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Was I so poor in those damned days that I went in the dark in torn shoes and furtiveness to steal fat ears of cattle corn from the good cows and pound them like hard maize on my worn Aztec stone? I was.

My mother is scared of the world. She left my father after forty years. She was like, Happy anniversary, goodbye; I respect that. The moon tonight is dazzling, is full of   itself  but not quite full. A man should not love the moon, said Milosz. Not exactly. He translated himself into saying it. A man should not love translation; there’s so much I can’t know. An hour ago, marking time with someone I would like to like, we passed some trees and there were crickets (crickets!) chirping right off  Divisadero. I touched his hand, and for a cold moment I was like a child again, nothing more, nothing less.

can replace poetry in my life and one day surely it will

for Yukio Mishima I didn’t write Etsuko, I sliced her open. She was carmine inside like a sea bass and empty. No viscera, nothing but color. I love you like that, boy. I pull the kimono down around your shoulders and kiss you. Then you let it fall open. Each time, I cut you a little and when you leave, I take the piece, broil it, dip it in ginger sauce and eat it. It burns my mouth so. You laugh, holding me belly-down with your body. So much hurting to get to this moment, when I’m beneath you, wanting it to go on and to end. At midnight, you say see you tonight and I answer there won’t be any tonight, but you just smile, swing your sweater over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck. I hear you whistling long after you disappear down the subway steps, as I walk back home, my whole body tingling. I undress and put the bronze sword on my desk beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper. I smooth it open and read its single sentence: I meant to do it. No. It should be common and feminine like I can’t go on sharing him, or something to imply that. Or the truth: that I saw in myself the five signs of the decay of the angel and you were holding on, watching and free, that I decided to go out with the pungent odor of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death. Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined. Goddamn you, boy. Nothing I said mattered to you; that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself. I tear the note, then burn it. The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M. I take the sword and walk into the garden. I look up. The sun, the moon, two round teeth rock together and the light of one chews up the other. I stab myself in the belly, wait, then stab myself again. Again. It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice, but I’ll burn anyone who touches me. I start pulling my guts out, those red silk cords, spiraling skyward, and I’m climbing them past the moon and the sun, past darkness into white. I mean to live.

I will not speak ill of Jack Flick. I will rarely look at the scar he made on my cheek one summer at the lake. I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles and gangly legs are gone. So is the drained face I saw when he saw what he'd done with a sharp rock nonchalantly skipped. I will speak well, for it was somewhat sweet to lie on the dock while Jack and his friends bent down and wiped my face with a sandy towel. I will speak well of them, for most are gone and the wound proved small. I will speak well, for the rock missed my eye. I can hardly find the scar. Jack went into the air corps, fought in one of the wars, retired, and lived less than a year before his tender heart gave out. I will speak well of Jack.

A king did not die, a president was not acquitted, a balloon did not fly around the world in twenty days, at 84 with white hair, Joe DiMaggio was not mourned. And air strikes launched street to street in order to bring peace, or a doctor convicted of doctoring death? No, and no, nothing happened, except flowers purple the year before bloomed white, but no viruses named after women spread across the globe, and the word “columbine” did not enter the consciousness of a nation. What about the bomb that made a mistake, or the famous son of a famous president mistaking the ocean for the sky? That year, the weather was unpredictable, that happened, and if anything else did, like shots fired at people praying, no one heard them, and if people prayed for war to become holy, those prayers went unanswered. In Turkey, the ground split open and the 17,000 who would die, let’s say, miraculously, they did not, not in 1999, the year two lifelong enemies shook hands and said there will be peace, but their palms never touched, why lie about that? Let’s say the child from Cuba arrived not an orphan but with his mother, who loved and did not sink into the sea. Let’s not talk about rampages, disasters, conflicts or coupes that never ruined a perfectly good year during which the sun shined on the moon, the earth, and six billion who, for once, got everything right and not a single thing wrong.

Though I have never caught the word Of God from any calling bird, I hear all that the ancients heard. Though I have seen no deity Enter or leave a twilit tree, I see all that the seers see. A common stone can still reveal Something not stone, not seen, yet real. What may a common stone conceal? Nothing is far that once was near. Nothing is hid that once was clear. Nothing was God that is not here. Here is the bird, the tree, the stone. Here in the sun I sit alone Between the known and the unknown.

—Now let me tell you why I said that. Try to put yourself into an experimental mood. Stop right here and try to review everything you felt about that line. Did you accept it as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe, for your private anthology of Telling Truths? My point is that the line is fraudulent. A blurb. It is also relevant that I know at least a dozen devoutly intellectual journals that will gladly buy any fourteen such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and compound the felony by calling that a sonnet. —Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for the record, let me add that I am a cynic with one wife, three children, and other invest- ments. Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a pack for the fun of it? It won’t really do I’m something else. Were I to dramatize myself, I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting the devil as a master of make-up, and that among his favorite impersonations he appears, often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks, tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.” I guess what the devil gets out of this—if he is the fool he seems to be—is the illusion of imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced and we are all damned. For all of us, unless we are carefully warned, will accept such noises as examples of the sound an actual mind makes. Why arc we damned then?—I am glad you asked that. It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question. (Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.) In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer I have memorized: We are damned for accepting as the sound a man makes, the sound of something else, thereby losing the truth of our own sound. How do we learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.) —by listening to what men there have been and are —by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning Law)—and by reading what we read not for its oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into your heads and you will know what tones to exclude. — if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings, and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear that has listened enough to be a listener. As for the devil—when he has finished every imp- ersonation, the best he will have been able to accomplish is only that sound which is exactly not the music.

Oh, what am I but an engine, shod With muscle and flesh, by the hand of God, Speeding on through the dense, dark night, Guided alone by the soul’s white light. Often and often my mad heart tires, And hates its way with a bitter hate, And longs to follow its own desires, And leave the end in the hands of fate. O, mighty engine of steel and steam; O, human engine of blood and bone, Follow the white light’s certain beam— There lies safety, and there alone. The narrow track of fearless truth, Lit by the soul’s great eye of light, O passionate heart of restless youth, Alone will carry you through the night.

The fields are white; The laborers are few; Yet say the idle: There’s nothing to do. Jails are crowded; In Sunday-schools few; We still complain: There’s nothing to do. Drunkards are dying— Your sons, it is true; Mothers’ arms folded With nothing to do. Heathens are dying; Their blood falls on you; How can you people Find nothing to do?