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Speaking of blindness, the man told his one-eyed fiancée, have you heard about the ortolans? Fig-peckers of yellowhammer descent. Thumb-sized or tongue-sized. Kings used to catch them at summer’s end, knife-blind them so that in their darkness they’d feast on millet all day, all night, a break from beetles and seeds, until they grew from one ounce to four. Drowned in Armagnac, plucked, placed in a saucepan, roasted, you eat them whole, so the head dangles between your lips, crunch bones like hazelnuts, underneath the linen napkin you must place over your head to create a scent tent or, so God won’t see your shame. (Proust paired them with sips of Yquem, a sauterne born of noble rot — grapes like ashes, their wet dried in the nick of time, so honeysuckle turns to bitter finish.) Mediterranean salt emerges as flight bursts in your mouth. Imagine yourself a memory, a body full of meal, as Mitterrand must have, eating ortolans eight days before dying, his last illegal act. Fifteen minutes of savoring a supple, burning ball of fat until you exhaust its roast juices. When you finally swallow, you will regret the end of a sensual experience. At least once in your life, you must pay the price for this princely folly.

For Easton, Zooey, and Nacho Cancer loves the long bone, the femur and the fibula, the humerus and ulna, the greyhound’s sleek physique, a calumet, ribboned with fur and eddies of dust churned to a smoke, the sweet slenderness of that languorous lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy, a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow — loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs, the distance between points A and D, epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end but then of course it does, emptying its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel that river of waste and sorrow. I’ve begun a scrapbook: here the limp that started it all, here your scream when the shoulder bone broke, here that walk to the water dish, your leg trailing like a length of   black bunting. And here the words I whispered when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods on that beautiful silky head: Run. Run, my boy-o, in that madcap zigzag, unzipping the air.

Ostrich and Lark started each morning together at first light, day in and day out. And they parted at nightfall. Every day they nibbled an ongoing meal: a few seeds here, a few seeds there; for Ostrich, the occasional lizard. All day the sun glared out of cloudless blue. Every day, all day, over the cidada’s drone, a drizzle of buzzings fell, and a downpour of birdsong. Hornbill, Bee-eater, Hoopoe, Diederik, Mousebird, Whydah, Canary: from gray-light-come to last-light-gone, the fancy-dressed suitors of the veld warbled their rain-shower jazz. But Ostrich was silent. Lark sang the first song of the day, perched tall, slender, the tawny brown on a termite castle or a low branch of a camel thorn tree. But Ostrich was silent. When Lark sang, he flickered his wings, and his white throat feathers trembled. All day Lark sang, standing still or flitting, his open wings vermillion-spangled. But Ostrich was silent. At dusk Lark sought his hidden nest on the ground. Ostrich sat down under an acacia tree and tucked his head under one of his black-and-white wings. Sometimes he dreamed of flying. Sometimes he dreamed of singing the sky full of stars. Sometimes he dreamed of the green season, drinking caught water, and drinking, and drinking. At first light, Lark called, and together they started their day. One evening, as the great red sun sank toward the tree-spiked horizon and the birds swooped to their nests; as the plant eaters gathered at full alert and the meat eaters woke to prowl; as the gates of night opened to the dark, Ostrich fluttered his billowy wings. He stretched his graceful neck, closed his eyes, and TWOO-WOO-WOOOT Ostrich found his voice, a voice part lion’s roar, part foghorn, part old man trumpeting into his handkerchief. Ostrich was booming! Which is what ostriches do. The veld fell silent. And Ostrich boomed like thunderheads on the horizon. Ostrich boomed like the rainstorm that ends the dusty months of thirst. Ostrich boomed like the promise of jubilant green, like the promise of birth. Ostrich boomed Lark right off his perch! Lark flew up to an Ostrich-high branch and looked at his friend with a big WOW in his eyes. Ostrich had found his voice at last, his own beauty, his big, terrific self.

