruled the day an hour the boys would call girl cousins & sisters, & they came running half-naked into a white splash, but we could outrun the sunset through sage & rabbit tobacco, born to hide each other’s alibis beneath the drowned sky.

In memoriam Mary Ann, 1932–1980 The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like Listening to music. Several of them are teachers, One is a psychologist, one is reading a book, The page glares white in the summer sunlight; Others are just sunning themselves, or just Sitting there looking out over the water; A couple of them seem to be talking together; From this far off you can’t hear what they are saying. The day is hot, the absolute middle of summer. Someone has written an obscenity In huge letters on the rocks above and behind This group of people, and someone else, one of them, Maybe, or maybe a neighbor, the owner of one Of the cottages up behind and back in the woods, Has tried to erase it and only partly done so, So that for years it will say hoarsely fuck To the random winds and to the senseless waves. One of them is sitting with her back turned To me and to the others on the rocks. The purple Loosestrife and the tigerlilies are like the flags Of some celebration; they bloom along the edge Of a small stream that makes its way unseen Down to the rocks and sand. Her shoulders are round, And rather luxuriously heavy, and the whole figure Has a youthful and graceful amplitude of being Whose beauty will last her her whole life long. The voices of some people out in a boat somewhere Are carried in over the water with surprising Force and clarity, though saying I don’t know what: Happiness; unhappiness; something about the conditions Of all such things; work done, not done; the saving Of the self in the intense work of its singleness, Learning to live with it. Their lives have separate ends. Suddenly she turned her head and seems to look Toward me and toward the others on the rocks, So that her body, turned away, is more expressive Than her blank face, a pure reflector of light.

We’re headed for empty-headedness, the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration. We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds; we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow. Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’ white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding the whole great story together. Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station, and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows. The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance, and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though it were the author of this story.

He stood on his stoop and clapped her sneakers together hard, a sharp report, smacking right sole against left, trying to shock the mud from each complicated tread, spanking those expensive footprints until clay flakes and plugs ticked onto the boxwood’s leaves like a light filthy sleet from the rubber craters and crannies where they stuck weeks ago, until her shoes were banged clean though that didn’t stop his stiff-armed slow-motion applause with her feet’s emptied gloves, slapping mate against mate without missing a beat, half-wishing that hollow sound echoing off their neighbors’ houses could call her back.

I try to make myself afraid, the way you must have been afraid, stepping out onto this stage— but with a fear so pure, so perfectly informed that you strode out shouting. Here, where the neon yellow arrows painted on the floor shoot forward underfoot in blackness—beneath the hanging sequence of tinted skies—out toward that mindless immortalizing light, now dark. Now I think I feel the heat you must have felt rising from the front rows. A gaping fire door, a furnace: your single body standing here with no shadow, swinging on itself. Had you been a fool, you might have thought that they loved you. They never love you, you said. They are hungry for the god in his gold eclipse, the pure you on fire. John and I move quickly, each with a handful of ash, scattering. The sound of no sound falling into the cracks in the boards, the footlights, the first row. A small personal snow: a prince of dust, a villain of dust. Each part you played drifting up again, recomposing. I open my hand, I let you go—back into the lines you learned, back into the body and the body's beauty— back into the standing ovation: bow after bow after bow.

You could grow into it, that sense of living like a dog, loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin, able to exist only for the sake of existing. Nothing inside your head lasting long enough for you to hold onto, you watch your own thoughts leap across your own synapses and disappear— small boats in a wind, fliers in all that blue, the swish of an arm backed with feathers, a dress talking in a corner, and then poof, your mind clean as a dog’s, your body big as the world, important with accident— blood or a limp, fur and paws. You swell into survival, you take up the whole day, you’re all there is, everything else is not you, is every passing glint, is shadows brought to you by wind, passing into a bird’s cheep, replaced by a rabbit skittering across a yard, a void you yourself fall into. You could make this beautiful, but you don’t need to, living is this fleshy side of the bone, going on is this medicinal smell of the sun— no dog ever tires of seeing his life keep showing up at the back door even as a rotting bone with a bad smell; feet tottering, he dreams of it, wakes and licks no matter what.

Like columns of mist in some temple to a vanished god, the late cloud-stacks mass over a June reduced to the sickly greens of the Norfolk broads; and, above the steam-soiled mess where earthworms grovel, where lumpish toads set up the resistances of grace, where badgers undermine the tarred road, I watch the canvas of that underpainted sky through a jellied glass of vermouth while the gravestone crops up and an oily wind steels itself to the south. There certain winged creatures from a century misplaced on shelves take the day down with a moaning chant known to themselves.

Waiting for your ride in front of the house where you spent the night, where, as a third ear during their endless intimate, important, and kinky phone calls, you pretended to rinse glassware; you were a dog from the pound, grateful, sniffing the upholstery. Later, lying in the center of their king-sized bed, a giant wall-to-wall mirror, isolating you like a rabbit; it was also their exercise room with torture equipment; something in you twitched; flickering a bizarre video in your head. It’s morning now. You’re standing outside, with nightgown and toothbrush wrapped in your purse, waiting for a bus to take you somewhere else. You’re depressed. They’re asleep of course. Their network wrapped around them. You keep wondering why you’re missing something. Then you look back and see your pricked-up ears, your waggy self, stuck inside their picture window, where for years it will wave at you—naive, apologetic, embarrassed.

I The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, "O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!" II Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?" They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-Tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose. III "Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will." So they took it away, and were married next day By the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.