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There are those for whom moving house is all so many pennies in a jar. It’ll all amount to something. I am more the alchemist; slowly, but not surely, making the mundane something precious. Just as it is several floors above the street, my new flat is in nearly every way better than my old ground-floor one, all except for the cheap plastic toilet seat that wasn’t even bolted to the bowl. I took a dislike to it even before I’d started sliding left, right, and front and back every time I eased myself; sat there a-flipping and a-flopping in some kinda kooky Pan’s People routine. No big deal; I now live amidst a jangle of pound shops and determined to purchase and attach a brand new model. I spotted a real bobby dazzler; clear resin filled with silver glitter. I liked it, it had a certain 1974 “gay bloke in a glam rock band” quality but, on reflection, did it give the message that I wanted to send, to ladies especially so? So I got plain wood. No mistaking that. However, this soon broke; too much cheesecake too soon? Of course there’d been second thoughts, and my framed portraits of Ingrid Pitt and the sheer amount of reggae singles would surely choke any doubts about my dance moves raised by this, admittedly, exuberant toilet seat. I returned and purchased the glitter that could, perhaps, handle the weight of my pretensions. The bathroom is the one place where we truly relax, it hangs out, baby. We are confronted with the true selves we love, loathe, or try to avoid. Both seat and lid molded stardust! My life has plopped into the plush. I’ve taken to hot, foamy baths with Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits pumping on the stereo. Lathered with scented foam, I wonder about Bryan Ferry looking through an old picture frame. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Thane of Bathwater. Us skinhead types aren’t known for our decadence, Desmond excluded that is. Even now I’m more coal tar than Imperial Leather. Citrus mouthwash has appeared on my bathroom cabinet. I’ve even started using it twice daily, according to directions. Outside, Ermine Street walks backwards to the gilt and butchery of Londinium, then as now, my manor blinged up vermin. My street is a busy one, a dirty one, a loud one. Police cars freeequently scream past, sirens forcing themselves in. It’s not the noise I object to. It’s the urgency. I’m all for the fight against crime but surely it can be done in a more Sherlock Holmes and gentlemanly languid manner? Iniquity is a mire, into which we are sinking, or a briar catching at us with thorns. I forget which, although I note that these encompass both descent and ascension. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions but the road to Whitechapel, is laid far less savory. The Commercial Tavern, once a trysting place for East End homosexualists, is now frequented by “artists” and the like. I work around the corner and am there for the lock in. For all its bustling traffic, Commercial Street crawls slower than most of London. Painters whine, beer flows, brasses ply their trade; much the same as in the Ripper’s heyday. I am introduced to and shake hands with the new landlord; tall, louche, pastel open-necked yet masculine shirt, sovereigns all heads, blond flipped hair    ...    no less than Bryan Ferry in negative! The police speed past, the prostitutes splash.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist, From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, From the myriad thence-arous’d words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such as now they start the scene revisiting, As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. Once Paumanok, When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing, Up this seashore in some briers, Two feather’d guests from Alabama, two together, And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown, And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, And every day the she-bird crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth, great sun! While we bask, we two together. Two together! Winds blow south, or winds blow north, Day come white, or night come black, Home, or rivers and mountains from home, Singing all time, minding no time, While we two keep together.

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering, I love you, before long I die, I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

The day of my mother’s funeral I spend clearing out her overgrown flower beds, down on my knees in the leaf rot, nut shells, tiny grains of sandlot sand spilling from the runoff gullies. The hot work was to see not feel what had to be done, not to go on asking, not to wonder anymore. Full from scraps I’d found at the back of the refrigerator, her mongrel dog lay curled on a stone and watched me work. It was Sunday. The telephone rang, then stopped, then rang again. By the end of the day, I’d done what I could. I swept the walk, put away the tools, switched on the indoor safety lamps, and then (it hardly matters what I think I felt) I closed the gate on a house where no one lived anymore.

Years later, the water still drips— there's no one to tighten the valve. It courses through old pipes down to the septic tank. Next morning in the cellar I start the motor with a stick. It shakes and rumbles, and chirps— the switch is broken is all. At night the water arrives illegally, undergroundly, to the very grave where last spring parsley sprouted, and at the foot, beside it, feral sorrel darkens tastily and tartly like clandestine sex. The motor lifts the spirits and returns the night's deductions. It's morning, I hum softly— a stranger will replace me. In the cellar a stream of light rinses the window grate, it pulses, strikes the meter— I catch my rhythm on the stairs. And for memory's sake I hum— as I pass the septic tank— a fluid, underground song about sorrel and a stranger.

A new embroidery of flowers, canary color, dots the grass already dotty with aster-white and clover. I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.” The children pick some anyway. In or out of  water children don’t last either. I watch them as they pick. Still free of  what’s next and what was yesterday they pick today.

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load. And nothing happened: day was all but done. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all— Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’ So. But the hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath. And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

1 We like to think that the mind controls the body. We send the body on a mission. We don’t feel the body, but we receive conflicting reports. The body is catching flak or flies. The body is sprouting grapefruit. The body is under- performing in heavy trading. 2 Reception is spotty. Someone “just like me” is born in the future and I don’t feel a thing? Like only goes so far.

After my father unhooded it, lugged it down the steep path to the boat and clamped it on, drew back the cord again and again like a pitch about to be thrown, grimacing with each whining refusal, and muttered, finally said She doesn't want to start, after it always did, and we shoved away from the pier, rowed out of the dense tangle of weeds and lily pads, not once did our resting oars uncross their feet, not even as we entered the shallow inlet between our lake and the next, just purring through the reeds in that narrow passage, over the billow of silt, the rocks, never getting stuck before we flew through the waves, his hand guiding the tiller.

Past the congested interstate, past the long lines outside the Dorothy Day Center, past the cheering bleachers, the steam rising from the coach’s face, the fathers straining in prayer, past the rusting letters on the marquee, the dim lights along Main, the couples who will fuck during the movie & the couples who won’t, past the frozen orchard, past the defaced statue of a saint, a dog chews thin the leather cord around his neck. The opposite of hunger is not satisfaction, it is birth. It is what makes a man chisel a face into stone. It is what drives the body to lie in the fresh snow. It is what quiets the world when she pulls you in close. It is the winning pass, the crowd too busy counting down to notice. The world puts its mouth on you & you don’t say a thing. The world digs a hole in your yard & it’s up to you to fill it, up to you to find something useful to do with your sadness. Strange, the yellow beetle, dried between the pages of the dictionary, staining the page with its flattened body — its outline, a dirty halo circling the word pleased— please, you’ve circled the same two blocks in search of a place to park, circled the yard howling a name that won’t respond, but you still think you know enough to call that enough? The boat smacks against the dock it’s tied to. Your mother fixes your father’s tie before closing the casket. Everyone you loved refused to die in this town before they died in this town. The woman beside you on the plane wants to know where you’re going.