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Not having as yet learned how to live— indecision skittering like a dust devil across appetite’s parking lot—the time has come to learn how to die. First I’ll put away my clothes, return my books to their shelves; then I’ll raise the blinds, to see what’s happening on the street and which birds are forming their flocks, since I think it will be fall with the trees nearly bare, except for clusters of leaves clinging to the oaks. Does it matter that I’ve never learned to sleep on my back? Soon I’ll have plenty of time to practice. Like people standing in line waiting for a train, I’ll check my watch against a clock on the wall, touch the ticket tucked in my breast pocket. Don’t accuse me of morbidity. Actuarial tables have quickened their work against me. Oh, it’s no simple thing to practice for death and I’ve yet to reach the subject of goodbyes. Will I have time to speak to the people I love, to press hand or stroke a cheek? Then each might need to make some remark, maybe even an ironic gesture, nothing too somber as could complicate a rational occasion. Better, I think, to slip out across the driveway to where a car is waiting, its motor making the softest hum. As often occurs the cat will escort me part way and I’ll bend to scratch his ears, as he stretches to let me scratch his neck as well. I don’t know what birds will be left, I don’t know if it will be sunny or dark. Pausing, I’ll pat my pockets to see if I’ve got my keys, and then smile at my mistake. No time now for whatever remains undone, no time for regrets or good thoughts, not time perhaps— and this is hard to imagine—even to shut my eyes. Yes, this practicing for death is no simple thing— look at how I open my hand and once or twice flick my wrist so a bit of fluff or loose thread stuck to my fingers can at last float away.

These ghost soldiers live underground with the vast oversupply of castoff lanterns. If one were to take broadsword to one of these orange-bearded mammoth men of rough hew, he would laugh at the passing metal, make light of entrails. For years I have been here without a clear map. That hopes should dim as days go on above is natural I suppose, what do I know? I am dressed like one of them. The thick walls quake but stay soundproof. I fear my fists vestigial. These soldiers’ own panic is taking up rugs finding filigrees of the former world beneath, e.g., a locket with their mongrel’s mush. They will freeze, then feign noncom; smacking barrels of burgundy with pistol butts. I react comme squirrel: fleeing their reach to the chamber out of the impact area. One loved me until I asked if he worried about what must be happening without us. Well, his lips did narrow, hand abandoned my knee, blah, blah big mouth were his departing words. I will not say with shame that I came from nothing. Someone paved my first breakthrough at least, one time calling it love. And I will stand by that as it applies to my primary makeup.

The young bull dropped his head and stared. Only a wispy wire—electrified—kept us apart. That, and two long rows of asparagus. An ancient apple tree blossomed prodigally pink and white. The muddy path sucked at my shoe, but I reached the granite step, and knocked at the rickety porch door. Deep in the house a dog began to bark. I had prepared my Heart Fund speech, and the first word—When—was on my tongue. I heard no steps—only the breeze riffling the tender poplar leaves, and a random, meditative moo behind me. . . . Relieved, I turned back to the car, passing once more under the bull’s judicial eye. . . . Everything was intact: the canister, still far too light and mute, and metal boutonnières where they began— in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag.

decreed my mother-in-law as my husband passed the platter of inward-turning soft-skulled Martian baby heads around the table, and they were O so shyly slyly jostling each other with their boiled- green sardonic gossip (what was the news they told?) when he sharply answered, “Mother, have you ever eaten an artichoke?” “No,” she said, majestic, “but I just know I don’t care for them, don’t care for them at all”— for truly, if they weren’t Martian they were at the least Italian from that land of “smelly cheese” she wouldn’t eat, that land of oily curves and stalks, unnerving pots of churning who knows what, and she, nice, Jewish, from the Bronx, had fattened on her Russian- Jewish mother’s kugel, kosher chicken, good rye bread .... Bearded, rosy, magisterial at forty-five, he laughed, kept plucking, kept on licking those narcissistic leaves, each with its razor point defending the plump, the tender secret at the center, each a greave or plate of edible armor, so she smiled too, in the flash of dispute, knowing he’d give her ice cream later, all she wanted, as the rich meal drew to an end with sweets dished out in the lamplit circle, to parents, children, grandma— the chocolate mint she craved, and rocky road he bought especially for her, whose knees were just beginning to crumble from arthritis, whose heart would pump more creakily each year, whose baby fat would sag and sorrow as her voice weakened, breathing failed until she too was gathered into the same blank center where her son at sixty bearded still, still laughing, magisterial (though pallid now) had just a year before inexplicably settled.

I never said I loved you, John: Why will you tease me, day by day, And wax a weariness to think upon With always "do" and "pray"? You know I never loved you, John; No fault of mine made me your toast: Why will you haunt me with a face as wan As shows an hour-old ghost? I dare say Meg or Moll would take Pity upon you, if you'd ask: And pray don't remain single for my sake Who can't perform that task. I have no heart?—Perhaps I have not; But then you're mad to take offence That I don't give you what I have not got: Use your common sense. Let bygones be bygones: Don't call me false, who owed not to be true: I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns Than answer "Yes" to you. Let's mar our pleasant days no more, Song-birds of passage, days of youth: Catch at to-day, forget the days before: I'll wink at your untruth. Let us strike hands as hearty friends; No more, no less: and friendship's good: Only don't keep in view ulterior ends, And points not understood In open treaty. Rise above Quibbles and shuffling off and on: Here's friendship for you if you like; but love,— No, thank you, John.

Dear Kit, I’m sad we never did that Yacht Rock Karaoke Contest, or was it just Michael McDonald? But some things need not have happened to have floated as bright boats of genius upon the dark waters of this world. No things but in ideas. In fact, no things at all. Just ideas without the mess of facts, actions, actuality... actually Why don’t we... [wait for it] “... steal away” you sing in your captain’s hat on the deck of the S.S. Pangea — that perfect falsetto thought yacht on which we’ll sail this sea of mental illness in between us till we drown.

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

That this mountainside looks like a face is accidental, which is a shame, for I dearly love to laugh. The touch-smoothed redwood cross-section, in its rings of growth and brightness, seems like a sun seen from underwater, wobbly as jelly, mocking my inability to find a job, my food stamps, and saddens me to see the teens tagging themselves in nearby places to earn a virtual friend's respect, or boasting other symptoms of youth while leaving their greasy fingerprints on the thick lenses of my glasses, mocking my desire for artwork to remain packed in straw, and in music for sleepers halfway awake to grow wild in. It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess, when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries. Got a check today. Bought a book I can't read without it putting me to sleep with its out-of-date luxuriousness. So instead of reading it, I stayed up and listened to Harry Partch's song And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, dedicating it to the memory of Ramon Novarro, hoping it would arch electrically above him with all the characteristics of fire all night, all day, and soak his early spring colors in a late autumn sun as pale as silver and fern-green skies to draw light through midnight

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?

No, worry about nothing but the chiseling of hills into distance in the slight haze and sleep lost over color no two ever the same the wringing hands float ashore amazed. Worry about beauty. It can sell you anything. Lakes collect in the chambers of the heart where the sailboats are made of flying fish about the size of match heads. Sleep can be lost as easily as a house key, the shock can consume at any moment if the hills are not rising weather is wearing them down and you are driving north in the late afternoon or holding your eyes in your hands like addresses.