The air is drenched with day, but one by one The flowers close on cue, Obedient to the declining sun. Forest and grasses, bush and leaf and stem, They cannot move (and nor, you dream, can you); It is the wind that plays with them. Only the little midges dancing still Against the evening move at will. This tiny swarm still dancing on and on Like something in a net Expanding and contracting, that late swan Towing its wake, a solitary crow Crossing the twilight in its silhouette, The fox proceeding sly and slow: They are small worlds of purpose which infuse The world around with will to choose. An animalcule in a drop of dew— And so diminutive That if the human eye should look clear through That globe there would be nothing there to see— Although it only has a blink to live, Yet in the face of this is free; The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot Hangs from a single leaf, is not.

would be coming back from some war, sending back stuffed birds or handkerchiefs in navy blue with Love painted on it. Some sent telegrams for birthdays, the pastel letters like jewels. The magazines were full of fathers who were doing what had to be done, were serving, were brave. Someone yelped there’d be confetti in the streets, maybe no school. That soon we’d have bananas. My father sat in the grey chair, war after war, hardly said a word. I wished he had gone away with the others so maybe he would be coming back to us

To insects – sensual lust. . . was how I began my talk . . . On Paradise . . . at the local library . . . It would be a nuns-only audience . . . I knew . . . ! So I’d donned my habit . . . wore a ton of More Spirit Than Flesh make-up . . . And . . . brought props . . . props in my large portable closet . . . l’Armoire Secrète . . . Got to the library assembly room . . . Fuck . . . the one . . . only . . . person in the audience . . . my husband . . . Who . . . I knew . . . ! always preferred I get right to the . . . Thus . . .Paradise is sex sans bodies . . . Paradise: Travesty . . . Mechanical birds . . . Exegetes. . . Was I losing . . . ? Quickly to witticisms . . .I don’t like sexing but I love having sexed . . . The audience member . . . the audience member was . . . demanding to see the inside . . . of l’Armoire Secrète . . . Fuck . . . I . . . I began fumbling . . . with the golden lock . . . Took a minute for nunly explication . . .Sex lubricates . . . the locks on the gates . . . Paradise-wise . . . When the Armoire doors were . . . I stepped aside . . . let the audience member . . . He got very close . . . peered in . . . put his whole head . . . I regret he said . . . he was nervous trying to joke . . . I regret I’ve forgotten my spelunking costume . . . Shush I said . . . Keep looking . . . Though really there was nothing to see . . .  l’Armoire Secrète was empty . . . Finally . . . he stood . . . squinting in the library light . . . he peered . . . right at me . . . Hey he said . . . he came very close . . . This was how a naked marble statue felt . . . Hey he said . . . gentle-wise . . . Love . . . he said . . . Love it’s me don’t you recognize . . . Of course I did . . . had . . . But had to pretend I did . . . not . . . Will the audience member please take his seat. . . I said it resolutely . . . though not . . . firmly . . . I began again . . .On Paradise . . . My voice as clean as the Dewey Decimal System . . . I brought up my On Paradise PowerPoint . . . visuals of forests . . . trees . . . He was seated . . . Once my car broke down in front of a nunnery . . . over the door of which was inscribed . . . from Dante . . . Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura and I thought . . . at the time . . . I had been thinking una selva oscura. . . had to mean dark self . . . never bothering to . . . the Italian . . . I just . . . plunged . . . I’d donned a habit . . . black robes . . .  . . . Was I saying all this out loud . . . or in my head . . . ? It’s hard to tell the difference . . . if . . . you talk enough . . .I donned these black robes and lived in shadows and. . . It was time for a rhetorical gesture . . . Of course of course I said with a nod . . . a nod magnanimous . . . a nod sagacious . . . a nod to a slide of particularly dark . . . trees . . .Of course the wilderness spreads woe unto him . . . who carries the wilderness with him. . . and the audience member . . . I had him . . . I knew . . . Thus . . . I parted my robes . . . to show . . . marching in and out of my cunt . . . the ants . . . Then . . . the robes . . . I shut . . . He . . . the audience . . . was no longer standing . . . very close . . . Goodness . . . ! I chided . . . Such distance . . .

