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You have such lovely bones, he says, holding my face in his hands, and although I can almost feel the stone and the sand sifting away, his fingers like the softest of brushes, I realize after this touch he would know me years from now, even in the dark, even without my skin. Thank you,

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.” —Martin Gardner, in Scientific American Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am putting on. It is evening in the antiworld where she lives. She is forty-five years away from her death, the hole which spit her out into pain, impossible at first, later easing, going, gone. She has unlearned much by now. Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens, her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses, she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks, but their ardor increases. Soon her second child will be young enough to fight its way into her body and change its life to monkey to frog to tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to nothing. She is making a list: Things I will need in the past lipstick shampoo transistor radio Sergeant Pepper acne cream five-year diary with a lock She is eager, having heard about adolescent love and the freedom of children. She wants to read Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster without getting sick. I think of her as she will be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the mirror I see she uses her left hand to write, her other to open a jar. By now our lives should have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have passed one another like going and coming trains, with both of us looking the other way.

after Lisel Mueller on her profile i see she has 2 kids, now 1 she had in high school, now none at all. she unaborts 1. she is unpregnant in 8th grade. she unresembles her favorite pop singer Pink. she uncuts her hair, it pulls into her scalp from clumps on the floor. her new boyfriend forgets the weight of her. she leaves her new boyfriend. he's forgetting her phone number. she becomes my girlfriend she picks up the phone & i am on the line ungiving a goodbye. her best friend trades letters between us. we each open lettters from ourselves with hearts on the outside. she transfers to our magnet school. she moves to a neighborhood close by. we separate at the lips. we have never kissed behind the school. she unchecks the yes box on the note & i take away my middle school love letter. i unmeet her cop father & her Chicano moms. we walk backwards into Baskin-Robbins throwing up gold medal ribbon ice cream into cups. it rounds into scoops, flattens into gallon drums of sugar & cream & coldness. we are six years old. maybe we can go back to then. i unlearn her name, the way it is spelled the same backward. how it flips on a page, or in my mouth. i never knew words could do that until 5 minutes from now.

Set where the upper streams of Simois flow Was the Palladium, high 'mid rock and wood; And Hector was in Ilium, far below, And fought, and saw it not—but there it stood! It stood, and sun and moonshine rain'd their light On the pure columns of its glen-built hall. Backward and forward roll'd the waves of fight Round Troy—but while this stood, Troy could not fall. So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul. Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air; Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll; We visit it by moments, ah, too rare! We shall renew the battle in the plain To-morrow;—red with blood will Xanthus be; Hector and Ajax will be there again, Helen will come upon the wall to see. Then we shall rust in shade, or shine in strife, And fluctuate 'twixt blind hopes and blind despairs, And fancy that we put forth all our life, And never know how with the soul it fares. Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send. And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.

He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec frequencies, he said. When the sun god liquors loose each ashen tongue the planet tattles. We are advised to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his dwindling fuse and the bartender would show him the door. In his honor I tune my form to the emanations of this vibrant life: Either someone's dropped a blue coin and I've picked up the murmur of its ribs—a quarter kiltering beneath the blond brick arcade of the whispering gallery at Grand Central—or someone's table is ready. No matter that I set my phone to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest. The man has passed. I got the text today, and now feel at least obliged to observe silence. Observe this café thick with humid bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam revealing patterns in the glassy chatter. For that he is a phantasm rumoring now a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel of a partial print. For that he is finally transcendent. For that we convened for drinks by some clockwork of urban chance each week, my year adrift in the East Village. For that I renounced him, and now regret having done so. For that I vibed with his passions—more, the deeper we reached in our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical record. I've traveled years through boot-black redactions of thought to find his apparition greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover the bed in which he slept and quested visions toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills, Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity. If you see something. What a fear of hobgoblins and philistines can blind our better senses. At the table beside me children play mosquito tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.

Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carnage of battle, this is a "carrion creature," but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is "instructed," she is enchanted, rather. For from the depth of her racial inheritance, she invokes (as the perceptive visitor to Egypt must always do) the symbol or the "letter" that represents or recalls the protective mother-goddess. This is no death-symbol but a life-symbol, it is Isis or her Greek counterpart, Thetis, the mother of Achilles. We huddled over the fire, was there ever such a brazier? a night-bird hooted past, he started, "a curious flight, a carrion creature — what—" (dear God, let him forget); I said, "there is mystery in this place, I am instructed, I know the script, the shape of this bird is a letter, they call it the hieroglyph; strive not, it is dedicate to the goddess here, she is Isis"; "Isis," he said, "or Thetis," I said, recalling, remembering, invoking his sea-mother; flame, I prayed,flame forget, forgive and forget the other, let my heart be filled with peace, let me love him,as Thetis,his mother, for I knew him, I saw in his eyes the sea-enchantment, but he knew not yet, Helen of Sparta, knew not Helen of Troy, knew not Helena, hated of Greece.

She is afraid, too. So she needs this protection. She has tried to conceal her identity with mockery, "I am a woman of pleasure." She knows what the Greeks think of her, and here is Greece-incarnate, the hero-god; true, he is shipwrecked; nevertheless, though wounded, he carries with him the threat of autocracy. She has lost caste. He is still Achilles. Or who is she? She says that Helen upon the ramparts was a phantom. Then, what is this Helen? Are they both ghosts? And if she is convinced of this, why does she entreat the flame that Achilles kindled, "let me love him, as Thetis, his mother"? Is she afraid of losing even her phantom integrity? And what of it? Thetis — Isis — Aphrodite — it was not her fault. O—no—but through eternity, she will be blamed for this and she feels it coming. She will blacken her face like the prophetic femme noire of antiquity. But it does not work. Achilles is here to impeach her. Why? We must blame someone. Hecate—a witch —a vulture, and finally, as if he had run out of common invective, he taunts her — a hieroglyph . This is almost funny, she must stop him, he is after all, the son of the sea-goddess. She has named Isis, the Egyptian Aphrodite, the primal cause of all the madness. But another, born-of-the-sea, is nearer, his own mother. Again, she thinks of her and reminds Achilles of his divine origin, "O child of Thetis." This is quite enough. Can you throttle a phantom? He tries. The end is inevitable. How could I hide my eyes? how could I veil my face? with ash or charcoal from the embers? I drew out a blackened stick, but he snatched it, he flung it back, "what sort of enchantment is this? what art will you wield with a fagot? are you Hecate? are you a witch? a vulture, a hieroglyph, the sign or the name of a goddess? what sort of goddess is this? where are we? who are you? where is this desolate coast? who am I?    am I a ghost?" "you are living, O child of Thetis, as you never lived before," then he caught at my wrist, "Helena, cursed of Greece, I have seen you upon the ramparts, no art is beneath your power, you stole the chosen, the flower of all-time, of all-history, my children, my legions; for you were the ships burnt, O cursèd, O envious Isis, you — you — a vulture, a hieroglyph"; "Zeus be my witness," I said, "it was he, Amen dreamed of all this phantasmagoria of Troy, it was dream and a phantasy"; O Thetis,O sea-mother, I prayed, as he clutched my throat with his fingers' remorseless steel, let me go out,let me forget, let me be lost. . . . . . . O Thetis,O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak, let me remember,let me remember, forever,this Star in the night.

Always the sky keeps expanding. Wide as America’s brave margins, wide as my loneliness in the Middle West. I lean against a dust cloud behind us, the glory sinking into a muted timberline. I am drunk with longing. The wind is singing— my drunken friend, the wind, hurls sweet curses at my face. We have learned to love this road, which lies down like pythons, refuses to forgive our excesses, refuses to consider us kin. Our driver’s sign overhead reads,Jesus is my co-pilot. Jesus who crossed the city gates of his ancestors on a road carpeted by palms. Our goodtime driver must know this— he drives with abandon, despite our fragile cargo: scholars and accountants, prophets and exiles all the same to him. The road, which suggests things, is tired of ceremony. It lies down to sleep like the snow. Lie down TallMountain, lie down Serafin Syquia, lie down Li-Young, lie down Divakaruni, lie down Eman Lacaba, lie down pilgrims of the open road. Shameless, we gather our light jackets in balls. We rest our heads, our faces upturned to a squall of stars. I near the end, my soul recites. O loneliness, my body responds. This empty road is a house where no one lives. What strange fire we bring when we come to this house.

