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“Messieurs, l’huitre étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.” —Boileau Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless And solitary as Dickens said, but They have something to say: that there is more Than one way to yield. The first—and the hardest. The most nearly hindered—is when you pull Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge Sucking them back under the black mud, full Of hermit crabs and their borrowed snailshells, Minnows scattering like superstitions, The surf dragging, and every power Life permits them holding out, holding on For dear life. Sometimes the stones give way first. Before they will, but still we gather them, Even if our hands are bloody as meat, For a lunch Queen Victoria preferred: “A barrel of Wellfleet oysters, points down” Could last across the ocean, all the way To Windsor, wakening a widow’s taste. We ate them this afternoon, out of their Armor that was formidably grooved, though It proved our own reversal wiser still: Keep the bones and stones inside, or never Leave the sea. “He was a brave man,” Swift said, “Who first eat one.” Even now, precedent Of centuries is not always enough. Driving the knife into muscles that mould The valves so close to being impartial. Surrender, when it comes—and it must come: Lavish after that first grudging release Back there in the sea, the giving over Of despair, this time—makes me speculate. Like Oscar and oysters, I feel “always Slightly immortal when in the sea”: what Happens now we are out? Is the risk worth While for a potential pearl? No, what we’re Really after is the moment of release, The turn and tear of the blade that tightens, Tortures, ultimately tells. When you spread The shells, something always sticks to the wrong One, and a few drops of liquor dribble Into the sand. Scrape it off: in the full Half, as well as a Fautrier, a Zen Garden, and the smell of herring brine that Ferenczi said we remember from the womb, Lunch is served, in shiny stoneware sockets, Blue milk in the sea’s filthiest cup. More Easily an emblem for the inner man Than dinner, sundered, for the stomach. We Take them queasily, wonder as we gulp When it is—then, now, tomorrow—they’re dead.

After a while the 500-year-old village became a secret, carved into the wall of the forest where it met the Pacific, eleven long houses and their racks of drying fish, their dogs. No roads to this town, only boats and the memory of boaters. Blankets made from woodpecker feathers, cattail fluff, cedar bark and dog hair woven into a plaid pattern. At least that's what I remember of the museum's diorama. When the mud came down the mountain and covered the village, no one had lived there for years. It was a boater who remembered, after a while, that the village was gone, and also that it had once existed. Archaeologists brought garden hoses to wash the mud off and hooked the hoses up to the sea. Some of what had been preserved in the mud was destroyed that day by the water pressure, and then later most else was ruined by the wind and rain, but at least for a few weeks they could hold the bones in their hands. The archaeologists brought their dogs, they lived there a while.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias Ozymandias Pharaoh Rameses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE). According to the OED, the statue was once 57 feet tall. , King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

A downpour drumming on the rooftop, engine running, car, idle, interior bathed in the pungent intoxicating spices radiating from the carry-out in the passenger seat. Inside the Taj, neon beacon in a strip mall dark with the common sense of folks long gone home, red lamps glowered. A pair of headlights glared back. A downpour drowning out its own drumming, so loud I could barely make out the whispered venom streaming from a mobile into my right ear. She was saying something about something as I reached across the steering column with my left hand, as if my left ear had been bent by the loudspeaker of the law. Engine off, everything—the car, the carry-out, etc.— went cold. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat, put her into reverse, backed up, out, and drove home with my double order, her running commentary as undertow.

what for the rush and bloody pain what for the blooming and the rain what for the quest and odyssey what for the swimming and the sea, see there b no shore or beach that anyone can reach and breathe, inhale, exhale, and love all seems to ooze the stress that greed has carved in us surely our species should be meek before our motherearth’s volcanoes storms and huracanes tornadoes, floods and tremors and there we b secreting poisons for all leggeds, wingeds, fish and even trees what for the rush and bloody pain we’ll surely die, but then we dig deeper in our heartmindspiritbody and nurture glow and warmth and light and peace and patience and gladness and gardens and gather all in oneness and end the pain and bloody rush desiring naught expecting naught missing naught simply being being we truly have no choice…though we imagine, dream, hope, want being all that we are we are all that is and that is all there b césar and corky this b my writ to chávez y gonzález carnales de las sonrisas grandes de las carcajadas llenas de murales de cuadros, ensayos matadors de pendejadas terminators of guandajos and juanabees hermanos, jefes your “death” is but our “birth” porque amasteis entregasteis y hoy, como siempre, sois imprescindibles

“All folks hev some soft spot,” Ma uster say, “Somethin’ or ’nother Comes out some day Comes out ’fore they know it, Jest like ez not.” ’N’en us kids’d say, “Ma, What’s your sof’ spot?” An’ we’d keep a plaguin’, Till ma’d say, “I wish ’at you youngins ’D run away! Ask your pa’ bout his’n An’, like ez not, He’ll tell you willin’ly What’s his sof’ spot.” ’N’en we’d ’gree to ask him That very day; When his train’d whistle Why right away, We’d jest skedaddle Clean ’cross the lot, To be first to ask pa What’s his sof’ spot. Pa, he’d say, “My sof’ spot? Never hes none!” Wouldn’t tell us neither, But jest make fun; Then he’d tell his brakeman, He’d says “Great lot, Think you’re goin’ to tell ’em What’s your sof’ spot!” ’N’en we’d all go home, An’ after ’while Pa’d tell ma ’bout it, An’ ma she’d smile; We’d ’gin agin a guessin’, Till pa’d say, “Trot! Time you kids wuz dreamin’ In some sof’ spot.” An’ pa’d never tell us, When he wuz in; Ev’ry trip he come home We’d ’gin agin; Onct George sez when prayin’, He prayed a lot, “Please God, wisht you’d tell us What’s pa’s sof’ spot!” One day the opurat’r Sent word by Bert There hed bin a washout, An’ pa wuz hurt; Engineer wuz hurt, too, An’ both might die; Pa wanted to see us To say good-by. We wuz all so still When we went in; They wuz holdin’ pa up, A fannin’ him; An’ pa sez “I may die Jest like ez not, Tell the children I sed They’s my sof’ spot!” But our pa didn’t die, He jist got well; We wuz all so happy, Couldn’t ’gin to tell! ’Cause we all loved our pa, A great big lot, I guess God saw we wuz Pa’s sof’ spot!

