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In the beginning, a word, move ; then a plan and then the reasons, which I do not remember exactly. I remember clearly only the clothes we were given for the journey and the last, silent meal we ate. We left the place as lightly as we had come, so many years before. From a sunlit state of innocence where white sheets were hung to dry like clouds over paradise; from eucalyptus-scented earth, a red house with a yard swung between dreaming hills, pillaged by raccoons, framed with lilies like trumpets of the archangels, we moved: into history, a river slowed by many bends, a village of peacocks with a hundred eyes; a low house among fields, with an iron stove, a winter shrine; a fireplace blackened by time, the fragile bones of a sparrow frozen in the shape of its flight. When father played his trombone in the attic, schoolchildren tittered in the street. In the late afternoon, the cows assembled at the gate, witless, waiting for a farmer's son. Home, the children conjugated verbs, found variables and drew diagrams of the human heart. Evenings, the round kitchen table, lit by a low Dutch lamp, summoned poets, players, horsethieves, to glasses of jenever . An incense of gossip rose slowly, blackening the walls. Outside, horses pawed the darkness, breathing delicate feathers of ice. We courted the favors of spiders, mice and moles. Our words grew small and porous as fossiled bones, our gestures groaned with the cold. The will-less world of water, wood and stone taught us when to yield. When it came time to move along again, we were four strangers waving at each other, in slow motion, across a deafening expanse of ocean.

Hurrah! to them who do nothing see nothing feel nothing whose hearts are fitted with prudence like a diaphragm across womb’s beckoning doorway to bar the scandal of seminal rage. I’m told the owl too wears wisdom in a ring of defense round each vulnerable eye securing it fast against the darts of sight. Long ago in the Middle East Pontius Pilate openly washed involvement off his white hands and became famous. (Of all the Roman officials before him and after who else is talked about every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And talking of apostles that other fellow Judas wasn’t such a fool either; though much maligned by succeeding generations the fact remains he alone in that motley crowd had sense enough to tell a doomed movement when he saw one and get out quick, a nice little packet bulging his coat pocket into the bargain—sensible fellow. September 1970

We shall not come again, not to this wet and summer day, nor to the waylaid place where you laid waste to me and I to you, and where we reminisced recalling who did what to whom. We shall not come again. Not to the bed we thrashed nor to the memory of the way I brushed my hair back, nights, nor to the air we dared to share to breathe, or couldn’t quite. We shall not come again. No more, my face seen round your corner, or your briefcase found beneath my table. We weren’t able, apt or sane. We shall not come again. Nor cry nor clutch, not even once again. We shall not cover up in quilts or bear the beast of one another’s guilts or sit in silences made saddest by what

No shards where one is bound to no place in the first place all shards we were clear on that from the beginning Absence is always sudden to hear your voice once more more echo than shrapnel qualia of the forbidden transforms itself into wounds regenerates a hydra or lizard tail touch me I’m alive again there isn’t enough time or proximity for your essence or mine          to vanish we’ll remain fire and ice who turn to glass that doesn’t shatter mercury if it shatters

X, whom society’s most mild command, For instance evening dress, infuriates, In art is seen confusingly to stand For disciplined conformity, with Yeats. Taxed to explain what this resentment is He feels for small proprieties, it comes, He likes to think, from old enormities And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms. Yet it is likely, if indeed the crimes His fathers suffered rankle in his blood, That he find least excusable the times When they acceded, not when they withstood. How else explain this bloody-minded bent To kick against the prickings of the norm; When to conform is easy, to dissent; And when it is most difficult, conform?

This happened long ago, before the onset of universal genetic correctness. Boys and girls would stand naked before mirrors studying the defects of their structure. Nose too long, ears like burdocks, sunken chin just like a mongoloid. Breasts too small, too large, lopsided shoulders, penis too short, hips too broad or else too narrow. And just an inch or two taller! Such was the house they inhabited for life. Hiding, feigning, concealing defects. But somehow they still had to find a partner. Following incomprehensible tastes—airy creatures paired with potbellies, skin and bones enamored of salt pork. They had a saying then: “Even monsters have their mates.” So perhaps they learned to tolerate their partners’ flaws, trusting that theirs would be forgiven in turn. Now every genetic error meets with such disgust that crowds might spit on them and stone them. As happened in the city of K., where the town council voted to exile a girl So thickset and squat that no stylish dress could ever suit her, But let’s not yearn for the days of prenormalization. Just think of the torments, the anxieties, the sweat, the wiles needed to entice, in spite of all. Translated by Clare Cavanagh

The glassy hill I clomb for thee For surefooted step, hooves behoove the haver. The sky redid blue, the woman wavered, and the black bull (the vanquisher), vanished. She called out to nothing, and in vain shed tears until she reached the glass hill’s impasse. Served her standard fairy tale penance,passim, served her seven to be given iron shoes to — at last — scale the hill, the earned neared end. Each step conquered territory, at last, the sleeping prince-once-bull, torrid tearing of clothes, tearing on one’s clothes, three nights of this until the prince awakes. How she, exhausted, must have felt in the at long last, the ever after. Happily, I guess, but a long time until laughter.

Let us praise the immigrant who leaves the tropics and arrives in Chicago in the dead of winter. Let us praise the immigrant who has never worn coats who must bundle up against an unimaginable cold. For they will write letters home that speak of it like Norse sagas with claims that if a frigid hell exists the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city. Let us praise the immigrant who fears the depths of the subway the disappearance of landmarks to guide them through the labyrinth. Let us praise the immigrant who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke who wakes each morning to the alien sight of their breath suspended in the cold city air.

I returned to a long strand, the hammered curve of a bay, and found only the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering. I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin measured against their long swords rusting, those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. The longship’s swimming tongue was buoyant with hindsight— it said Thor’s hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, the hatreds and behind-backs of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, memory incubating the spilled blood. It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.’

Hoarfrost coats and cuffs the playing fields, a heyday of glistening. So there’s hope in my throat as I walk across them to the woods with my chest flung open, spilling its coins. The light so bright I can hear it, a silver tone like a penny whistle. It’s fall, so I’m craving pine cones. Hundreds of maples the color of bulldozers! But something strange is going on: the trees are tired of meaning, sick of providing mystery, parallels, consolation. “Leave us alone,” they seem to cry, with barely energy for a pun. The muscular river crawls on its belly in a maple coat of mail. Muddy and unreflective, it smells as if it too could use some privacy. The sumac reddens like a face, holding out its velvet pods almost desperately. The Queen Anne’s Lace clicks in the wind. A deaf-mute milkweed foaming at the mouth. Back at the field I look for what I didn’t mean to drop. The grass is green. Okay, Day, my host, I want to get out of your house. Come on, Night, with your twinkly stars and big dumb moon. Tell me don’t show me, and wipe that grin off your face.