Therefore, no more recounting of dreams, a routine thing that bores with expectations of invention, unfiltered non sequiturs, unusual embraces only from the practiced young woman who everyday remembers being a bride, she is changing behind that white curtain Leora fifteen again experiencing prematurely the pure suckling of a baby fifteen with a virgin desire for pure suckling something to do with jasmine with jasmine tea existing only without accident It blooms while Leora sleeps when she sleeps at night and it is also dark for the jasmine four hours of tea sucking on blossoms, Cestrum nocturnum like colostrums: the earliest secretions, and then only milk from mother —there it is seven times over jasmine bath after jasmine bath till the tea can get no better highest grade as stasis all As gets so boring, ka-put to the test of innovation all the right answers Leora sees herself mermaid, eel, tiger fish from waist down form-fitting skirt of winks under that bonefish or ladyfish profile: tail fins already split, caught in transition from legs to fin hybrid mutant bastard mestizo mulatto masala mule mix mutt hm/bm/mmmmm watered down (jasmine bath tea) spiked (jasmine bath tea) stands taller on tips of split tail fin ps: pastiche, salmagundi when all dressed up Leg and fin share custody so young men sacrifice only below the belt to please her many wounded soldiers her company From now on storming the beaches rocks already aftermath, the breaking of dozens of sphinxes the taming of sandstone lions and griffins, gargoyles Leora takes to breast anything capable of sucking and being filled, no ban on leeches and vipers that stick out like misplaced overdeveloped hairs and while in position, her free hand shaves the heads of Medusa’s children screaming for more nursing with her eyes closed, her free handy blade, sharpened life line The liquids of history therefore tend to ferment; the beverages for walks down memory lane therefore become pungent cheeses and wines, the odes to bitterness and sweetness happen. This is also desirable. Taste depends on how the glass tilts, how tongue curls. What’s difficult is maintaining gaps as gaps. A sustainable nothingness. But something enters. Sustainable nothingness looks like a niche. Ghosts and spirits of what’s been lost. A young woman looks over her shoulder. Close watching of what’s fading does not mean the change from substance to spirit would be observed. On the tippy-tips of split tail fin looking over her shoulder a long line for the nurse, exceptional business, nonstop nursing and the milk won’t stop, years are at the end of the line. Pull the plug on a nearby respirator (how on earth?) (don’t assume location, location, location) the substance travels the line joins the community of electricity, colonies of gigantic storms on the sun and appearances in auroras that the mermaid sits under as under any canopy nonstop The spell of the tide tailored to make the one falling under its influence fall more willingly. It feels nothing like falling at all: Leora describes rehabilitation Sand sparkles remembering having been alive only once Leora’s eyes sparkle upon contact with crabs and their incredible redness that ought to teach her something about fire she does not know with top-heavy ways of knowing (the brain should travel the stations of the body, and one day the eyes and navel, when the eyes accompany the brain, line up in a row) —then a real reason for revision Dream on Accordingly, pureness of the situation milks its own purity Fantastic and looks disgusting (no matter where the eyes are—candidate for truth) but purity is still pure following such a milking The mermaid’s pregnancy has to be called immaculate after repeated searches for the limits. Lost without those. Pure. Last resort and best explanation for birth of a human baby from a mermaid without a human pelvis or womb. The best xrays cannot find them. Machines arrive on the beach and leave defective. Leora continues nursing her baby first in line The milk is pure. It does not need to be pasteurized. Makes                               (empty) no one ill. Nothing in it allows allergies. The chemistry                                       (empty) of the milk is pure.                                                                                         (empty) The molecules of the tabernacle of purity. (as if they are empty)                                                                  (nothing is right here) Law Flattened out they are like flattened tetrahedrons, probably are smashed pendulums now Leora blessed with impossibility of the usual kind of rape her own brand jasmine bath after jasmine bath without legs she does as much sitting as anyone who ever sat on a throne wheelchairs keep evolving

There are fewer introductions In plague years, Hands held back, jocularity No longer bellicose, Even among men. Breathing’s generally wary, Labored, as they say, when The end is at hand. But this is the everyday intake Of   the imperceptible life force, Willed now, slow — Well, just cautious In inhabited air. As for ongoing dialogue, No longer an exuberant plosive To make a point, But a new squirreling of air space, A new sense of   boundary. Genghis Khan said the hand Is the first thing one man gives To another. Not in this war. A gesture of   limited distance Now suffices, a nod, A minor smile or a hand Slightly raised, Not in search of   its counterpart, Just a warning within The acknowledgment to stand back. Each beautiful stranger a barbarian Breathing on the other side of the gate.