I "One Snodgrass,two Snodgrass,three Snodgrass,four . . . I took my own rollcall when I counted seconds; "One two three,Two two three,Three. . .," the drum score Showed only long rests to the tympani's entrance. "Oh-oh-oh leff; leff; leff-toh-righ-toh-leff," The sergeant cadenced us footsore recruits; The heart, poor drummer, gone lame, deaf, Then AWOL, gets frogmarched to the noose. II Old coots, at the Veterans', might catch breath If their cheeks got slapped by a nurse's aide, Then come back to life; just so, at their birth, Young rumps had been tendered warm accolades. The kick-ass rude attitude, smart-assed insult, The acid-fueled book review just might shock Us back to the brawl like smelling salts, Might sting the lulled heart up off its blocks. III I thought I'd always favor rubato Or syncopation, scorning fixed rhythms; Thought my old heartthrobs could stand up to stress; Believed one's bloodpump should skip a few beats If it fell into company with sleek young women; Believed my own bruit could beat with the best. Wrong again, Snodgrass! This new gold gadget, Snug as the watch on my wife's warm wrist, Drives my pulsetempo near twice its old pace— Go, nonstop startwatch! Go, clockwork rabbit, Keeping this lame old dog synchronized, Steady, sparked up, still in the race.

The Santa Fe Depot's Moorish architecture of displacement— squeaky kids trawl satchels through the shed, happy voices mystically far from home, the waiting room's fizzled, tiled light of life lived imperfectly between one where and another. Everybody's here. Cowboys, Mennonites, Tijuana illegals, Muslim cabbies at prayer on loading docks as dark clouds fuss above the southerly sun past its prime. Killing time, a life mostly miscues and hesitance, I want something to take me over so looked for you near the baggage claim's glide, who could have been anybody from everywhere, like Ellis Island's ghosts, their dump of cardboard valises, bindles, baby-fat sacks strangled by hemp, and around me here long-haul lovers who in sleepers last night loved to exhaustion. Scorched roughnecks, perfumed girls in heels grabbing Samsonites and golf bags schooling the carousel's louvered U-turns and straightaways. It must be why I'm here, to wait and see who claims what looks too much like your brown suede duffel, no "Antigua" or "Cancun" decaled in its hide, nasal music threading the scene while tonight you weave through songs somewhere else. That floppy bag and us— the Garment District, two Venices, South End, South Philly, scraped nap, brass clips, gaunt warmed handle. . . A teenage girl two-hands it off the belt and waddles into the runny sun, your bag five years late thumping freshened thighs and dimpled knees. Where are you now that you're here again for me? Hear these thrilled voices, the engine horn howling? Smell these acid residues?

There were no road rails. I remember no road rails and the death depth off the cliffs we motored along. I remember speed in a parched Chevy clunker that could not have sped, and bench seats, and no buckles, and bare thighs peeling off faux leather at every hairpin. Every elevated canyon mile was a feat but a breath of less slickened air too, less cog and fume — a winding away from the wavering, sea-leg steam off blinding sidewalks, infinite sidewalks and other shoeless kids kicking rusted palm leaves outside infinite apartment complexes. Away from our corner of the valley of concrete corners, of no evidence of valley besides boulders stacked in the distance of every vista. The driver was a stranger, was my mother after my whole life had passed with stranger after stranger, was my mother after seven years, and me at seven years with her driving that snuff-colored Nova from her blinding valley not a valley — through Laurel, Topanga, Malibu canyons all the way to some fantastic, to her beloved blue — eucalyptus choking local growth the whole trek. And the cooling air as we 
efforted west, and the jolt of a castle,The Castle, in a distant crook of a range that hid the slate of the ocean, made me want to stop moving but not stop here. I remember hoping to find hermit crabs the size of the mole on my right side chin. And if I tethered them to a stick they’d line up by mass and trade shells, find homes that fit. And there’d be one left without, one torn out. A book said a scientist leaned into wet sand, watched a torn crab die in the beak of a gull. I can’t remember if I saw that death or read it. 
I remember watching a wrong castle tucked into a wrong mountain notch on the chin of the sky, like the hermit mole on my chin if my face were the sky. “It’s a beauty mark,” my mother had said, “Don’t pick at it.” I eyed that smoking stranger at the wheel and dug my nail in as the Pacific swelled into view that first time.

It was a green barn coat from L. L. Bean That he had ordered, thinking of her Walking the snowy hillside of his dream Though she detested the style and color. That it arrived two days after he died Did not dispose her to detest it less Though she may have wished she did, The way she wished she’d kept house More neatly or baked instead of fried, For every coronary’s a latent homicide— If not what we did, what we did not do. If not what we said, what we did not say. In this, the inner jury’s always out, No different for man or woman— For everyone over forty, the human Condition is grief complicated by guilt. It’s unexceptional really, what’s left After deaths. We’re thrown back on our own taste. That coat, for instance. If that was a gift, She would have to hide to throw it away.