The nightclub’s neon light glows red with anxiety as I wait on the turning lane. Cars blur past, their headlights white as charcoal. I trust each driver not to swerve. I trust each stranger not to kill me and let me cross the shadow of his smoky path. Trust is all I have for patrons at the bar: one man offers me a line, one man buys the kamikaze, another drinks it. Yet another wraps his arm around my waist. I trust him not to harm my body as much as he expects his body to remain unharmed. One man asks me to the dance floor, one asks me to a second drink, another asks me home. I dance, I drink, I follow. I can trust a man without clothes. Naked he conceals no weapons, no threat but the blood in his erection. His bed unfamiliar, only temporarily. Pillows without loyalty absorb the weight of any man, betray the scent of the men who came before. I trust a stranger’s tongue to tell me nothing valuable. It makes no promises of truth or lies, it doesn’t swear commitments. The stranger’s hands take their time exploring. Undisguised, they do not turn to claws or pretend artistic skill to draw configurations on my flesh. They are only human hands with fingertips unsentimental with discoveries, without nostalgia for what they leave behind. I trust this stranger not to stay inside me once he enters me. I trust him to release me from the blame of pleasure. The pain I exit with no greater than the loneliness that takes me to the bar. He says good night, I give him back those words, taking nothing with me that is his. The front door shuts behind me, the gravel driveway ushers me away. The rearview mirror loses sight of threshold, house, sidewalk, street. Driving by the nightclub I pass a car impatient on the turning lane. My hands are cold and itch to swerve the wheel, to brand his fender with the fury of my headlights. But I let this stranger live to struggle through the heat and sweat of false affections, anonymous and borrowed like the glass that washed my prints to hold another patron’s drink.

Three days after I was born, as I lay in my silken cradle, gazing with astonished dismay on the new world round about me, my mother spoke to the wet-nurse, saying, “How does my child?” And the wet-nurse answered, “He does well, Madame, I have fed him three times; and never before have I seen a babe so young yet so gay.” And I was indignant; and I cried, “It is not true, mother; for my bed is hard, and the milk I have sucked is bitter to my mouth, and the odour of the breast is foul in my nostrils, and I am most miserable.” But my mother did not understand, nor did the nurse; for the language I spoke was that of the world from which I came. And on the twenty-first day of my life, as I was being christened, the priest said to my mother, “You should indeed by happy, Madame, that your son was born a Christian.” And I was surprised,—and I said to the priest, “Then your mother in Heaven should be unhappy, for you were not born a Christian.” But the priest too did not understand my language. And after seven moons, one day a soothsayer looked at me, and he said to my mother, “Your son will be a statesman and a great leader of men.” But I cried out,—”That is a false prophet; for I shall be a musician, and naught but a musician shall I be.” But even at that age my language was not understood—and great was my astonishment. And after three and thirty years, during which my mother, and the nurse, and the priest have all died, (the shadow of God be upon their spirits) the soothsayer still lives.  And yesterday I met him near the gates of the temple; and while we were talking together he said, “I have always known you would become a great musician. Even in your infancy I prophesied and foretold your future.” And I believed him—for now I too have forgotten the language of that other world.

The leaves had fallen in that sullen place, but none around him knew just where they were. The sky revealed no sun. A ragged blur remained where each man's face had been a face. Two angels soon crept forth with trays of bread, circling among the lost like prison guards. Love is not love, unless its will affords forgiveness for the words that are not said. Still he could not believe that this was Hell, that others sent before him did not know; yet, once his name and memory grew faint, it was no worse, perhaps, than a cheap motel. It is the love of failure makes a saint. He stood up then, but did not try to go.

Put my glad rags in a cardboard box— This old jiggerboo never grew mature. Is everthing in its place except me? Don’t be surprised; I called all day And the only person I could reach was The operator; and it’s a sorry day when Nothing is coming down but your foot. And how deep is your stomach cause That’s how far your heart will fall! When I’m gone I might come back cause I’m always forgetting something special. A crease in my overalls, my collar stiff, I cried as many tears as I have teeth. And I only got two in my mouth. Son of the Sun look out: as you get black you burn. Is everything in its place except me?